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• Die with memories, not dreams.

"Don't worry about people trying to steal your design work. Worry about the day that they stop." — Jeffery Zeldman

100 years of whatever this will be

"We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy, capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once."

"The job of regulation is to stop distributed systems from going awry. Because distributed systems always go awry."

"All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation."

The Irresistible Future

"A guy appears at your door. He has a glowing sphere in his hand. He says he is from the future and will transport you 500 years into that future. You want to know what that future world is like. What does he have to say in order for you to get in? What is the future equivalent of “all the free food you can eat”?"

The Thinkism Fallacy

"But no matter how much intelligence you have, this thinkism alone won’t solve problems by itself. Intelligence has to be combined with imagination, perseverance, intuition, and large quantities of data, experience, and conext to really be useful. It’s these other qualities that our humanness can supply."

How your personal finance decisions affect society

"Want a better society? Build wealth, then write the future. Be the change you want to see in this world."

The Many Worlds of Enough

"Ambition morphs into greed when you stop listening to your inner compass, and start paying attention to what your actions may do for external things like your reputation."

"Enough is what remains when you remove these desires for approval or praise."

"You must self-adjust your definition of enough, instead of having it forced upon you. Wisdom is in self-correction, while misery is in coerced correction."

Assured Misery

"So you can move the needle a lot by focusing on what not to do in life."

"The inability to deal with criticism, even when it’s unwarranted, is a sure path to misery."

"Most things you envy look better from the outside, because everyone crafts a selected image of what they’re doing and they are."

"Everyone’s dealing with problems they don’t advertise, at least until you get to know them well."

"A sneaky kind of assured misery is when you have no room for error in your life, which feels like maximizing efficiency but actually just means you’re guaranteeing disappointment when the world inevitably wobbles."

"Define what game you’re playing and play it (and only it)."

"It’s just realizing that an insatiable appetite for more will always push you to the point of disappointment and regret"