“Life is information and energy and awareness. It’s a squirreling away of entropy, so that one bit of ordered matter can look at another and try to know it. It’s momentum rolling, for a moment, uphill. Life seems sometimes like it should be impossible, and yet here we are, and yet here our whole planet is.

Understanding life’s origin is a way to understand what it means to be alive, matter with memory, matter that brings new complexity into the world. And understanding how those origins - plural! - can happen helps us think about where else to look.”

“Don’t take it personally if people don’t like you. Many of them don’t even like themselves.”

“I am passionately pro-education. There are few things I care more about than reading and learning constantly. Yet, the lives of the people profiled in this book show conclusively that education is most certainly not the same thing as academic excellence. We’ve conflated them, at great cost to ourselves, our children, our economy, and our culture.”

“The driving theme of the stories in this book is that, even though you may learn many wonderful things in college, your success and happiness in life will have little to do with what you study there or the letters after your name once you graduate.

It has to do with your drive, your initiative, your persistence, your ability to make a contribution to other people’s lives, your ability to come up with good ideas and pitch them to others effectively, your charisma, your ability to navigate gracefully through social and business networks (what some researchers call ‘practical intelligence’), and a total, unwavering belief in your own eventual triumph, throughout all the ups and downs, no matter what the naysayers tell you.

While you may learn many valuable things in college, you won’t learn these things there – yet they are crucial for your success in business and in life.

Whether you’re a high school dropout or a graduate of Harvard Law School, you must learn and develop these skills, attitudes, and habits if you want to excel at what you do.

In this new economy, the biggest factor in your success will not be abstract, academic learning but whether you develop the real-life success skills evinced by the people on these pages, and how early you do.”

"I’m going to teach you two questions that, if you put them into use at parties, events, and conferences, will change your life forever and will grow your network faster than you ever thought possible: What’s most exciting for you right now in your life/business? What’s challenging for you in your life/business right now?”

“The breakthrough realization for you is that you are in the marketing business. You are not in the dry cleaning or restaurant or widget manufacturing or wedding planning or industrial chemicals business.

You are in the business of marketing dry cleaning services or restaurants or widgets or wedding planning or chemicals. When you embrace this, it makes perfect sense to set your sights on marketing mastery.

If you are going to make something your life’s work and chief activity and responsibility, why not do it exceptionally well?”

“The key to making money, and therefore living a life of less stress, is to cause someone to joyfully give you money in exchange for something that they perceive to be of greater value than the money they gave you.”

“If you invest in being better at marketing, sales, and leadership, then the sky’s the limit to your success.

There is knowledge in the world about how to do these three things well. They may be a mystery to you, or they may not be, but they’re not a mystery at large. There are actually simple things that every one of us can do to be quite good at these things.

In fact, the bar is so low, for marketers, salespeople, and leaders – the bar is so laughably low – that you have to get like a D in these things to be extraordinary. It’s the easiest class you’ll ever take.”

“You are a reflection of the 20 or 30 people that give you the best advice.”

“The three areas of life the majority of people spend most of their time worrying about are money, relationships, and health. In my experience, very few people have all three of these areas buttoned up in their life, at least not as much as they like.

If you’re talking to someone whom society deems more successful than you, it’s probably the case that they are more successful in only one area (business, marketing, sales, fame, etc.).

In my experience, almost every person I’ve met who is, by societal standards, much more successful than I, is also struggling with at least one area or issue about which I know quite a bit more than they do.

They’re human, just like you and me, and humans have problems.”

“The wealthiest people are not the ones who are hoarding the most value – they’re the ones who have the most value flowing in and out of their lives.”

“No single skill you could possibly learn correlates more directly with your real-world success than learning sales. And yet – surprise, surprise – it’s nowhere to be found on the curriculum of formal education, from elementary school through graduate school.

No wonder there are so many broke and unemployed people with undergraduate and graduate degrees. (And don’t tell me that there are more broke people without the degrees. True, but besides the point. If they learned to sell, like nearly all the dropouts I feature in this book did, they wouldn’t be broke for long.)”

“It turns out that nearly everyone I spoke to for this book has this in common: a serious passion for lifelong learning.”

“Any job you can get because you have a resume probably isn’t a job you want.”

“A key aspect of the entrepreneurial mindset is seeing the world around you as largely made up. Sure, there are societal rules, but those rules are often arbitrary and outdated, and can therefore frequently be broken, bent, bypassed, or just plain ignored, to good effect.

The people we've met in this book, with the entrepreneurial mindset, look out at the world and see malleability, elasticity, plasticity, flexibility. They see how they can bend currently accepted 'reality' toward the reality they would prefer.

Those with the employee mindset, in turn, look out and see a world full of protocols, rules, regulations, fixed hierarchies, established orders. They bow their heads down and 'stick with the program,' hoping that if they just do what they're told and what's expected of them, it will turn out all right, just as Mom or Dad or Teacher or Professor or Boss said it would."

“If you always asked yourself how you could make a greater and higher-leveraged contribution to the people you work with and the situations you find yourself in; if you focused like a laser on the actual outcome of the projects you're involved with, rather than the output of your time and effort; if you were relentless about taking care of what's actually needed in your workplace or team, rather than just doing what was requested of you; if you started running toward the big decisions in your organization, rather than away from them, whether or not your job description called for it; if you became a diligent student of the ways in which social reality is more flexible and malleable, and less predetermined than you think it is - if you did all these things, is there any chance you would come out behind?"  

“Do you really believe that the average person knows what's best for you better than you do?”

“If you want to live an uncommon life, then why would you listen to commonplace advice?”