One evening, intending to ask my host mother to wake me the next morning (okosu), I ask her to violently rape me (okasu). She is very confused. - Tim Ferriss

Happiness can be bought with a bottle of wine and has become ambiguous through overuse.

The Logic of the Double or Triple Threat On “career advice,” Scott has written the following, which is slightly trimmed for space here. This is effectively my mantra, and you’ll see why I bring it up: If you want an average, successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1) Become the best at one specific thing. 2) Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try. The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.

… For more than a thousand years it was thought that the heavens obeyed a different physics than pertains here on Earth. With the scientific renaissance that culminated in Isaac Newton’s work it became clear that, on the contrary, the same natural laws rule the earth and the sky. The cosmos came to be viewed as a marvel, events following from causes like the tickings of brass cogs. The realm of the inexplicable—where dwell the gods of those dazzled by the unexplained—was thereafter relegated to the first moment of time, when the universe somehow blossomed into being. Then quantum chance reared its indeterminate face, as a creative agency that authored the first phenomena of cosmic time. So we are obliged to consider that even the largest systems are ruled by quantum precepts that govern nature on the smallest scales, and that the origin of the universe may itself have been a cosmic flux.