The kings and priests of ancient Sumer wanted writing to be used by professional scribes to record numbers of sheep owed in taxes, not by the masses to write poetry and hatch plots. As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ancient writing’s main function was 'to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.

As Lean Startups grow, they can use adaptive techniques to develop more complex processes without giving up their core advantage: speed through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop.

Conjunction fallacy: people judge the conjunction of two events as more probable than one of those events separate.

The smartest way to deal with this kind of limitation is to cheat. Instead of forcing ourselves to do something we don’t feel like doing, we need to find a way to make us feel like doing what moves our project further along.

The difference between winning and losing is most often not quitting.

To become engrossed in and overwhelmed by the details risks mission failure, but to be so far detached from the details that the leader loses control is to fail the team and fail the mission.

The key, however, is not to prioritize your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.

Atheism is so senseless. When I look at the solar system, I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and light. This did not happen by chance.

Events in life are not negative or positive. They are completely neutral...Things merely happen to you. It is your mind that chooses to interpret them as negative or positive.

Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.