Umarbek

There are hundreds of thousands of words you could learn in Spanish. But with the most frequently used 500, you can get to reasonable conversational fluency in almost any language in 8 to 12 weeks.

If more information were the answer, we'd all be billionaires with six-pack abs. So, information is clearly not sufficient. It's necessary, but not sufficient. Incentives drive behavior change.

If you have a reliable 5 to 10 year plan, you're going to be playing so safely within the bounds of your capabilities that I feel like you're selling yourself short.

I pick the projects based on relationships and skills. New relationships or deepening important relationships and skills I'm going to learn. Those relationships and those skills have to be able to transcend that project.

Everything snowballs over time and compounds, and it's really hard to lose long term, as long as you're not over-indexing and betting too much on any one project.

Whatever game you choose to play requires a system that allows you to survive a string of very bad luck.

I like energy over passion. Energy for me is very simple. Are you more awake or are you sleepy? Do you feel like you can do this for another 5 hours? Do you feel like you want to stop in 15 minutes? These are almost biological questions.

I don't think it's possible to have a wonderful life without awe and wonder. And those are things you can architect. Those are things you can very much engineer and schedule in your life.

I feel like I have a moral obligation to help people, which can turn into a bit of a savior complex. That can become a huge, unhelpful self-imposed burden where I feel a moral obligation to do things at the expense of my own mental health or physical health.

Take the pain and make it part of your medicine. All that stuff is horrible. Nothing can excuse it. Take that pain and make it part of what you offer the world.

For a long time, I had seven mental health psycho-emotional challenges I needed to address. I was viewing them as independent problems. But when I was willing to reopen the door and look at the childhood abuse, everything was tied to that.

Sometimes you just have to put on your gas mask and go into the cellar and contend with that. There's no one right way to do it.

People who have been abused are those who survive and do well afterwards in some way become very good by force, by necessity, at compartmentalizing.

There is a price to be paid when you cauterize certain aspects of yourself and disallow certain types of emotions.

I'm just plugging holes in the side of the boat, not asking why it's filling with water in the first place.

You can't fix the past.

It's disturbing because you realize how prevalent it is and how close so many people have come. It's reassuring because you realize also very quickly that you are not alone. You're not uniquely flawed. This doesn't need to be personal and permanent. People have solved for this.

When I see a constellation of issues, I try to identify not just the symptoms, because then you end up putting band-aids on things that are interrelated but treating them as silos. Instead, I look underneath to see if there are root causes that we can address.

Independence, lone wolf is not in our programming. When in doubt, revert on some level to what people were doing a few hundred years ago.

Social interaction, analog human interaction, is the one target when hit that solves a multitude of other problems that otherwise you'll be playing whack-a-mole.

Many of the assumptions that we have currently, which form the bedrock of our understanding of mental illness, are just going to be completely false within 10 years.

Another startup's not going to make any difference to my life. Another podcast. I love the podcast. I love the books. But we're at the squeezing out of marginal gains at this point.

My friends that struggle with dating the most, date the most.

Before investing in new relationships, I look at my top five to ten relationships and ask myself, did I spend the amount of time I would want to spend with these people last year? If the answer is no, I always reinvest in those people, and only the overflow gets allocated to new relationships.

Everyone should put as a challenge for themselves a 4-week mini-retirement once a year where you are unavailable. No laptop, no phone. It's going to allow you to play the long game at high intensity, having that de-load phase.

If you end up having a slight panic attack because you don't know what to do with your time, that's a great wake-up call. You need some other things to offset the type A maniacal focus.

How would you spend your final day on Earth? With my closest friends and family. It would be telling the people I love that I love them and spending time with them. Doesn't need to be anything fancy. Could be sitting on a porch on a rocking chair.