Orange Book 🍊📖

People don't get depressed because their goals are too hard, but because they are too easy.

The most straightforward way to get luckier in life is to raise your standards and be more ambitious about who you could be, and pay the price to get there.

Most people fail to achieve their goals because they focus on the goals directly; the goals only give you an approximate direction, what you need to work on every day is: (1) becoming the kind of person who is more likely to achieve them, physically, mentally, spiritually: by reading what no one is reading to develop a unique mind, by writing your most uncomfortable ideas to clarify your network of thoughts, by investing in yourself to become someone worthy of the goals. (2) figuring out how to be physically in a place where serendipity might find you: a lot of breakthroughs happen in private, and as long as you are not in the right place, you are swimming against the tide and your hard work won't matter, because there are plenty of equally hard-working people who are playing under much more favorable circumstances. (3) accumulating the long-term capital, connections, knowledge, and unique skillsets that will eventually increase your probabilities of success: a lot of "luck" is about being slightly overprepared and being in a position to jump in fearlessly when you get a hint from reality that your life is about to change, and as long as you don't raise your standards of rigor, the years will keep passing, and you will keep wishing you had gotten started earlier, or jumped on that investment, or texted that person, or made the bolder move.

Long-lasting adult friendships mostly happen between high-energy people because most other people are too tired to bother keeping in touch over the years.

When you are living in a great country, you travel abroad, learn a lot, have fun, then are very happy to be back home; when you are not, you travel abroad, and stay there.

What most people call bad luck is just reality catching up and punishing you for your periods of self-disrespect and complacency.

If you are not making tons of mistakes while you’re growing up (out of fear of being judged by your parents), you are actually setting yourself up to become an anxious and insecure adult.

People who grew up with judgmental parents often have a very distorted view of reality; they think the whole world is out there trying to get them, when it’s clear that everyone is focused on their own problems and that no one cares.

Everybody already knows exactly what they need to do, eat well, train well, sleep well to be the healthiest version of themselves; read well, think well, write well to be the sharpest version of themselves; teach well, love well, give back well to be the most confident version of themselves; and yet, very few people manage to maintain that lifestyle and flow state, because life happens and circumstances suddenly change, and hence, the real talent is rooted in whether you can navigate the chaos without losing track of the path that will get you a bit closer every day to the best version of yourself, the path that allows you to experience life in a calm, joyful, and grateful mind.

Most people who think they lack talent actually lack the mental clarity and self-discipline to create and maintain an environment where their talent will naturally bloom.

The problem is never technology, it's the way people who don't respect themselves use it; they use AI to outsource their thinking instead of improving it and getting smarter themselves; they use productivity tools to get themselves even busier instead of building a healthier lifestyle rooted in freedom; they use social media to argue with each other and feel envious of some others instead of connecting with like-minded souls; they use games, music, movies as an escape to an unsatisfying reality instead of getting inspired by them to write a better life scenario for themselves; there has never been a better time to be alive, but the quality of your life will inevitably follow the quality of your taste and the quality of your mind.

If you married someone who enjoys time alone, you’ve already won the lottery. Relationships thrive when both sides were already happy alone and didn't need each other: that's when you can start having genuine conversations with no agenda, no insecurity, no energy-draining drama.

@platzer_k Thank you! 🙏🧡

Hands down, the best content on this site to reflect on life, family, relationships, personal growth, where you are in life, what you are doing and what you are aiming for is @orangebook.

A lot of people go bankrupt because they don’t understand that a lot of advice out there never applied to them. Successful people say “follow your passion” but they don’t mention that they have a comfortable financial safety net and/or connections that would have landed them a job anyway. They say “quit your job and start your own thing” but they are certainly not taking responsibility when your business fails and you have nothing to bounce back from. They say “just be yourself, just believe in yourself” without mentioning all the years of tutoring, training, traveling, mentoring, healthy lifestyle that they were blessed to have. Stop focusing on the destination that all those advice givers reached; focus on their starting point, and make sure it’s relevant to yours.