Shane Parrish Quotes

Reacting without reasoning makes every situation worse. Whether big or small, these unforced errors consume significant time and energy just to get you back to where you were before.

Your exemplars needn’t be alive. They can be either dead or fictional, as well. We can learn from both Atticus Finch and Warren Buffett, along with Genghis Khan and Batman. It’s up to you.

The second thing we can do is to learn how to fail properly. Failing properly has two major components. First, never take a risk that will do you in completely. (Never get taken out of the game completely.) Second, develop the personal resilience to learn from your failures and start again. With these two rules, you can only fail temporarily.

Why risk looking like an idiot when you can remain average?

The map of reality is not reality.

Most geniuses — especially those who lead others — prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.

In the short term, you are as good as your intensity. In the long term, you are only as good as your consistency.

The leverage you have may not always be the leverage you want, but chances are, if you look, you will find you have some somewhere.

«Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking.»

You can’t improve if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong.

No one likes to fail. It hurts. But failure carries with it one huge antifragile gift: learning.

Rationality is wasted if you don’t know when to use it.

The only way you’ll know the extent to which you understand reality is to put your ideas and understanding into action. If you don’t test your ideas against the real world — keep contact with the earth — how can you be sure you understand?

When things happen in accord with our view of the world we naturally think they are good for us and others. When they conflict with our views, they are wrong and bad. But the world is smarter than we are and it will teach us all we need to know if we’re open to its feedback — if we keep our feet on the ground.

The only controllable variable in any situation is you. Oddly, it's the last one people adjust.