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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
(7) Failure to appreciate the urgency. Until very late in the story, nobody fully realized what was at stake. Only as the king was staring into the bloodied face of the young pleading man does the extent of the tragedy sink in. Searching for a cure for aging is not just a nice thing that we should perhaps one day get around to. It is an urgent, screaming moral imperative. The sooner we start a focused research program, the sooner we will get results. It matters if we get the cure in 25 years rather than in 24 years: a population greater than that of Canada would die as a result. In this matter, time equals life, at a rate of approximately 70 lives per minute. With the meter ticking at such a furious rate, we should stop faffing about.
The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant
nickbostrom.com
Tenanted land as a share of all cultivated land was around 20 per cent in the first years after the Meiji government instituted its land reform. By the time of the Second World War, almost half of arable land was under tenancy and 70 per cent of Japanese farmers rented some or all of their fields. Despite the global depression, tenant rents did not fall below 50–60 per cent of crops (and this was after the renter had paid the cost of seeds, fertiliser, implements and all taxes and levies bar the main land tax). It was hardly surprising that output stopped rising in the 1920s.
How Asia Works
Joe Studwell
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