You have to put yourself in my shoes as a person who believes in radical truth and in being radically transparent, not in seeing things through somebody else's eyes.

Never say anything about a person you wouldn't say to them directly, and don't try people without accusing them to their face. Badmouthing people behind their backs shows a serious lack of integrity and is counterproductive. It doesn't yield any beneficial change, and it subverts both the people you are badmouthing and the environment as a whole.

I'd like to be clear that a number of people find me intolerable, and they don't hesitate to say so - which they and I cherish.

Unlike in school, in life you don't have to come up with all the right answers. You can ask the people around you for help - or even ask them to do the things you don't do well. In other words, there is almost no reason not to succeed if you take the attitude of 1) total flexibility - good answers can come from anyone or anywhere (and in fact, as I have mentioned, there are far more good answers 'out there' than there are in you) and 2) total accountability: regardless of where the good answers come from, it's your job to find them.

I believe that dreamers who simply imagine things that would be nice but are not possible don’t sufficiently appreciate the laws of the universe to understand the true implications of their desires, much less how to achieve them.

There is slow growth, but it is positive slow growth. At the same time, ratios of debt-to-incomes go down. That's a beautiful deleveraging.

Evolution is the only thing that exists through time. That is true for computers, or people, or a business. We tend to see things in a static way, and so you see what is. Even in looking at ourselves, what we really are is essentially vessels for our DNA that keeps evolving through time. So seeing that and embracing that reality, and thinking of everything as kind of this perpetual motion machine in which you embrace reality - you don't wish it was different. You realize that it's your puzzle to interact with. You interact with it well, you evolve yourself.