One of the unfair secrets of business is the more success you have, the more you have a platform for a bigger thing you do next time. Just keep in the game. After successes you get to do bigger things more easily.
The victors of the battles of tomorrow will be those who can best harness thought to action.
And if you aren't trying really hard and taking risks and failing and knowing when to pull the plug and move on, you're not taking advantage of the american embrace of risk and failure.
The embrace or the acceptance of failure in america is singular and it's a wonderful thing and if you aren't trying and taking a lot of risk here, you aren't taking advantage of an economy that's one of the few in the world, one of the few societies.
People who were disruptors tended to have demons driving them.
You can either Harness those demons or the demons harness you.
To be in the top 1% in world wide terms. You need to make 32k.
It’s actually lazier. It takes more laziness to go to work every single day for the next 40 years than it would be to sit and use your mind and try to find a way to escape. You can't be bothered to think outside of your box. You're either stupid, lazy, or arrogant.
You can't have an easy life and a great character.
The link between effort and result is so much more disconnected than you think. What's actually going to work. These things are one day of work.
Greatness is in the agency of others.
You have to be humble when things work because a lot of your success isn't your fault.
I think you grow older based on your experience. That's why you can have high school level experience lawyers. And 60 year old 30 year olds based on the lives they lived.
And being a martyr and being angry and having enemies when they’re unnecessary, those are forms of false adventure.
God will sell you anything at the price of labor. If you want something, you have to work for it.
Luck does not exist. It's merely a game of probabilities. You work hard, you work more, you work longer, and eventually you can increase your odds of success.
One metric above all others that predicts your earning income above anything: your zipcode. Where you were born.
If they love you then you probably have 90% of the happiness you’re capable of.
If not, then you’re lucky if you have 10%.
And that is extremely exciting.
If for 10 years you didn't avoid doing what you knew you needed to do, what would you be like?
What cures in therapy is truth.
there's exposure to the things you're afraid of and you're avoiding as well but I would say that that's a form of enacted truth because if you know there's something you should do, by your own set of rules and you're avoiding it then you're enacting a lie. you're not telling one but you're acting one, out it's the same thing. So if I can get you to face what it is that you're confronting that you know you shouldn't be avoiding then what's happening is that we're both partaking in the process of attempting for you to act out your deepest truth and what happens is that that improves people's lives.
We know that if you expose people to the things they're afraid of but that they're avoiding they get better. and you have to do it carefully and cautiously and to their own participation and all of that but of all the things that clinicians have established that's credible, that's number one and that's nested inside this deeper realization that the clinical experience is redemptive let's say because it is designed to address suffering and so as far as the people who are engaged in the process are both telling each other the truth.
That's how perception works. That's a hell of a thing to learn.
Ask yourself if your aim is wrong if you see the world so horribly.
A piece of advice people later wish they'd listened to is that it is very easy to get sucked into a path in life. – Sam Altman
There's moments in your life where decades are decided.
Jobs: Focus is saying no to 100 great ideas so you can say yes to the one exceptional one.
Dostoevsky said:
Every man is not only responsible for everything he does but for everything everyone else does.
Is what you receive back proportionate to what you deliver? The answer might be yes. Terrifying idea.
People think startups either work or they don’t. But it’s always about whether or not the founder makes it happen.
Make yourself worthy of a partner like that. Trust, success, admiration are things you can't buy and have to earn.
A lot of us have so many things we want to create in the world and it's dangerous to wait because life priorities change.
You can predict the long term health of a relationship by whether each cut heals to 99% or 101%.
99% means, eventually the relationship decays to zero.
101% means it gets better and better over time.
"I’ll take care of you and you’ll take care of me."
It should be:
"I’ll take care of me for you and you take care of you for me."
This is a much better model for how to be in a relationship.
Invest in low cost ETFs.
80–90% of people who day trade lose money.
SPY = index that tracks S&P 500.
Net conclusion of smartest finance people = nobody beats the market after fees.
A ruling and influential class of educated or skilled people.
Universities have been forced to transition from public institutions to competitive corporations.
Calculate a strategic approach:
Look at markets
Create a market map
Identify a gap
Reverse engineer
Demand test
A/B test
Validate your idea
If you can earn average returns for 50 years, you’re going to end up in the top one percent of all investors — and you do it with zero effort.
A probability of about 1 in 3.5 million
2,286 people in the world would be a "1 in 3.5 million" success case
Pretend we took all the money that existed and redistributed it evenly.
Everyone got $100,000.
Ten years later, most of the rich would be rich again.
They say it takes 10,000 hours to do something.
It’s actually 20.
40 minutes a day for about a month.
Warren Buffett calls it “winning the generic lottery” —
The luck of being born:
in this era (not the Middle Ages)
in this country (U.S.)
to this family (stable household)
with certain talents (building, tenacity, focus)
with this gender, ethnicity, health
While none of this negates hard work and good choices, you can’t ignore the tailwinds in the success equation.
Roosevelt did all these amazing things to outrun the sadness of that day.
You are going to be the thing that makes it work.
The magic you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding.
You tend to believe the world is more logical than it is.
But it’s based on relationships.
Heartbreak, stress, pain and suffering mature men.
The sooner you suffer, get good at it, then perform regardless — the faster you grow.
Winning and being successful is this thing that feels scarce when you’re not around it.
People very rarely are able to rethink the rules of their game.
Humans can only concentrate 5 hours a day — optimal work time.
3-hour sprints, 3 times a day
3 hours first thing, then 90, 90, 90
It’s hard to have intellectual stimulation all day, week, year long.
Humans took over the world.
Not because we’re the fastest, strongest, or longest-lived —
But because we’re the smartest.
And now, we’re going to build a new smartest species.
Almost all of us are just doing what we were doing because we were already doing it.
To me, that is 10/10 execution on a 4/10 opportunity.
There’s safety and security in starting your own business.
Doing something you own where you manage 100% of the risk.
Outside of science and law, all rules can be bent or broken — and it doesn’t require being unethical.
But with everyone playing make-believe, it’s easy to forget.
The universe doesn’t conspire against you,
But it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either.
But anything less can be endured with enough clever rationalization.
You cannot hide anything from yourself.
Your failures are written within your psyche and obvious to you.
If you have too many moral shortcomings, you won’t respect yourself.
Let’s team up! If you’re into cool business ideas and want to brainstorm with someone young, schedule-less, and eager to learn — let’s talk.
Copyright © 2025 KellyGeng
