“If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing your limits, and if you’re not pushing your limits, you’re not maximizing your potential”
― Principles: Life and Work
― Principles: Life and Work
“Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better—so they don’t go looking for it. Or, perhaps, they don’t want the trouble of better. Freud called this a “repetition compulsion.” He thought of it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past—sometimes, perhaps, to formulate those horrors more precisely, sometimes to attempt more active mastery and sometimes, perhaps, because no alternatives beckon. People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results. It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it. It’s partly fate. It’s partly inability. It’s partly … unwillingness to learn? Refusal to learn? Motivated refusal to learn?”
― 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
― 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us.”
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
“For I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by life. Let him or her be the only judge; not your reputation, not your wealth, not your standing in the community, not the decorations on your lapel. If you do not feel ashamed, you are successful. All other definitions of success are modern constructions; fragile modern constructions.”
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“Start by being nice to every person you meet. But if someone tries to exercise power over you, exercise power over him.”
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Kazankz’s 2025 Year in Books
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