I don't want to be in a situation where I have to leave some other commitment or worse I am rude and someone else has to support my stuff. I stopped coding for Facebook a while ago.

You could probably go all the way back to the first books. I bet people said 'why should you read when you could talk to other people?' The point of reading is that you get to deeply immerse yourself in a person's perspective. Right? Same thing with newspapers or phones or TVs. Soon it will be VR, I bet.

You hear these stories about people who take apart their radio and put it back. Or just learn a lot from taking it apart. But I wasn't as into that stuff as I was just into how computer programs work.

There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big organization, and then there are people who are very analytic or focused on strategy. Those two types don't usually tend to be in the same person. I would put myself much more in the latter camp.

In a recent survive of Millennials around the world asking what most defines our identity, the most popular wasn't nationality, ethnicity or religion. It was "citizen of the world." That's a big deal. Every generation expands the circle of people we consider one of us. And in our generation, that now includes the whole world. This is the struggle of our time. The forces of freedom, openness, and global community against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism, and nationalism - forces for the flow of knowledge, trade, and immigration, against those who would slow them down.

Don't discount yourself, no matter what you're doing.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.