“Assume you will achieve your goal, even if it requires multiple attempts. Take it on faith that the world is more pliable than feels true. Refuse to accept your brain’s first-order response that you probably can’t achieve goal X because of restrictions Y and Z. Instead, approach restrictions Y and Z with a puzzle-solving mindset, relishing the challenge of discovering how to work around them.”

“Every time you skirt around small frictions, you accumulate debt in the form of resentment. The debt grows, and for a while it might seem manageable, but then one day you just don’t like the person anymore.”

“I think our memories are benevolent with respect to other people’s failures because they just aren’t very emotionally salient for us. Perhaps we feel compassionate, or we might feel judgmental. More often, we just don’t think of them. In any event, failure is not as significant from the outside. To the outside eye, the course of a life consists of the bright peaks achieved, with the long gray plateau of ordinary days edited away.”

“If you would like to become the author of your own life, regardless of the plot, more agency is the key.

Agency entails a radically different way of relating to the world.

Rather than avoiding failure and rejection, agentic people see these as the inevitable costs of personal progress, and opportunities for learning. Rather than assuming that everything worthwhile has been done already, they assume that many great ventures are postponed out of inertia and fear. Rather than taking it for granted that the experts have it under control, they expect that something more can be done, and that they can be the ones to do it. They choose to believe that everything is learnable, even traits and skills often believed to be innate, like charisma or curiosity.

And, fundamentally, they take responsibility. They act on the world, rather than the world acting on them.”

“It’s important to realize that you are allowed to have some shortcomings that you don’t address. In fact, I think accomplishing anything of real value in life requires accepting the finitude of time and the practicality of being mediocre in areas you don’t care about.”

“...the continuous need for willpower may be the sign of a badly-engineered life.”

“The exertion of willpower makes you feel like you’re trying. But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re actually trying.”

“The high-agency mindset about rejection takes things even further. It says that you should seek out rejection, or at least welcome it.

Congratulate yourself on hearing no. Remind yourself that if you don’t routinely encounter rejection, you are not asking for enough-you’re only making requests that are extremely likely to receive a yes. By making bolder requests, you will sometimes achieve big leaps, and you’ll know you’re not leaving opportunities on the table.”

“There is always a way to trade time for ever-increasing sums of money, and once you start making that trade, it becomes harder and harder to draw a line, easier and easier to convince yourself that your obligations to someone else—spouse, kids, aging parents—demand that you stay where you are.”