The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich - Expanded and Updated

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economic downturns produce discounted infrastructure, outstanding freelancers at bargain prices, and rock-bottom advertising deals—all impossible when everyone is optimistic.

Grads from top schools are funneled into high-income 80-hour-per-week jobs, and 15–30 years of soul-crushing work has been accepted as the default path.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

job descriptions as self-descriptions.

New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility.

People don’t want to be millionaires—they want to experience what they believe only millions can buy.

$1,000,000 in the bank isn’t the fantasy. The fantasy is the lifestyle of complete freedom it supposedly allows.

What is the pot of gold that justifies spending the best years of your life hoping for happiness in the last?

The commonsense rules of the “real world” are a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions.

Reality is negotiable. Outside of science and law, all rules can be bent or broken, and it doesn’t require being unethical.

D for Definition turns misguided common sense upside down and introduces the rules and objectives of the new game.

Reality is negotiable.

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

finding a market before designing a product is smarter than the reverse.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

Reality is merely an illusion,albeit a very persistent one.

D: To work for yourself. NR: To have others work for you.

NR: To prevent work for work’s sake, and to do the minimum necessary for maximum effect

NR: To distribute recovery periods and adventures (mini-retirements) throughout life on a regular basis and recognize that inactivity is not the goal. Doing that which excites you is.

Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W’s you control in your life: what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it.

NR: To do all the things you want to do, and be all the things you want to be. If this includes some tools and gadgets, so be it, but they are either means to an end or bonuses, not the focus.

Options—the ability to choose—is real power.

NR: To make a ton of money with specific reasons and defined dreams to chase, timelines and steps included. What are you working for?

NR: To have more quality and less clutter. To have huge financial reserves but recognize that most material wants are justifications for spending time on the things that don’t really matter, including buying things and preparing to buy things.

NR: To have freedom from doing that which you dislike, but also the freedom and resolve to pursue your dreams without reverting to work for work’s sake (W4W).

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them.

There are always lateral options.

Once you say you’re going to settle for second, that’s what happens to you in life.

EVERYTHING POPULAR IS WRONG

I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.

Beating the Game, Not Playing the Game

Sports evolve when sacred cows are killed, when basic assumptions are tested.

Different is better when it is more effective or more fun.

If everyone is defining a problem or solving it one way and the results are subpar, this is the time to ask, What if I did the opposite?

1. Retirement Is Worst-Case-Scenario Insurance.

Retirement as a goal or final redemption is flawed for at least three solid reasons: It is predicated on the assumption that you dislike what you are doing during the most physically capable years of your life. This is a nonstarter—nothing can justify that sacrifice. Most people will never be able to retire and maintain even a hotdogs-for-dinner standard of living. Even one million is chump change in a world where traditional retirement could span 30 years and inflation lowers your purchasing power 2–4% per year. The math doesn’t work.3The golden years become lower-middle-class life revisited. That’s a bittersweet ending. If the math does work, it means that you are one ambitious, hardworking machine. If that’s the case, guess what? One week into retirement, you’ll be so damn bored that you’ll want to stick bicycle spokes in your eyes. You’ll probably opt to look for a new job or start another company. Kinda defeats the purpose of waiting, doesn’t it?

don’t mistake retirement for the goal.

Alternating periods of activity and rest is necessary to survive, let alone thrive.

Capacity, interest, and mental endurance all wax and wane. Plan accordingly.

By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable.

Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.

Few people choose to (or are able to) measure the results of their actions and thus measure their contribution in time.

Focus on being productive instead of busy.

Conditions are never perfect. “Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way.

5. Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission.

If it isn’t going to devastate those around you, try it and then justify it.

If the potential damage is moderate or in any way reversible, don’t give people the chance to say no.

Get good at being a troublemaker and saying sorry when you really screw up.

Most people are fast to stop you before you get started but hesitant to get in the way if you’re moving.

It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor.

The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre. Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.

7. Things in Excess Become Their Opposite.

In excess, most endeavors and possessions take on the characteristics of their opposite.

8. Money Alone Is Not the Solution.

Busy yourself with the routine of the money wheel, pretend it’s the fix-all, and you artfully create a constant distraction that prevents you from seeing just how pointless it is.

Deep down, you know it’s all an illusion, but with everyone participating in the same game of make-believe, it’s easy to forget.

The problem is more than money.

Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hours.

The New Rich are equally aggressive in removing distress and finding eustress.

How has being “realistic” or “responsible” kept you from the life you want?

How has doing what you “should” resulted in subpar experiences or regret for not having done something else?

Look at what you’re currently doing and ask yourself, “What would happen if I did the opposite of the people around me? What will I sacrifice if I continue on this track for 5, 10, or 20 years?”

Many a false step was made by standing still.

Named must your fear be before banish it you can.

It’s not giving up to put your current path on indefinite pause.

Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.

Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?”

fear of the unknown disguised as optimism.

To enjoy life, you don’t need fancy nonsense, but you do need to control your time and realize that most things just aren’t as serious as you make them out to be.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

Usually, what we most fear doing is what we most need to do.

Define the worst case, accept it, and do it.

a person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.

What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.

Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear.

if we define risk as “the likelihood of an irreversible negative outcome,” inaction is the greatest risk of all.

What are you waiting for?

Measure the cost of inaction, realize the unlikelihood and re-pairability of most missteps, and develop the most important habit of those who excel and enjoy doing so: action.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where …” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. —LEWIS CARROLL, Alice in Wonderland

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Doing the Unrealistic Is Easier Than Doing the Realistic

It’s lonely at the top. Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for “realistic” goals, paradoxically making them the most time-and energy-consuming.

Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself.

Having an unusually large goal is an adrenaline infusion that provides the endurance to overcome the inevitable trials and tribulations that go along with any goal.

If the potential payoff is mediocre or average, so is your effort.

The fishing is best where the fewest go, and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone else is aiming for base hits.

The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is—here’s the clincher—boredom.

The question you should be asking isn’t, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”

Adult-Onset ADD: Adventure Deficit Disorder

This is how most people work until death: “I’ll just work until I have X dollars and then do what I want.” If you don’t define the “what I want” alternate activities, the X figure will increase indefinitely to avoid the fear-inducing uncertainty of this void.

The worst that could happen wasn’t crashing and burning, it was accepting terminal boredom as a tolerable status quo.

Remember—boredom is the enemy, not some abstract “failure.”

Living like a millionaire requires doing interesting things and not just owning enviable things.

success can be measured in the number of uncomfortable conversations you’re willing to have.

‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.

The best first step, the one I recommend, is finding someone who’s done it and ask for advice on how to do the same. It’s not hard.

To have an uncommon lifestyle, you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decisions, both for yourself and for others.

One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.

Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.

It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.

Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.

Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals.

Doing something unimportant well does not make it important. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.

What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things.

Pareto’s Law can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs.

80% of the consequences flow from 20% of the causes. 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort and time. 80% of company profits come from 20% of the products and customers. 80% of all stock market gains are realized by 20% of the investors and 20% of an individual portfolio.

Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness?

Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness?

The goal is to find your inefficiencies in order to eliminate them and to find your strengths so you can multiply them.

Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.

Being selective—doing less—is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.

lack of time is actually lack of priorities.

How is it possible that all the people in the world need exactly 8 hours to accomplish their work? It isn’t. 9–5 is arbitrary.

Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.

If I give you 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the bare essentials. If I give you a week to complete the same task, it’s six days of making a mountain out of a molehill. If I give you two months, God forbid, it becomes a mental monster. The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.

Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20).

Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law).

Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines. If you haven’t identified the mission-critical tasks and set aggressive start and end times for their completion, the unimportant becomes the important.

Am I being productive or just active?

Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?

Dedication is often just meaningless work in disguise.

What 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness?

What 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcome and happiness?

If you had a heart attack and had to work two hours per day, what would you do?

If you had a gun to your head and had to stop doing 4/5 of different time-consuming activities, what would you remove?

What are the top-three activities that I use to fill time to feel as though I’ve been productive?

Who are the 20% of people who produce 80% of your enjoyment and propel you forward, and which 20% cause 80% of your depression, anger, and second-guessing?

Who is causing me stress disproportionate to the time I spend with them? What will happen if I simply stop interacting with these people?

Exact numbers aren’t needed to realize that we spend too much time with those who poison us with pessimism, sloth, and low expectations of themselves and the world.

It is often the case that you have to fire certain friends or retire from particular social circles to have the life you want.

Poisonous people do not deserve your time.

If this approach is too confrontational for you, just politely refuse to interact with them. Be in the middle of something when the call comes, and have a prior commitment when the invitation to hang out comes. Once you see the benefits of decreased time with these people, it will be easier to stop communication altogether.

But you are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends.

If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.

“If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?”

There should never be more than two mission-critical items to complete each day. Never. It just isn’t necessary if they’re actually high-impact.

What will happen if I don’t do this, and is it worth putting off the important to do it?

Put a Post-it on your computer screen or set an Outlook reminder to alert you at least three times daily with the question: Are you inventing things to do to avoid the important?

If you prioritize properly, there is no need to multitask.

Use Parkinson’s Law to accomplish more in less time. Shorten schedules and deadlines to necessitate focused action instead of deliberation and procrastination.

Stop asking for opinions and start proposing solutions.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

Problems, as a rule, solve themselves or disappear if you remove yourself as an information bottleneck and empower others.

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.

Cultivating Selective Ignorance

be selectively ignorant. Ignorance may be bliss, but it is also practical.

It is imperative that you learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable.

Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence.

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.

Develop the habit of asking yourself, “Will I definitely use this information for something immediate and important?”

Focus on what digerati Kathy Sierra calls “just-in-time” information instead of “just-in-case” information.

Practice the art of nonfinishing.

Starting something doesn’t automatically justify finishing it.

Develop the habit of nonfinishing that which is boring or unproductive if a boss isn’t demanding it.

Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece.

The best defense is a good offense.

People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutiae to fill time and feel important.

Don’t encourage people to chitchat and don’t let them chitchat. Get them to the point immediately.

From this moment forward, resolve to keep those around you focused and avoid all meetings, whether in person or remote, that do not have clear objectives.

Meetings should only be held to make decisions about a predefined situation, not to define the problem.

if you absolutely cannot stop a meeting or call from happening, define the end time. Do not leave these discussions open-ended, and keep them short.

The Puppy Dog Close is invaluable whenever you face resistance to permanent changes. Get your foot in the door with a “let’s just try it once” reversible trial.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim.

There is a psychological switching of gears that can require up to 45 minutes to resume a major task that has been interrupted.

This batching has saved me hundreds of hours of redundant work.

If you calculate the financial and emotional benefit of completing just one main task (such as landing a major client or completing a life-changing trip), the value of batching is much more than the per-hour savings.

If the problems cost more than hours saved, scale back to the next-less-frequent batch schedule.

Do not work harder when the solution is working smarter.

The vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.

It wasn’t scalable because there was an information and decision bottleneck: me.

It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.

Establish yourself as a consistent challenger of the status quo and most people will learn to avoid challenging you, particularly if it is in the interest of higher per-hour productivity.

Empower others to act without interrupting you.

Limit access to your time, force people to define their requests before spending time with them, and batch routine menial tasks to prevent postponement of more important projects.

Do not let people interrupt you. Find your focus and you’ll find your lifestyle.

People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don’t realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.

Blaming idiots for interruptions is like blaming clowns for scaring children—they can’t help it.

It is your job to prevent yourself and others from letting the unnecessary and unimportant prevent the start-to-finish completion of the important.

1. Create systems to limit your availability via e-mail and phone and deflect inappropriate contact.

Replace the habit of “How are you?” with “How can I help you?”

Set and practice interruption-killing policies.

Batch activities to limit setup cost and provide more time for dreamline milestones.

Set or request autonomous rules and guidelines with occasional review of results.

Eliminate the decision bottleneck for all things that are nonfatal if misperformed.

Remember, profit is only profitable to the extent that you can use it. For that you need time.

Screening and Avoiding Unwanted Calls

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.

Becoming a member of the NR is not just about working smarter. It’s about building a system to replace yourself.

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. —BILL GATES

Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined.

Using people to leverage a refined process multiplies production; using people as a solution to a poor process multiplies problems.

Each delegated task must be both time-consuming and well-defined.

our target product can’t take more than $500 to test, it has to lend itself to automation within four weeks, and—when up and running—it can’t require more than one day per week of management.

cash flow and time. With these two currencies, all other things are possible. Without them, nothing is possible.

Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is much easier. Don’t create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market—define your customers—then find or develop a product for them.

Be a member of your target market and don’t speculate what others need or will be willing to buy.

It is said that if everyone is your customer, then no one is your customer.

It is more profitable to be a big fish in a small pond than a small undefined fish in a big pond.

Call these magazines, speak to the advertising directors, and tell them that you are considering advertising

The main benefit of your product should be explainable in one sentence or phrase.

Higher pricing means that we can sell fewer units—and thus manage fewer customers—and fulfill our dreamlines. It’s faster. Higher pricing attracts lower-maintenance customers (better credit, fewer complaints/questions, fewer returns, etc.). It’s less headache. This is HUGE. Higher pricing also creates higher profit margins. It’s safer.

Price high and then justify.

Purchasing an existing product at wholesale and reselling it is the easiest route but also the least profitable.

I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.

Some of the world’s best-known brands and products have been borrowed from someone or somewhere else.

Creation is a better means of self-expression than possession; it is through creating, not possessing, that life is revealed.

Information products are low-cost, fast to manufacture, and time-consuming for competitors to duplicate.

Information, on the other hand, is too time-consuming for most knockoff artists to bother with when there are easier products to replicate.

Read the three top-selling books on your topic (search historical New York Times bestseller lists online) and summarize each on one page.

The moral is that intuition and experience are poor predictors of which products and businesses will be profitable.

Test: Test the offer using short Google Adwords advertising campaigns (three hours to set up and five days of passive observation).

The user then clicks a continue to PayPal button. This automatically e-mails me their details, but then shows the user a message stating that the link to PayPal is currently not working. I use this to determine how many sales I would have achieved.

Reinventing the wheel is expensive—become an astute observer of what is already working and adapt it.

The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.

A company is stronger if it is bound by love rather than by fear…. If the employees come first, then they’re happy.

Once you have a product that sells, it’s time to design a self-correcting business architecture that runs itself.

This intentional absence has enabled him to create a process-driven instead of founder-driven business.

The system is the solution.

1. Contract outsourcing companies53 that specialize in one function vs. freelancers whenever possible so that if someone is fired, quits, or doesn’t perform, you can replace them without interrupting your business.

Phase I: 0–50 Total Units of Product Shipped Do it all yourself. Put your phone number on the site for both general questions and order-taking—this is important in the beginning—and take customer calls to determine common questions that you will answer later in an online FAQ.

Companies go out of business when they make the wrong decisions or, just as important, make too many decisions. The latter creates complexity.

The more options you offer the customer, the more indecision you create and the fewer orders you receive—it is a disservice all around.

The art of “undecision” refers to minimizing the number of decisions your customers can or need to make.

Offer one or two purchase options (“basic” and “premium,” for example) and no more.

Do not offer multiple shipping options. Offer one fast method instead and charge a premium.

Do not offer international shipments. Spending 10 minutes per order filling out customs forms and then dealing with customer complaints when the product costs 20–100% more with tariffs and duties is about as fun as headbutting a curb. It’s about as profitable, too.

I recommend looking at the customer as an equal trading partner and not as an infallible blessing of a human being to be pleased at all costs.

Those who spend the least and ask for the most before ordering will do the same after the sale. Cutting them out is both a good lifestyle decision and a good financial decision.

Make your customer base an exclusive club, and treat the members well once they’ve been accepted.

By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.

On this path, it is only the first step that counts.

The key to cutting the leash was simple—he asked for forgiveness instead of permission.

To create the proper leverage to be unshackled, we’ll do two things: demonstrate the business benefit of remote working and make it too expensive or excruciating to refuse a request for it.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner.

The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.

Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.

Only those who are asleep make no mistakes.

The person who has more options has more power.

The simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, than research.

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

relocating to one place for one to six months before going home or moving to another locale.

Though it can be relaxing, the mini-retirement is not an escape from your life but a reexamination of it—the creation of a blank slate.

True freedom is much more than having enough income and time to do what you want.

I know too well that it’s easier to live with ourselves if we cite an external reason for inaction.

To be free, to be happy and fruitful, can only be attained through sacrifice of many common but overestimated things

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot.

I suggest Monday mornings for checking e-mail and online banking. The first and third Mondays of the month can be used for checking credit cards and making other online payments such as affiliates.

To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass.

There is not enough time to do all the nothing we want to do.

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.

If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.

The benefits of becoming fluent in a foreign tongue are as underestimated as the difficulty is overestimated.

If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.

Surround yourself with smiling, positive people who have absolutely nothing to do with work. Create your muses alone if you must, but do not live your life alone. Happiness shared in the form of friendships and love is happiness multiplied.

There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living; there is nothing harder to learn.

SLOW DANCE Have you ever watched kids On a merry-go-round? Or listened to the rain Slapping on the ground? Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight? Or gazed at the sun into the fading night? You better slow down. Don’t dance so fast. Time is short. The music won’t last. Do you run through each day On the fly? When you ask: How are you? Do you hear the reply? When the day is done, do you lie in your bed With the next hundred chores Running through your head? You’d better slow down. Don’t dance so fast. Time is short. The music won’t last. Ever told your child, We’ll do it tomorrow? And in your haste, Not see his sorrow? Ever lost touch, Let a good friendship die Cause you never had time To call and say, “Hi”? You’d better slow down. Don’t dance so fast. Time is short. The music won’t last. When you run so fast to get somewhere You miss half the fun of getting there. When you worry and hurry through your day, It is like an unopened gift thrown away. Life is not a race. Do take it slower. Hear the music Before the song is over.

Oftentimes, in order to do the big things, you have to let the small bad things happen.

Once you realize that you can turn off the noise without the world ending, you’re liberated in a way that few people ever know.

Time without attention is worthless, so value attention over time.

What is the one goal, if completed, that could change everything?

Let the small bad things happen and make the big good things happen. —OCTOBER 25, 2007

Don’t accept large or costly favors from strangers.

You don’t have to recoup losses the same way you lose them.

One of the most universal causes of self-doubt and depression: trying to impress people you don’t like.

Adversity doesn’t build character; it reveals it.

Money doesn’t change you; it reveals who you are when you no longer have to be nice.

You’re never as bad as they say you are.

Are you having a breakdown or a breakthrough?

A mindset of scarcity (which breeds jealousy and unethical behavior) is due to a disdain for those things easily obtained

Opportunities abound in bad times as well as good times.

Trip enjoyment is inversely proportionate to the amount of crap (read: distractions) you bring with you.

The more options you consider, the more buyer’s regret you’ll have.

The more options you encounter, the less fulfilling your ultimate outcome will be.

You had time but you didn’t have attention, so the time had no practical value.

Considering options costs attention that then can’t be spent on action or present-state awareness.

Attention is necessary for not only productivity but appreciation.

1. Set rules for yourself so you can automate as much decision making as possible

Don’t provoke deliberation before you can take action.

Don’t postpone decisions just to avoid uncomfortable conversations.

Learn to make nonfatal or reversible decisions as quickly as possible.

Fast decisions preserve usable attention for what matters.

1. Do not answer calls from unrecognized phone numbers. Feel free to surprise others, but don’t be surprised. It just results in unwanted interruption or poor negotiating positions.

Do not agree to meetings or calls with no clear agenda or end time.

Do not work more to fix overwhelmingness—prioritize.

Profitability often requires better rules and speed, not more time.

financial goal of a start-up should be simple: profit in the least time with the least effort.

Who you portray in your marketing isn’t necessarily the only demographic who buys your product—it’s often the demographic that most people want to identify with or belong to. The target isn’t the market. No one aspires to be the bland average, so don’t water down messaging to appeal to everyone—it will end up appealing to no one.

Being busy is not the same as being productive.

The 80/20 principle, also known as Pareto’s Law, dictates that 80% of your desired outcomes are the result of 20% of your activities or inputs.

Perfect products delivered past deadline kill companies faster than decent products delivered on time.