Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World Quotes
Quotes from "Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World"
All of these are quotes from the book. These are not mine. If you believe that your copyright has been violated, please contact me for immediate removal.
“The keys belong to whoever is inspired, and no specific age, sex, gender, or cultural background has a monopoly on inspiration. When you’re creative, you render competition obsolete, because there is only one you, and no one can do things exactly the way you do. Never worry about the competition. When you’re creative, you can, in fact, cheer others on with the full knowledge that their success will undoubtedly be your own.”
“When you are in your 20s and 30s and want to have a remarkable, fulfilling career, you must work hard. If you don’t work harder than everyone else, you will not get ahead. Further, if you are looking for work-life balance in your 20s or 30s, you are likely in the wrong career.”
“Advice: 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.
Do everything you were going to do, but with less angst, less suffering, less emotion. Everything takes time.
Ignore: The news. Complainers, angry people, high-conflict people. Anyone trying to scare you about a danger that isn’t clear and present.
“Ignore the unfairness—there is no fair. Play the hand that you’re dealt to the best of your ability. People are highly consistent, so you will eventually get what you deserve and so will they. In the end, everyone gets the same judgment: death.”
“I aspire to only work with people who I can work with forever, to invest my time in activities that are a joy unto themselves, and to focus on the extremely long term.
So I have no time for short-term things: dinners with people I won’t see again, tedious ceremonies to please tedious people, traveling to places that I wouldn’t go to on vacation.”
“Memento mori—“remember that you have to die.” All of this will go to nothing. Remember before you were born? Just like that.”
“Don’t be intimidated by anything. In the vast majority of the professions and vocations, the people who succeed are not any cleverer than you. The adult world is not full of gods, just people who have acquired skills and habits that work for them. And specialize—the great human achievement is to specialize as a producer of goods or services so that you can diversify as a consumer. Self-sufficiency is another word for poverty.”
“We spend far too much time complaining about the way things are, and forget that we have the power to change anything and everything.”
“Obsess over figuring out the funnest, most exciting, most natural shape of yourself as a writer and start doing that. There are a lot of people on the Internet, and they can all access your work with one tap on the phone in their pocket. So even if only one in every thousand of them—0.1 percent—happens to be a reader peg that perfectly matches the shape of your writing hole, that amounts to over a million people who will absolutely love what you’re doing.”
“By focusing inward on yourself as a writer instead of outward on what you think readers will want to read, you’ll end up creating the best and most original work, and that one-in-a-thousand person who happens to love it will end up finding their way to you.”
“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.”
“Don’t let yourself define what matters by the dogma of other people’s thoughts. And even more important, don’t let the thoughts of self-doubt and chattering self-criticism in your own mind slow you down. You will likely be your own worst critic. Be kind to yourself in your own mind. Let your mind show you the same kindness that you aspire to show others.”
“The best advice is more like, “I can’t answer your question, but this might be a good way for you to think about it.”
Everyone has their own journey. People who offer great advice understand that their goal is to help someone on their unique journey. People who offer bad advice are trying to relive their old glories”
“Don’t let someone knock you off course before you reach your destination. Trust the work. Always trust the work.”
“We can’t control the fact that bad things are going to happen, but it’s how we react to them that really matters”
“Don’t wait until you get a job to do the thing you want to be doing. For most careers, showing that you have initiative by working on projects related to your future job is a great way to get a foot in the door. If you want to be a writer or journalist, start keeping a blog that you update regularly! If you want to be a programmer, create and maintain a project on GitHub. Anything that you can point to on your LinkedIn that screams, “Hey, I’m passionate about this!” works.
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“Nothing truly meaningful or lasting has ever been created in a short period of time. If you learn the story behind any great success, you realize how many years went by and how many hard choices were made to achieve it. Reaching for more is not only an act of ambition, it also comes from passion and love. Nothing is achieved because of easy choices.”
“They should ignore any advice from anyone who purports to tell them what the future will look like. No one knows. People have ideas, and those are good to take on board and consider, but that’s about the extent of it. I can’t tell you how many media or political “experts” have made proclamations as to the next big thing in journalism or entertainment—or politics—and been proven horribly, embarrassingly wrong. ”
“Persistence matters more than talent. The student with straight As is irrelevant if the student sitting next to him with Bs has more passion.”
“When two extreme opinions meet, the truth lies generally somewhere in the middle. Without exposure to the other side, you will naturally drift toward the extremes and away from the truth of the matter”
“First, seek out dissenting opinions. Always try to find people who disagree with you, who can honestly and productively play devil’s advocate. Challenge yourself to truly listen to people who have differing ideas and opinions than you do. Stay out of political bubbles and echo chambers as much as possible. Feel good about really hearing those who disagree with you. Try to change your mind about one thing every day.”
“Second, stay flexible and be open to opportunities as they come your way. Most of the successful people I know did not know exactly what they wanted to do coming right out of college, and they changed their focus over the course of their careers. Be open to what the world brings your way. Don’t be afraid to change jobs or careers, no matter how much time you have already put into something. There is no urgency to have it all figured out. And feeling like you have it all figured out can make you stuck and close-minded to change.”
“Life will present you with unexpected opportunities, and you won’t always know in advance which are the important moments. Above all, it’s the quality of your relationships that will determine the quality of your life. Invest in your connections, even those that seem inconsequential.”
“Always take the time to acknowledge people—and not just when you know you have something to gain. If you show interest in them, they will be interested in you. People react to kindness with kindness, to respect with respect. Relationships—even brief ones—are doorways to opportunity.
The advice to ignore is “What is your five-year plan?”
“You can’t ever say the words “please” and “thank you” enough. And turn those words into actions, make people around you feel that those words are genuine, that it is exactly how you feel. The same goes for when you break through and make it. Don’t eliminate those words from your pocket.”
“Focus on your writing skills. It’s the one thing I’ve found that really helps people stand out. More and more communication is written today.”
“Also, most of the stuff you’ll worry about doesn’t matter anyway. You’ll sweat so many details that no one will care about. It’s not that details don’t matter—they do—but only the right details matter. Pay close attention to what you’re spending your time on.”
“There are so many. “Scale.” No, don’t scale. Start small, stay as small as possible for as long as possible. Grow in control, not out of control.”
“Failure may tell you what not to do again, but it doesn’t help you figure out what to do the next time around. I’d rather focus on the things that work, and try those again, than try to take lessons from the things that didn’t.”
“Burnout is not the price you have to pay for success.” And I hope billions truly would see it, since so much of the world is still living under the collective delusion that they have to choose between their own well-being and success. Science tells us the complete opposite—when we prioritize our well-being, our performance goes up across the board. Three-quarters of all startups fail, and entrepreneurship is about making decisions. Nothing impairs the quality of your decisions faster than running on empty.”
“Macro patience, micro speed. They should not care about the next eight years, but they should stress the next eight days.”
“Three of the most popular are:
“Work on stuff that matters.”
“Create more value than you capture.”
“Money in a business is like gas in your car. You need to pay attention so you don’t end up on the side of the road. But your trip is not a tour of gas stations.”
If I had to pick just one, it would probably be “Create more value than you capture”
“We equate being smart and being driven as the ways to get ahead. But sometimes, an attitude of alert watchfulness is far wiser and more effective. Learning to follow your nose, pulling on threads of curiosity or interest, may take you places that being driven will never lead you to”
“Shit or get off the pot.” Too many people are waiting to get shit set up just right so they can do the thing they are gonna do. It’s time.
Or: “Posting about it isn’t doing anything. It’s just like talk . . . it’s cheap!” Too many people think they are supporting a cause, and the only thing they are doing is posting about it on social media. Doing something is doing something, everything else is just talk.”
“Don’t trust the gurus, whether a marketing guru or a life guru. Anybody telling you he knows better is—more than anything—disempowering you, because he is placing you below and himself above. The guru separates himself from the rest of us. Anything that creates separation is an illusion. In reality, we are all united, all the same, all small parts of the same bigger thing, the universe. I am especially thinking of all the online personalities telling you to work harder, telling you they are working more than anybody. When 99 percent of your life is your work, either you are really bad at what you do or you are completely off balance with the rest of your life”
“The seminal change in the business from then to now is that a young person should view the career pyramid differently rather than traditionally. Put the point at the bottom where you are now (at the start of your career) and conceive your future as an expanding opportunity horizon where you can move laterally across the spectrum in search of an ever-widening set of career opportunities. Reinvent yourself regularly. See your world as an ever-increasing set of realities and seize the day.”
“Good things come to those who wait.” If I’d listened to that, Spotify would never have become anything more than an idea. We had so many knock-backs in the early days. Bono once said to me, “Good things come to those who work their asses off and never give up.” That speaks to me much more.”
“The markets that have done great are great investments.” In other words, when someone says, “Buy this because it’s doing well,” you should be thinking, “Be careful, because it’s become more expensive.”
“Love looking at what you don’t know, your mistakes, and your weaknesses, because understanding them is essential for making the most of your life.”
“Don’t worry all that much about your first job. Just start, and let the work teach you. With every step, you will discover more about who you want to be and what you want to do. If you wait for the perfect and keep all of your options open, you might end up with nothing but options. So start.”
“ If you want to help people, ask why they are in so much pain that they are driven (there’s that word again) to escape from it through ultimately self-harming habits or substances. Then support them in healing the trauma at the core of their addiction, a process that always starts with nonjudgmental curiosity and compassion.”
“First, I’d say it’s important to lean into the future, and position yourself for what’s happening next, versus what’s happening now. ”
“if you plan to try something new, especially if that something new disrupts the status quo, then you should expect to be called nuts. You can’t rock the boat without being told you’re off your rocker. ”
“My advice to entrepreneurs: Once your idea has gained traction, cut the umbilical cord. Your idea can’t take flight if you don’t leave the nest.”
“For every successful individual who designed a master plan for life, there is another who was deliberately spontaneous. Ignore advice, especially early in one’s career. There is no universal path to success.”
“Most of the game is about persistence. It is the most important trait. Sure, when you get an opportunity, you have to perform and you have to exceed beyond all expectations, but getting that chance is the hardest part. So keep the vision clear in your head an”
“So resist temptations and advice to play to the middle. The best work always comes from pushing the edge.”
“Be in a hurry to learn, not in a hurry to get validation. In a team environment, you will make a much better impression if it seems like you’re not at all worried about yourself. It’s okay to actually be worried about yourself—everyone is—just don’t seem like it. If you resist asking for too much, you will often get more.”
“Be humble and self-aware. Ignore the concept of “being yourself.” Of course this is literally true by definition, but it is a way to avoid self-improvement. Pursuing your passion is fine.”
“Find an area of expertise.” It’s so weird when I hear this. Just learn how to learn. Then you can always figure out the next thing that you will need to know.”
“No matter what challenge or obstacle you face, whether it’s personal, professional, or global, there’s a path ahead. It’s all figure-out-able. You’ll find a way or make a way, if you’re willing to be relentless, stay nimble, and keep taking action. It’s especially useful to remember when things go wrong, because rather than wasting time or energy on the problem, you shift immediately to brainstorming solutions.”
“Pursue every project, idea, or industry that genuinely lights you up, regardless of how unrelated each idea is, or how unrealistic a long-term career in that field might now seem. You’ll connect the dots later. Work your fucking ass off and develop a reputation for going above and beyond in all situations. Do whatever it takes to earn enough money, so that you can go all in on experiences or learning opportunities that put you in close proximity to people you admire, because proximity is power. Show up in every moment like you’re meant to be there, because your energy precedes anything you could possibly say.
Ignore the advice to specialize in one thing, unless you’re certain that’s how you want to roll. Ignore giving a shit about what other people think about your career choices”
“When it comes to building an online audience, a big mistake people make is trying to be everywhere at once. They’re scrambling to generate a ton of mediocre content to fill up a seemingly endless number of social feeds and online platforms, which leads to dismal results.
Trying to crush it on every platform, especially if you’re a one-person show, is not a wise or sustainable use of your time, talent, or energy. Even if you have a team, I still recommend choosing one platform to focus on at first. Before committing to another content channel or social platform, ask yourself, why exactly do you want to be on this platform? What are the specific business reasons you’re going to commit time, energy, and resources to regularly creating and engaging in that space? Does this really make sense given your other time commitments and big-picture goals?
One thing business owners don’t realize is that every social media platform you’re active on becomes an open channel for customer service. People will ask questions there and, yes, they’ll complain there, too. Think that through. “Have a process in place for someone on your team to sweep social channels on a regular basis so you don’t create a customer service nightmare for yourself.”
“Every step in your early career must get you incrementally closer to whatever genuinely interests you. The most promising path to success is pursuing genuine interests and setting yourself up for the circumstantial relationships, collaborations, and experiences that will make all the difference in your life. ”
“The greatest lessons you learn in the beginning of a career are about people—how to work with people, be managed by people, manage expectations with people, and lead other people. As such, the team you choose to join, and your boss, are huge factors in the value of a professional experience early in your career. Choose opportunities based on the quality of people you will get to work with.”