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Status is fake and transient. Just focus on substance and doing valuable work. Talk about it in public. Beware the inner ring fallacy.

In particular, try to go deep on multiple things. (To varying degrees, I tried to go deep on languages, programming, writing, physics, math. Some of those stuck more than others.) One of the main things you should try to achieve by age 20 is some sense for which kinds of things you enjoy doing. This probably won't change a lot throughout your life and so you should try to discover the shape of that space as quickly as you can.

Highs that don’t lead to subsequent lows: • Meditation, gratitude, prayer, journaling, unconditional love. • Yoga, exercise, play, nature walks. • Creating art, reading for fun, singing, poetry. • Practicing a craft, pursuing curiosity, work done for its own sake, flow.

There is a famous test from Paul Graham called the animal test. The idea here is that you should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do. I don't think that translates out of English very well but you need unstoppable people. You want people that are just going to get it done. Founders who usually end up being very happy with their early hires usually end up describing these people as the very best in the world at what they do. Mark Zuckerberg once said that he tries to hire people that A. he'd be comfortable hanging with socially and B. he’d be comfortable reporting to if the roles were reversed. This strikes me as a very good framework. You don't have to be friends with everybody, but you should at least enjoy working with them. And if you don't have that, you should at least deeply respect them. But again, if you don't want to spend a lot of time around people you should trust your instincts about that.

Energy compounds on itself. If you start the morning by getting something done (a workout, an important task, writing) then you’re going to have a higher baseline energy day overall. It’s as though the initial thing gives you a persistent ‘boost’ throughout the day. Doing additional things becomes easier. Without this boost, there’s a good chance I get nothing important done that day. Most people’s mental models of energy are flawed: they think there’s a ‘tank’ of energy that gets depleted as you spend it. This may be roughly true for physical energy, but mental energy is different: spending mental energy on things that you consider productive or important gives you more mental energy for other things: a positive feedback loop. On the other hand, procrastinating, spending all day scrolling Twitter, or staying in bed all day reduces the amount of energy you have to spend; this means you are less likely to get anything done. It’s common to get trapped in this negative energy feedback loop: you don’t feel like doing something, so you check Twitter for awhile, which reduces your energy levels, which makes you feel worse, but you try and do something anyway, but you’re even less energized now, so you decide to go to bed for a bit to rest, but the rest isn’t restful… etc. The way to get out of these energy ruts is to just do something really small (empty the dishwasher! Write one sentence!) and get that tiny reward of accomplishment. This generates a little bit more energy. Use that spark to get something slightly bigger done, and so on.

“We’re all hanging out in this cabana… & Elon is there reading some obscure Soviet rocket manual that was all moldy & looked like it had been bought on eBay… He was studying it & talking openly about space travel & changing the world.”

In planning the Moravian campaign, the Emperor understood that the Russians, since they lacked a first rate general, would think that the line of retreat of the French army was anchored on Vienna. Consequently, they had to attach great importance to cutting the Vienna road, whereas in fact, throughout the whole Moravian campaign, the French line of retreat was never intended to bear on Vienna. This single circumstance falsified all the enemy’s calculations and was bound to make him decide on movements which led to his annihilation.

This is how the smallest events change the destinies of the world. The mistakes of our enemies often are more useful to them than their abilities and cause us to commit mistakes still greater than theirs.

[On productivity] Turn off notifications. Quit Slack when you're doing deep work. Check your emails once a day and just literally go through them in five minutes. Oftentimes, most of them use lists. Check Slack only at the top of the hour. Use Slack snooze or reminders. I mean, there's a whole other podcast we can talk about over Slack channels and how to organize that, but just get really good at the tools you're using. I think the first year of consulting, we just got really good at Excel and Excel shortcuts, and it was a big part of our training. And so just train yourself and train your teams on how to use their tools, how to use your calendar, how to use Slack, how to use email, whatever the tool you've designed as the right tool for you. Be dogmatic.

Musk found himself flying across the country to pay visits - sometimes surprise ones - on the contractors to check on their progress'