he cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living...

Be curious. Be constantly, consistently, indiscriminatel y curious.

I didn't really - at least intellectually and creatively - have a particularly compelling experience in college. But during my junior year, they made the TED talks public. So I started listening to them. They were producing one per day, and I was listening to one per day, every day, at the gym.

To understand and be understood, those are among life's greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them

When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as importantly, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.

When I discovered PopTech and other kind of intellectualish, online portals for curiosity. Very quickly, I just got so much more out of those than from so-called "Ivy League" education that I knew it was on me to keep myself stimulated, and to keep learning, more than anything. And, because I paid my way through college, I was working at Penn, two to four jobs at a time to pay for school.

Because it is possible to create - creating one's self, willing to be one's self - one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever.