“Opportunity isn’t evenly distributed. Certain places, industries, and communities act as amplifiers. They concentrate talent, energy, and resources in ways that make success more possible.

Think of: Silicon Valley for tech innovators. New York City for finance and fashion. Los Angeles for entertainment. Venice Beach for bodybuilding.

Proximity doesn’t guarantee success. But it increases your chances of it. It puts you in the room with the right people, exposes you to opportunities you wouldn’t otherwise see, and forces you to level up.

You can’t live big in a small environment. Stay in the wrong place too long, and you start to shrink.”

“Our brains construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to.”

“Being anything close to an ‘ethical person’ requires daily thought and introspection and hard work; we have to think about how we can be good not, you know, once a month, but literally all the time.

To make it a little less overwhelming, this book hopes to boil down the whole confusing morass into four simple questions that we can ask ourselves whenever we encounter any ethical dilemma, great or small:

What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Is there something we could do that’s better? Why is it better?”

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

“‘Should I Punch My Friend in the Face for No Reason?’ No. You shouldn’t. Was that your answer? Sweet. You’re doing great so far.”

“As technical and brainy as Kantian theory is, I find there to be something sweetly humanistic about the second formulation.

Kant holds humans in the highest possible regard, and rejects any action that demeans them or turns them into tools used to achieve some other goal.

I’m not saying you’d want him to be your dad and comfort you after you strike out in Little League, but I think this iteration of the categorical imperative means there’s a beating heart under all that pure reason.”

“This happens a lot in philosophy - the second you ask a question, you have to back up and ask fifty other questions just so you know that you’re asking the right question and that you understand why you’re even asking it, and then you have to ask questions within those questions, and you keep backing up and widening out and getting more and more foundational in your investigation until finally a German fascist is trying to figure out why there are even ‘things.’”

“In 1746, a group of British booksellers asked Dr. Samuel Johnson to write a definitive dictionary of the English language. Over the next eight years, he did just that - he wrote an entire dictionary. Using only his own brain.

After he was done, a woman approached him, annoyed, and asked how he could have possibly defined a ‘pastern’ as ‘the knee of a horse’ when it is actually part of the foot. Johnson replied: ‘Ignorance, Madam. Pure ignorance!’”

“For the record, the hardest thing I’ve even attempted to read is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which, like, don’t even try.

Wittgenstein is largely thought of as a genius even by professional philosopher standards, and that seventy-five-page-long migraine is the only book he ever published in his lifetime.

Imagine being so brilliant that you only write one seventy-five-page book and the smartest people who ever lived are all like, ‘Man, that guy is a genius.’”

“That’s the crux of this counterargument to donating anonymously:

How much extra good has come from famous people - George Clooney, or Oprah, or LeBron James - publicly announcing their charitable giving? How much more attention has been brought to those causes because of the public nature of their gifts? Certainly: a lot.

And it doesn’t have to be famous people - if we give $1,000 to fight poverty in rural Arkansas and our friends and coworkers and family see what we’ve done, perhaps they’ll be inspired and decide to give themselves.

There’s gotta be some golden mean here between ‘total anonymity’ and ‘post a selfie while cutting a huge check, with hashtags #ImAwesome, #BetterThanYou, and #GenerousAF.’”

“The goal of charitable giving is to maximize the transfer of money from people who have it to people who need it. Often, the circumstances are dire - the money will be used for emergency disaster relief, to provide food, shelter, or medicine.

Requiring a purity of motivation seems like a limiting demand in a realm where we shouldn’t impose any limits. In other words: I don’t really care why you’re giving money, as long as you’re giving it.”

“Now, in terms of motivations to raise money for charity, ‘Vanquish my rivals and establish alpha male superiority in Hollywood’ is…not ideal.

That’s probably pretty low on Maimonides’s list, it certainly fails Kant’s test, and it’s verrrrrrry far away from a Buddhist state of mindfulness. But also, I think: Who cares?

Josh raised millions of dollars for a good cause, and if his ego was inflated as a byproduct, so be it. Charitable giving in the modern world is a numbers game - there are billions in need, and money is concentrated in the hands of very few.

And when we’re talking numbers games, utilitarianism has a massive leg up on every other ethical theory. If ignoring everything (within reason) except the results - the total money raised - gets the world to become a more equitable place, that’s fine with me.”

“Thich Nhat Hanh also wrote the passage that inspired the metaphor for death that Chidi gives Eleanor in the series finale of The Good Place.

He describes a person’s life as analogous to a wave forming - with specific dimensions and properties and qualities - and then returning to the ocean whence it came.

The water is the constant - the wave is just a different way for the water to be, for some amount of time, so when it ceases to be a wave and returns to the ocean, we should be happy, not sad.

It’s beautiful and peaceful and makes me cry a little every time I think about it.”

“I’m not quite as harsh regarding Geffen as Peter Singer would be. I wouldn’t say he’s morally required to sell his yacht and donate the money.

But I would say that as a man worth billions, he has a responsibility to do far more than the average person during a pandemic that has disrupted the lives of everyone on earth.

I’d also recommend he spend some of that money on a social media consultant, so that when he tries to post a picture of his $590 million yacht the same week a record number of Americans lose their jobs, there’d be someone to grab his phone and toss it into the ocean.”

“The most important part of becoming better people, I’ll say yet again, is that we care about whether what we do is good or bad, and therefore try to do the right thing.”

“So here we are, two hundred pages deep in this book, having learned all about deontology and utilitarianism and contractualism and virtue ethics and a bunch of other stuff, and along comes a morose Frenchman to tell us that there’s no God and people define themselves through action and we have to just make decisions with no guidance except ‘the essential anguish of our own existence’ or something.”

“Take Michael Jordan, who’s generally regarded as the greatest basketball player who ever lived. No one worked harder, at anything, than Jordan worked at basketball. His determination was unparalleled, his commitment to his craft was off the charts, his intensity and competitive drive are legendary.

Thinking of Jordan as a guy who didn’t earn everything he got - all the championships, the MVPs, the accolades - seems ludicrous. And yet.

Jordan is six foot six. He didn’t achieve that height because he, like, worked really hard at being tall. He was also born in America, to parents who supported and encouraged his passion. Those two facts make him lucky.

If you take Jordan’s exact personality, talent profile, and work ethic, and put them in the body of a five-foot-two goat herder in Bangladesh, he does not become Air Jordan, six-time NBA champion. He becomes the most intense and irritating Bangladeshi goat herder in history, who’s constantly yelling at the other goat herders for not being good enough at herding goats.”

“We need to remember one final thing: If we can even afford to be asking what we should do here, it probably means we’re pretty lucky people.

We have a car full of groceries - and thus a functioning car - and the luxury of posing philosophical questions, instead of having to think only about our health or safety or where we’re going to find our next meal.

If we determine that relative to others we’re lucky, which means we can afford to do a little extra, then we should do a little extra.”