📚 The Book in 3 Bullets

• The people who are the best at something, do not think they're the best. This is the intrinsic drive they have for continuous improvement and development.

• Remain humble. Seek out people who know more than you, and topics you don't know anything about. Be a life-long student.

• Don't seek out results or validation. This is fuel for the ego. Instead, focus on effort, and the process, and do it for intrinsic satisfaction, not the external.

👤 Who Should Read It?

• Anyone who is getting into a new career, or feels like they have everything figured out.

🌎 How the Book Changed Me

• This book taught me that I need to keep my ego in check. When I start to feel like I'm getting good at something or that I've figured everything out, I need to check myself. Because most likely I still don't know anything.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.

• You can't learn if you already think you know.

• A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you're looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

• All of us waste precious life doing things we don't like, to prove ourselves to people we don't respect, and to get things we don't want.

• Play for the name on the front of the jersey, and they'll remember the name on the back.

• If you want to live happily, live hidden.

📖 Summary & Notes

• The ego is an unhealthy belief in our own importance. Arrogance. Self-centered ambition.

• If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.

• Shakespeare and Socrates were trained to be self-contained, self-motivated, and ruled by principle. Now our cultural values have switched to make us more dependent on validation, entitlement, and ruled by our emotions.

• Silence is becoming a more scarce commodity. Silence is the ability to deliberately leave yourself out of a conversation and subsist without its validation.

• The voice of a generation doesn't call itself that. These are the people that you actually hear very little from. This is like LeBron calling himself the greatest ever. If you are the greatest you shouldn't have to call yourself that.

• Keep your head down and let others slap each other on the back while you're in the lab or gym.

• Become a student

  • We don't like knowing that there's someone out there better than us. Or that we have a lot left to learn. We want to be done. We need to keep updating our talents and knowledge because this is the path to mastery.

  • Accept that others know more than you and that you can benefit from their knowledge, and then seek them out to learn more and hush the ego.

  • You cannot get better if you already think you're the best.

• Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself.

• When you're just starting out there are a few fundamental realities

  1. You're not as good or important as you think.

  2. You have an attitude that needs readjusting.

  3. Most of what you think you know or most of what you learned in school is out of date or wrong.

• Greatness comes from humble beginnings. It comes from grunt work. It means you're the least important in the room until you change that with results.

• Be lesser, do more. Every person you meet, you should think of some way to help them. This could have a profound cumulative effect. You'd develop a reputation for being indispensable. You'd have an enormous bank of favors to call upon down the road.

• Pride gets in the way of the mind trying to function. Our ability to learn, adapt, and be flexible is all dulled by pride. Pride takes a minor accomplishment and makes it a major one.

• If you're doing the work and putting in the time, you won't need to cheat, you won't need to overcompensate.

• Just because you are quiet doesn't mean that you are without pride. Privately thinking you're better than others is still pride. It's still dangerous.

• Every time you sit down to work, remind yourself: I am delaying gratification by doing this. I am making an investment in myself instead of my ego.

• Humility engenders learning because it beats back the arrogance that puts blinders on. It leaves you open for truths to reveal themselves.

• If you're not still learning, you're dying.

• Pick up a book on something you know nothing about. Put yourself in rooms where you're the least knowledgeable person.

• Constantly question why you are doing something. Only then will you be able to understand what matters and what doesn't. Only then can you opt out of stupid races that don't matter.

• Control says, it all must be done my way—even little things, even inconsequential things. It can become paralyzing. A million pointless battles fought merely for the sake of exerting its say.

• The ego needs honor in order to be validated. Confidence, on the other hand, is able to wait and focus on the task at hand, is able to wait and focus on the task at hand regardless of external recognition.

• We never earn the right to be greedy or to pursue our interests at the expense of everyone else. To think otherwise is not only egotistical, it's counterproductive.

• Remember when your ego gets out of control your place in the universe. You are small, but also big because you are connected to the universe, and it is with you. Just remember which one is bigger and which has been around for longer.

• The effort is enough. Doing good work is sufficient. Even if it doesn't get recognition or end in great results. All we can control is our effort.

• Change the definition of success. Success is peace of mind, knowing you made the effort to do your best to become what you're capable of becoming.

• Many significant life changes come from moments in which we are thoroughly demolished, in which everything we thought we knew about the world is rendered false.

• He who will do anything to avoid failure will almost certainly do something worthy of failure.

• Only look back to find out about mistakes. There is only danger in thinking back to things you are proud of.

• Great people hold themselves to a standard that exceeds what society might consider objective success.

• Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. Assholes can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.

• A person who can think long term doesn't pity themself during short-term setbacks.

• Always love. Why get angry at the universe? It doesn't care.

• When people are mean or disrespecting you, feel a sort of pity and empathy for them instead of hating them.