Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World

My top 25 points:

1. Life will go faster than you know. It will be tempting to live a life that impresses others. But this is the wrong path. The right path is to know that life is short, every day is a gift, and you have certain gifts.

2. Many people feel that when they are overwhelmed or lose focus, they need to retreat into themselves and shut out the world. That doesn’t work for me. I find myself, and activate my greatest creative capacities, in relationship with the beautiful diversity of other human beings.

3. In my practice, when I see clients for the first time, I see them as the end product—the way they will be in the future. They are all beautiful. What stands between who they are and who they want to be is their willingness to change strong habits, belief systems, and the gracefulness to embrace a new way of living.

4. Most of history was built by young people. They just got credit when they were older.

5. The mind is just as malleable as the body. We spend so much time and effort trying to change the external world, other people, and our own bodies, all the while accepting ourselves the way we were programmed in our youths. We accept the voice that talks to us in our head all the time as the source of all truth. But all of it is malleable and every day is new.

6. Of the many, many excuses people use to rationalize why they can’t do something, the excuse “I am too busy” is not only the most inauthentic, it is also the laziest. We do the things we want to do, period. If we say we are too busy, it is shorthand for “not important enough”.

7. The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower. The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that’s scarce. Cultivate that desire by reading what you want, not what you’re “supposed to.”

8. One wrong person in your circle can destroy your whole future.

9. Follow your intellectual curiosity over whatever is “hot” right now. If your curiosity ever leads you to a place where society eventually wants to go, you’ll get paid extremely well.

10. Self-esteem is just the reputation that you have with yourself. You’ll always know.

11. I used to resent obstacles along the path, thinking, ‘If only that hadn’t happened life would be so good.’ Then I suddenly realized, life is the obstacles. There is no underlying path.

12. Ego is about who’s right. Truth is about what’s right.

13. We are drawn to tasks where we can receive validation through results, but I’ve learned that true fulfillment comes from love of the process. Look for something where you love the process, and the results will follow.

14. Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” It’s a short reminder that success can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations we are willing to have, and by the number of uncomfortable actions we are willing to take.

15. Bad advice is everywhere. Build a following. Establish a platform. Learn how to scam the system. In other words, do all the surface stuff and none of the real work it takes to actually produce something of value. The disease of our times is that we live on the surface.

16. It is likely that most of what you currently learn at school will be irrelevant by the time you are 40…. My best advice is to focus on personal resilience and emotional intelligence.

17. I realized that I had to let people leave my life, never to return. Every relationship must be a voluntary relationship. But the same is true on my end. If I say I’m ready to move on and someone doesn’t accept that, now we have a problem.

18. While people often say there’s not enough time, remember that you’ll always have less attention than time. Full attention is where you do your best work, and everyone’s going to be looking to rip it from you. Protect and preserve it.

19. Everybody’s impatient at a macro, and just so patient at a micro, wasting your days worrying about years. I’m not worried about my years, because I’m squeezing the fuck out of my seconds, let alone my days. It’s going to work out.

20. A good general strategy is reasoning counterfactually: if someone tells you that X is true, ask yourself—(i) what would they say if X really is true, and (ii) what would they say if X is false? If the answer to (i) and (ii) is “they will say roughly what they just said now,” then their words provided you with exactly zero information. In general, know when it’s really important not to take people’s words at 100 percent face value.

21. Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another: ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’

22. One piece of advice I think they should ignore is the value of being a “people person.” No one cares if you are a people person. Have a point of view, and share it meaningfully, thoughtfully, and with conviction.

23. It’s easy for us to confuse real love for ourselves with narcissism or conceit, but I think they are very different. Instead of the hollowness narcissism is designed to conceal, I’ve seen that real love for myself comes from a sense of inner abundance or inner sufficiency. So it’s not going to take learning tennis or creating a video that goes viral or becoming a world-class chef to be worthy of love. Those are all great things, but we are worthy whether or not we accomplish them.

24. Losing faith in my bosses and elders made me independent and an adult.

25. A little part of me dies every time someone tells me they’ve taken a job as a “steppingstone” to something else, when they clearly aren’t invested in it. You have one life to live. Time is valuable. If you’re using steppingstones, you’re also likely relying on someone else’s path or definition of success. Make your own.