Dan Koe Quotes

Most people's lives are determined by how they choose to cure their boredom.

I love entrepreneurship because it allows you to apply anything you learn.

At school, you’re told what to learn. At a job, you’re told what to work on, and you only learn until you are good enough to do the job (unless you self-educate out of genuine interest, but being honest, an abysmally low amount of people do that, because those who do realize that in order to learn they must grow, and you can’t grow in someone else’s box).

When you do your own thing, the only way to survive is to do something you’ve never done before, which requires you to learn what can’t be taught in school.

The greatest trait you can acquire is to work with tremendous intensity on things that matter to you, and more importantly, be strangely unbothered when those things don't work out.

You don’t need to dream big. You need to imagine a life so depressing that the only option in your mind is to achieve big.

You aren't where you want to be because you don't want to be there more than you want to be where you are. Your behavior is your confession. You say you want a better life (mostly for social approval), but when something more instant and pleasurable comes around, your actions show that you want that more.

With time, you will realize that selfishness and selflessness are two polar ends. They cannot be separated like oil and water. They are constantly mixing according to the situation at hand.

You can train your mind to achieve anything you want. Most of what you don't have is no more than a lack of skill, knowledge, action, and the logical sequence of steps it takes to achieve that thing. Deep down, everyone knows this, but their mind was trained by someone else to believe their potential is limited.

The best thing you can do in today's world is practice thinking. Very few people, especially smart people, do this. Snap yourself out of your automatic patterns and stretch your mind for once. This will only become more important as AI and social media distort reality.

How to know if you need to make a big change:

You stay up late, every night, because you feel like you haven't gotten enough out of the day.

The 2-4 hours you spend scrolling each day (or 730-1460 hours each year) is more than enough time to write a book, build a business, or get in shape. In the moment, it seems like nothing. That's why it's so dangerous. Your time disappears without you being conscious of it.

Do whatever you want.

When you do, you will make mistakes. At that point, if you are smart, you no longer want it, and begin to slowly course correct toward what you really want. If you always do what others want for you, you will never discover what you want.

Most people quit because they forget that you have to be bad at something before you can be good at it. It's so obvious. You suck. Of course you're not going to win in 2 weeks. But if you can learn to enjoy extended periods of failure, you will make it very, very far in life.

The worst life is to wake up and have nothing you want to do. The best life is not being able to stop yourself from launching out of bed, working on a project that's important to you, and having so much clarity that stress and worry can't even find their way into your brain.

You can't improve what doesn't exist.

The ideas in your head. The business you dream of building. The plans you keep putting off. All are worthless until you test them against reality.

You're afraid of failure and glorify perfection when the opposite is what determines success.

Yes, anyone can build anything now. We know. But it wasn't that hard to do before. You execute a series of steps toward a goal.

The problem is psychological. Most people will still fail to start, and even more will fail to iterate. Your competition isn't as large as you think.