Benjamin P. Hardy

If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.

Thus, it’s not free will or determinism. It’s not choice or environments. Instead, it is choice and environment. More directly, it is the choice of environment. You are responsible for shaping and choosing the environments that will ultimately shape the person you become and the destiny you have. Environmental design is your greatest responsibility. Choosing and shaping your environment is at the center of what “free will” really means, because your choice of environment and external influences will directly reflect in the person you become.

Business strategist Charlie Jones stated, “You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.” By proactively changing your inputs of information, experiences, and people, you become aware of what you previously didn’t know. You see what you previously didn’t notice. You seek what you previously didn’t want. You act in ways you previously didn’t behave.

The goal of creating an environment of freedom is that as an individual, you actually live your life according to your own choosing rather than compulsion.

Your life is like a garden. If you’re not intentional, your garden will be overrun with weeds and randomness.

About commitment, the late Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen said, “100 percent is easier than 98 percent.” It’s easier to commit to something 100 percent, because once you’ve committed, you’ve eliminated the internal conflict. You’ve silenced the decision fatigue. You’ve banished the lesser goals.

But ideas can create culture, and culture is perhaps the most powerful force shaping human identity and decision-making.

Simply switching to home-brewed coffee will save you an average of $64.48 per month (or $2 per day) or $773.80 per year. By putting the savings into a mutual fund with average earnings of 6.5% interest and reinvesting the dividends into more mutual funds over a decade, the $64.48 saved every month would grow into $10,981.93.

People naturally avoid investing in loss. It’s comfortable doing something you can already do. Winning feels good. But if you want to aggressively become your Future Self, then investing in loss is how you get there.

Choosing one's own way is a primary purpose of our lives. Yet there is a fear in making choices, because choices have consequences. As a result, people avoid making decisions, fail to choose their own way, and limit their capacity for growth, learning, and change.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

My question is, how many best parts will there be and how many years will you spend in fast-forward? You may be young in years, but you are closer to death than you think.

When you frame the past negatively, your goals become reactive to and based on your past.

If we maintain the open-mindedness of children, we challenge fixed ideas and established structures, including our own. We listen to people in other denominations and religions. We don’t find demons in those with whom we disagree. We don’t cozy up to people who mouth our jargon. If we are open, we rarely resort to either-or: either creation or evolution, liberty or law, sacred or secular, Beethoven or Madonna. We focus on both-and, fully aware that God’s truth cannot be imprisoned in a small definition.” — Brennan Manning