#88 Derek Sivers: Innovation Versus Imitation

The moment when you read somebody else's idea—that's a wow moment, but you don't really learn it until you've put aside the time to reflect on it.

Say no to almost everything and leave space in your life—leave free time ... Then, when something great comes along—something that makes you say, 'Oh, hell yeah! That would be awesome!' then not only can you say 'yes' to that, but now you have the time and energy to throw yourself into it completely.

I don't think life has meaning. I don't think anything has inherent meaning. I think it's all just a blank slate that we can project whatever meaning we want on to.

We should not sugarcoat everything because we really learn best from pain. Pain teaches us like nothing else.

Tony Robbins' 'Awaken the Giant Within' ... It's like asking someone what they learned from their religion. The stuff that Tony Robbins preached in that book is so deeply ingrained in me that it just feels like reality.

There's no such thing as failure until you give up because until that point, you're still just getting feedback.

What the people must learn if they learn anything at all is that the world will do most of the work for you provided you cooperate with it by identifying how it really works and aligning with those realities. If we do not let the world teach us, it teaches us a lesson.

It's better to do 5 big things with your life instead of 500 half-assed things.

You know you're a true business owner when you could leave your business for a year and come back a year later to find that it's doing better than when you left.

Choose the plan with the most options ... The best plan is the one that lets you change your plans.

Choose opportunity, not loyalty. Have no loyalty to location, corporation, or your past public statements. Be an absolute opportunist, doing whatever's best for the future in the current situation unbound by the past. Have loyalty for only your most important human relationships.

I just don't find myself to be that kind of person who can do one thing for an hour and something else for two hours, and then this for an hour, and this for 30 minutes. I throw myself completely into whatever I'm doing—almost to a fault. I love just doing one thing all the way, and I'll do that for hours or days or weeks or months or sometimes, like in the case of CD Baby, I did one thing for 10 years.

All the things that I love the most in life— learning, thinking, and creating—don't take any money. And in fact, money is probably a distraction that would take me away from those things.

The world feels unnecessarily ceremonial. People imitate others without questioning it enough.

You can change the way you feel about anything in an instant. So, if your emotions aren't working in your favor, you can just change them.

Events are neutral. You can interpret events as good or bad. You can interpret a neutral event as crisis or as opportunity.

Own as little as possible; depend on even less. The less you own, the less you're affected by disaster.