I think too many people are paralyzed with the ability to write or the desire to write by saying like 'It doesn't matter if I write if I don't have an audience to be able to ship those words to.' I think that even if you have literally zero people who read what you write today, it is still worth writing that thing today because you will produce an asset that you can use in the future.

I feel really bad for somebody who is a morning person, is extremely 9-5, wants a routine, doesn't like computers, wants to come into the office every day and high-five somebody—essentially the kind of person that the 1950s was built around. Nothing against that person ... That morning person-type mentality is just the opposite of the way the world is going. It's going from synchronous to asynchronous. It's going from in-person to remote. It's going from pull the same lever a thousand times to think deeply, and then write a piece of code that just does it.

Naval [Ravikant], I don't know if he's working out on Christmas day ... Twenty six-year-old Naval would have said, 'Fuck yeah. Get back to work.' ... Current day Naval would say, 'My money is working on Christmas day; my software is working on Christmas day; my Twitter is going on Christmas day; but I'm not doing anything.'

It's actually kind of interesting how little collaborative work is done on the Internet. I mean, we have Wikipedia—that's one of the great ones. There's obviously GitHub... There's Google Docs. You might say, 'Well that is a lot of collaborative work,' and I agree, but I think there's so much more that can be done. Why aren't there more things like Google Docs where you can collaborate in real time and see the thing coming together? You can see people fighting in quasi real time on Twitter, but you can't necessarily see them building things together, and that's partially because the division of labor is challenging, rewards are challenging, approval of digital work is challenging...

Learning is like love; the more you try to make it happen, the less it happens. It only can happen as a side effect—as a byproduct of something else.

People who meditate, in general, have a much better heart rate variability. So, we do see that people who practice some form of mindfulness, some form of meditation, have, on average, higher heart rate variabilities than other people.

REM sleep is when your brain is repairing. It's when you're improving cognitive performance. And if you're an executive, if you're trying to perform at a high level mentally, you need to be getting a lot of REM sleep.

You radically underestimate both how much you know that other people do not and the instrumental benefits of you publishing it.

If you spend nine months in the code cave building out version 1.0 of your software and then launch to nobody, that's nine months where you could have developed a newsletter with thousands of people subscribing to it and then, nine months after that, with relatively little additional work done on the newsletter, had people ready to buy your thing the first day.

In general, especially if you're a writer, but in general, you ought to hang out with people who are willing to criticize you. That gets harder as you get older and more successful. You have to take more extreme steps, but I would say those steps are worth taking.

Your manager is one of your biggest 'multiply by zeroes.' If you have a terrible manager who doesn't like you, you could have your dream job at a dream firm, and your life is still going to be miserable ... Every day is going to feel like a slog.

7 hours in bed does not actually translate to seven hours in sleep. Maybe you spend 7 hours in bed, and if you're pretty efficient, you're getting 6 hours and 15 minutes of quality sleep ... There are people who get 6 hours and 15 minutes of sleep, and 5 and a half hours of that is light sleep.

Rethink the mindset of becoming a software person who writes and think more about becoming the expert and then writing the software that encodes your expertise in the software product ... Writing deeply about how you understand whatever your problem domain is will make your software product decisions better.

There's a deep fundamental paradox of writing, which is as soon as you know enough to say something interesting, you've completely forgotten what it's like to see that topic for the first time.

This is the paradox of book publishing: Publishers won't give you a book deal until you have a big following, a big email list, a great idea, and they know you can write well and sell books. But then, once you get there, you don't actually need the book publisher.

The amount of luck that you have in life is how much value you create times how many people you tell about it.

At certain critical moments in time, you can say something to somebody, and it can be such an off-handed comment, but it can totally change the course of somebody's life, raising their ambitions or unblocking them.

The reason genomics is important is that your genome is your OS. That is your operating system, and we now can read the source code for that. You can actually look at that on the computer, and you can see how your genes help determine your body, your metabolism, [and] your makeup. And you can click those genes and see whether you can metabolize caffeine [or] whether you're predisposed to this or that cancer. All this stuff is there, but you kind of have to be sort of an expert to do it. I think it's going to become extremely accessible.

Knowledge can be transmitted, but vision combined with passion is singular. One person's vision and passion will never in all of human history be recombined.

One of the ideas that I'm just ecstatically excited about is building an online audience writing online and then, through that, actually validating demand and meeting people who could be future coworkers, or future customers, or future investors for your company and, through that, actually launching small software businesses.