Orange Book 🍊📖

“Unlucky” people are just people who spend too much time playing the victim and not enough time working on themselves.

When you don’t allow your kids to make the mistakes that you yourself needed to make in order to grow, you are not helping them, you are actually depriving them from an important opportunity to grow.

Too many single people ask for relationship advice from their single friends. Too many poor people ask for money advice from friends who are not wealthy either. The pattern is always the same: we go to the people who make us feel understood, not the people who can actually help.

A lot of long-term success simply boils down to staying mentally lucid even as the rest of the world keeps occasionally going insane.

People don’t struggle to raise emotionally healthy kids, they struggle to nurture the emotionally healthy version of themselves.

People think they want money, then they marry someone they love, have kids they love even more, and suddenly, they understand that all they've ever wanted was the time and freedom to watch those kids grow up next to their second favorite person in the world.

A lot of successful people who got there by optimizing every compartment of their lives ended up becoming terrible parents because they never granted their kids the most important element: the freedom to think alone, try and fail alone, self-reflect and rebuild who they are alone

Everybody knows that when you start "cheating" in a video game, and start giving yourself infinite resources and limitless abilities, you just end up losing all interest. You know there is no point trying hard anymore. Life is the same, and you should actually be grateful for having difficult goals to work on. You might hate some of your struggles in the moment, but they actually give you a reason to wake up every morning, to get better, to do better.

One of the greatest advantages in life is having parents who don't unconsciously pass their anxiety and trauma on to you.

It's not a coincidence that so many highly professionally successful people are struggling with their relationships, friendships, and marriage: a lot of "success" in society boils down to having a very long-term goal, and being right over and over again on your way there whilst unapologetically investing in yourself, and competition isn't so easy that you can be top-tier and world-class at something whilst also enjoying "work-life balance" and plenty of relaxed time with your family and friends. Fortunately, you are also free to choose your priorities and trade-offs, you just need to make sure that you are never lying to yourself, because it's so easy to get convinced by a sick society to live a life that isn't aligned to your core values: in doubt, close your eyes, remember your childhood, recall your early interests, dive deeper and deeper, and at some point, the answer to how you want to live your life will be extremely clear.

The older you get, the clearer it becomes that mental strength is much more important than intelligence. So many "smart" people just end up using their brain to make excuses, get anxious about a bunch of things that will never happen, and overthink every decision and relationship

You become a mediocre conversationalist when you are busy all the time, because you are too worried about your next place to be, your next deadline, your next meeting, to be able to actually focus, be present, and listen to what the other person has to say in a non-judgmental way

Smart enough to build the life you want, not smart enough to understand how you actually got where you are and recreate favorable circumstances for your kids:

In a world that keeps accelerating, the solution to avoid becoming a hamster in a wheel is not to slow down, it's to differentiate yourself by thinking alone and truly independently, and play another game altogether.