To test if you are worrying too much about looking good, observe how you feel when you find out you've made a mistake or don't know something.

Distinguish open-minded people from closed-minded people. Open-minded people seek to learn by asking questions; they realize that what they know is little in relation to what there is to know and recognize that they might be wrong. Closed-minded people always tell you what they know, even if they know hardly anything about the subject being discussed. They are typically made uncomfortable by being around those who know a lot more about a subject, unlike open-minded people who are thrilled by such company.

Don't be a perfectionist, because perfectionists often spend too much time on little differences at the margins at the expense of other big, important things. Be an effective imperfectionist. Solutions that broadly work well (e.g., how people should contact each other in the event of crises) are generally better than highly specialized solutions (e.g., how each person should contact each other in the event of every conceivable crisis).

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.

I believe that one of the best ways of getting at truth is reflecting with others who have opposing views and who share your interest in finding the truth rather than being proven right

In return, society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted.

The expression I use: Pain + Reality = Progress. Whenever I would have a painful mistake, I started to view that as puzzles that would give me gems if I could solve the puzzle. So, it made me thoughtful - what should I do differently next time? That was the puzzle. And the gem was some principle for handling the same thing when it came along again, and then I would write it down. And by writing it down and referring to it, and also being able to show it to other people so that we could agree that that was a good way of handling that thing - that was very, very powerful.