The ability to do what you want, when you want, for as long as you want, has an infinite ROI.

Whoever is born with a talent, or to a talent, must surely find in that the most pleasing of occupations!

Artists who operate on the principle of rejecting all form are themselves dependent on form.

Self-awareness is the foundation of authenticity.

Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of the deepest joy in our lives.

The most important quality is resilience. I’m talking about the ability to bounce back from failure, to turn around a bad situation, to profit from your mistakes. That’s because everybody makes mistakes, plenty of them. What’s more, we keep on making them as long as we’re in business.

“Proactive people are still influenced by external stimuli, whether physical, social, or psychological. But their response to the stimuli, conscious or unconscious, is a value-based choice or response.”

Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological.

Alphabets apparently arose only once in human history: among speakers of Semitic languages, in the area from modern Syria to the Sinai, during the second millennium B.C. All of the hundreds of historical and now existing alphabets were ultimately derived from that ancestral Semitic alphabet.

Mastering this skill means that you can knock down two of the biggest barriers preventing your reports from doing great work — unclear expectations and inadequate skills — so that they know exactly where to aim and how to hit the target