The good advice is boring ... This is true with personal development, it's true with social skills, true with diet, nutrition, everything—the stuff that works is boring. It's not the information that's hard; it's simply doing it; it's implementing consistently over a long period of time. That's the hard part.

In the self-help and self-development world, there's so much focus on success—getting ahead in your career, starting a business, making more money, having better relationships—but nobody's actually standing back and defining what success is. Is our definition of success valuable or not?

Because we don't know what we want, we just want what other people want, and this locks us in this weird keeping up with the Joneses arms race competition to win contests that we, to use your word, don't actually give a fuck about.

People who go through traumatic experiences—less than 30% of them develop PTSD symptoms, whereas over 70% end up, six months later, [saying] that they actually benefited from their traumatic experience, so they experienced some degree of what's considered post-traumatic growth.

Often, the difference between somebody being depressed and somebody not is something as simple as getting a job or making a new friend or moving out of your parents basement—it's actually very basic things that have compounding effects.

We kind of invent metrics for ourselves to define what success is going to be, and I think, for a lot of us, our default setting is to define our metric by whatever the people around us are doing or have recently done ... If you're not consciously questioning that, it can get you into trouble.

If you're not improving yourself for the right reasons, you could be damaging yourself. The why behind everything you try to improve or everything that you're driven toward is more important than actually how far you get.

When you live in a society where information is no longer scarce; where there's essentially more stuff for you to consume, and understand, and learn about than is humanly possible; the most obvious question becomes 'What is worth pursuing? What is worth learning about? What is worth trusting and believing in?'

I think the things that we tend to be passionate about, we don't even realize we're passionate about them because they seem so normal and obvious to us.

There's a freedom in not knowing things, and I think it's harder than ever probably to think that you don't know something today because we're just flooded with information. Generally, the information that gets shared the most is the information that is spoken or written with the most confidence, and generally, the people who speak or write with the most confidence are the people who don't know a damn thing at all.

It's impossible to not give a fuck. If you're alive and sentient and conscious, you have to care about something—that's just a fundamental state of being human. There is no such thing as not giving a fuck. So, the question then becomes, 'What is fuck-worthy? What deserves your fucks?'

For me, one of most powerful heuristics is to simply, instead of thinking about what benefits I want in my life, I try to think about what problems do I want my life.

...You don't actually know who you are ... The self's an illusion. It's an arbitrary construct that you've spun up over the course of your life ... It's just this idea ... It's a subjective idea, and it can be anything you want.

The anonymity of the Internet removes the consequences of being a total asshole.

The more people that you take to bed, the more you're with one person—and that person is yourself because all those relationships are exactly the same. The fact that they happen to be different bodies is trivial compared to the depth of realization that you obtain by getting to know one person really well.

I think it's just a healthy habit to develop the desire to challenge yourself in every sense—physically, mentally emotionally.