How to Live – von Derek Sivers

Datum gelesen: 05.05.2025

Empfehlung: 10/10

Meine Notizen

• Most of being a good person is not doing bad.
• Change your need to change things.
• Don't hope. Hope is wanting things to be different than they are. Wanting to change yourself is self-loathing. There's no deeper happiness than wanting nothing. Desire is the opposite of peace.
• Silence is the one thing that all religions have in common.
• When someone asks you to decide, just refuse. The longer you go without deciding, the more information is revealed. Eventually, the choice is obvious and made without an agonizing decision.
• When people give opinions, add a question mark. If they say, "Immigration is bad," change it to, "Immigration is bad?" Let the questions drift away, unanswered.
• The unintelligent jump to conclusions. The wise just observe. Wisdom comes from removing the junk, lies, and obstacles to clear thinking. Instead of learning more, get wise by learning less.
• Doing nothing is the ultimate minimalism.
• The stock market takes money from the active traders and gives it to the patient.
• The biggest challenge is to think long-term when life is pulling you around.
• We overestimate what we can do in one year. We underestimate what we can do in ten years.
• When you choose a behavior, you choose its future consequences.
• Your memories are a mix of fact and fiction. Your story about an experience overwrites your memory of the actual experience. So use this in your favor. Re-write your past. Embellish adventures. Disempower trauma.
• Mastery is the best goal because the rich can't buy it, the impatient can't rush it, the privileged can't inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.
• If you do what most people do, you'll get what most people get. Don't be normal.
• But if you avoid pain, you avoid improvement. Avoid embarrassment, and you avoid success. Avoid risk, and you avoid reward.
• Life is incredibly peaceful when you shut out the noise.
• The modern life is shallow and distracted. The timeless life is deep and focused.
• Live in the past. Watch the greatest movies of all time. Read the classics. Listen to the legends. These things have lasted because they work so well. Time is the best filter.
• Learning leaves a trail of little deaths.
• Humor means using your mind beyond necessity, beyond reality, for both noticing and imagining.
• Life is meaningless. That's what's funny.
• At every moment in life, choose whatever action or angle amuses you. Laughing at life is how to live.
• Expecting life to be wonderful is disappointing. Expecting life to be disappointing is wonderful.
• People say everything is connected. They're wrong. Everything is disconnected. There is no line between moments in time.
• Your identity. Your meanings. Your trauma. They're all based on the core idea that you're in a continuum, living a story. But there is no line between moments in time. There is no story. There is no plot.
• Not love, the feeling, but love the active verb. It's not something that happens to you. It's something you do.
• The most valuable real estate in the world is the graveyard. There lie millions of half-written books, ideas never launched, and talents never developed. Most people die with everything still inside of them.
• Don't wait for inspiration. Inspiration will never make the first move. She comes only when you've shown you don't need her. Do your work every day, no matter what.
• Suspend all judgment when creating the first draft. Just get to the end. It's better to create something bad than nothing at all. You can improve something bad. You can't improve nothing.
• Die empty, so death takes only a corpse.
• Be paranoid. Avoid failure to survive.
• You learn best from your mistakes. This is true. So you should deliberately make as many mistakes as possible.
• The people devastated by failure are the ones who didn't expect it.