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1) Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your priority list.  Prefer a handful of truly close friends to a hundred acquaintances.  Don’t lose touch with old friends.  Occasionally stay up until the sun rises talking to people.  Have parties. 2) Life is not a dress rehearsal—this is probably it.  Make it count.  Time is extremely limited and goes by fast.  Do what makes you happy and fulfilled—few people get remembered hundreds of years after they die anyway.  Don’t do stuff that doesn’t make you happy (this happens most often when other people want you to do something).  Don’t spend time trying to maintain relationships with people you don’t like, and cut negative people out of your life.  Negativity is really bad.  Don’t let yourself make excuses for not doing the things you want to do.

The Days Are Long but the Decades Are Short

blog.samaltman.com

this romantic insistence on seeing a dark shadow behind each invention is as dogmatic as the belief in the inevitability of progress.

Sapiens

Yuval Noah Harari

American politicians and bureaucrats struggled to reach a consensus about how to respond. On the one hand, despite the longstanding legal right of Americans to claim homesteads, the mandatory redistribution of other people’s private property was decidedly un-American. On the other hand, Washington’s more liberal foreign policy specialists argued that land reform was necessary to make Asian societies fairer and – in the context of an incipient Cold War – less susceptible to the rising tide of communism. (There was no significant body of empirical evidence, as of 1945, to show that land reform would inevitably lead to faster economic growth.) The tensions between the property rights camp and those who viewed land reform as the key to stabilising US allies in Asia were never resolved; this led to a see-sawing of policy for several years, followed by a retreat from support for redistribution despite its manifest successes.

How Asia Works

Joe Studwell

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