I also figured out that I could use my workouts as a form of meditation because I concentrate so much on the muscle, I have my mind inside the bicep when I do my curls. I have my mind inside the pectoral muscles when I do my bench press. I’m really inside, and it’s like I gain a form of meditation, because you have no chance of thinking or concentrating on anything else at that time.
This is the best thing you’re ever going to learn in SEAL training. When you’re a leader, people are going to mimic your behavior, at a minimum. It’s a guarantee. So here’s the key piece of advice: “Calm is contagious.”
If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.
Sounds great, right? It can be, but that result is far from guaranteed. Psychedelics usually give you what you need, not what you want. To get to pleasure, you often need to claw through pain first.
Although marijuana, ketamine, and MDMA have compelling medical application, I don’t consider them psychedelics. Jim explains our shared distinction, using MDMA as an example: “It’s not exactly a psychedelic because you don’t leave your identity behind, but it is the single best way to overcome intractable PTSD.”
The noun “entheogen,” meaning “generating the divine within,” has become a popular alternative to the term “psychedelic.”
Transcendental roughly means the feeling or the awareness that you are connected not only to other people but to other things and to living systems.
A number of Nobel Prize laureates in chemistry, biology, and elsewhere attribute breakthroughs to LSD.
“You may come to this study, and we’ll give you the most creative day of your life. But you have to have a problem which obsesses you that you have been working on for a couple of months and that you’ve failed to solve.” We want them to have an emotional “money” in the game.
Everything is just a little better. You know at the end of a day when you say, “Wow, that was a really good day”? That’s what people report on microdosing. They’re a little bit nicer.
What I’m finding is that microdoses of LSD or mushrooms may be very helpful for depression because they make you feel better enough that you do something about what’s wrong with your life. We’ve made depression an illness. It may be the body’s way of saying, “You better deal with something, because it’s making you really sad.”
A microdose of psychedelics is actually a low enough dose that it could be called “sub-perceptual,” which means you don’t necessarily see any differences in the outside world. As someone said to me, “The rocks don’t glitter even a little, and the flowers don’t turn and watch you.”
Jim describes this as “the feeling or the awareness that you are connected not only to other people, but to other things and living systems and to the air you breathe. We tend to think we’re kind of encapsulated. Obviously, the air I am breathing comes from all over the world, and some of it’s a billion years old. Every 8 years, I get almost all new cells from something. Everything I eat is connected to me. Everyone I meet is connected to me. Right now you and I are sitting outside, and our feet out touching the ground. We’re connected to the ground. Now, that’s all easy to say intellectually and even poetically. But when you actually experience that you’re part of this larger system, one of the things that you become aware of is that your ego — your personal identity — is not that bit a part of you.
“What I learned was — and this is from my own personal experience in 1961 — ‘Jim Fadiman’ is a subset of me, and the me is very, very large and a lot smarter and knows a lot more than ‘Jim Fadiman.’”
“In a very deep way, and it isn’t the giggles of marijuana. It’s the laughter of ‘how could I have forgotten who I really am?’ And then, much later in the day, when they’re reintegrating and finding that they are surprisingly still in the same body they came in with, one person said very beautifully, ‘I was back in the prison of all of the things that hold me back, but I could see that the door was locked from the inside.’”
Don’t rush the experience. Don’t cheapen the experience.
A good sitter is someone you trust. A great sitter is someone who loves you and you trust. A superlative sitter is someone who doesn’t have any agenda of their own. They don’t want you to see a certain thing. They don’t want you to be a certain way. They don’t want you to discover a certain thing. With or without psychedelics, sounds like good criteria for close friends, too.
There’s a saying in the psychedelic world: “If you get the answer, you should hang up the phone.” In other words, when you get the message you need, you shouldn’t keep asking (i.e., having more experiences), at least until you’ve done some homework assignments, or used the clarity gained to make meaningful changes. It’s easy to use the medicine as a crutch and avoid doing your own work, as the compounds themselves help in the short term as antidepressants.
There’s no point in going to a motivational seminar if you’re not going to take any next steps.
Kids don’t do what you say. They do what they see. How you live your life is their example.
You’re not wound up about this at all?
How would I be wound up? I’m either ready or I’m not. Worrying about it right now ain’t gonna change a damn thing. Right? Whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen. I’ve either done everything I can to be ready for this, or I haven’t.
My work isn’t done tonight. My work was done 3 months ago, and I just have to show up.
If you don’t do something well, don’t do it unless you want to spend the time to improve it.
The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.
It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. Might be time for you (and me) to rethink our personal priorities.
I don’t like the word “education” because it is such an extraordinary abstraction. I’m very much in favor of learning.
On saying “no” and declining things: “The phone rings, and lots of people want a thing. If it doesn’t align with the thing that is your mission, and you say ‘yes,’ now your mission is their mission. There’s nothing wrong with being a wandering generality instead of a meaningful specific, but don’t expect to make the change you hope to make if that’s what you do.
Keeping track of how many times it didn’t work. Keeping track of all the times someone has broken our heart or double-crossed us or let us down. Of course, we can keep track of those things, but why? Why keep track of them? Are they making us better?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep track of the other stuff? To keep track of all the times it worked? All the times we took a risk? All the times we were able to brighten someone else’s day? When we start doing that, we can redefine ourselves as people who are able to make an impact on the world. It took me a bunch of cycles to figure out that the narrative was up to me.
If a narrative isn’t working, well then, really, why are you using it? The narrative isn’t done to you; the narrative is something that you choose. Once we can dig deep and find a different narrative, then we ought to be able to change the game.
Life is always happening for us, not to us. It’s our job to find out where the benefit is. If we do, life is magnificent.
“Stress” is the achiever word for “fear.”
Losers react, leaders anticipate.
Mastery doesn’t come from an infographic. What you know doesn’t mean shit. What do you do consistently?
I think people actually do not learn very much from failure. I think it ends up being quite damaging and demoralizing to people in the long run, and my sense is that the death of every business is a tragedy. It’s not some sort of beautiful aesthetic where there’s a lot of carnage, but that’s how progress happens, and it’s not some sort of educational imperative. So I think failure is neither a Darwinian nor an educational imperative. Failure is always simply a tragedy.
I don’t like talking in terms of tech “trends” because I think, once you have a trend, you have many people doing it. And once you have many people doing something, you have lots of competition and little differentiation. You, generally, never want to be part of a popular trend.
That strikes me as sort of a lack of diversity in our thinking about the kinds of things people should be doing. It’s very limiting for our society as well as for those students. Why am I doing this? Am I doing this just because I have good grades and test scores and because I think it’s prestigious? Or am I doing this because I’m extremely passionate about practicing law?
Trust and attention — these are the scarce items in a post-scarcity world.
We can’t out-obedience the competition.
Once you have enough for beans and rice and taking care of your family and a few other things, money is a story. You can tell yourself any story you want about money, and it’s better to tell yourself a story about money that you can happily live with.
I think we need to teach kids 2 things: 1) how to lead, and 2) how to solve interesting problems. Because the fact is, there are plenty of countries on Earth where there are people who are willing to be obedient and work harder for less money than us. So we cannot out-obedience the competition. Therefore, we have to out-lead or out-solve the other people.
The way you teach your kids to solve interesting problems is to give them interesting problems to solve. And then, don’t criticize them when they fail. Because kids aren’t stupid. If they get into trouble every time they try to solve an interesting problem, they’ll just go back to getting an A by memorizing what’s in the textbook.
What is your best investment?
Every time I’ve given without any expectation of return. Money, time, energy, whatever. Whenever I’ve expected something in return, the investment was stunted. Whenever I’ve given purely for giving, for helping, for supporting, for aiding, for encouraging — with zero expectation or interest in any return whatsoever — it’s been thoroughly fulfilling.
By 2040, this traditional model will become obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives and to reinvent themselves again and again.
Money in a business is like gas in your car. You need to pay attention so you don’t end up on the side of the road. But your trip is not a tour of gas stations.
More than one Internet billionaire had told me that he’d started his business with what he’d learned from an O’Reilly book.
When Christensen introduced the term “disruptive technology,” he was asking a very different question than “How can I get funded by convincing VCs that there’s a huge market I can blow up?” He wanted to know why existing companies fail to take advantage of new opportunities. He discovered that breakthrough technologies that are not yet mature first succeed by finding radically new markets, and only later disrupt existing markets.
The point of a disruptive technology is not the market or the competitors that it destroys. It is the markets and the new possibilities that it creates. These new markets are often too small for established companies to consider them worth pursuing. By the time they wake up, an upstart has taken a leadership position in the emerging segment.
But more important, the idea that we should focus on disruption rather than the new value that we can create is at the heart of the current economic malaise, income inequality, and political upheaval. The secret to building a better future is to use technology to do things that were previously impossible. It isn’t technology that eliminates jobs, it is the shortsighted business decisions that use technology simply to cut costs and fatten corporate profits. The point of technology isn’t to make money. It’s to solve problems.
This is the master design pattern for applying technology: Do more. Do things that were previously unimaginable.
“Let life ripen and then fall. Will is not the way at all.” — Lao Tzu.
We equate being smart and being driven as the ways to get ahead. But sometimes, an attitude of alert watchfulness is far wiser and more effective. Learning to follow your nose, pulling on threads of curiosity or interest, may take you places that being driven will never lead you to.
The difference between winning and losing is most often not quitting.
Building a startup is very much an endurance sport.
Look for a partner you’ll try to impress daily, and one who will try to impress you.