Imagine being so intrinsically compelled by what you do that it feels almost unfair to receive rewards and recognition for doing it.

Imagine being so compulsively engaged that you wish there were more hours in the day, and more days in a life, so that you could do even more of it.

Imagine the thing you are doing feels almost more important than life itself.

Imagine doing something you love so much that no amount of money could entice you to give up doing it.

Imagine having such an unquenchable enthusiasm for what you do that you might seem childlike to those around you.

Imagine that focusing the inner fire with great intensity does the exact opposite of causing burnout: It feeds the fire.

Imagine you are able to sustain the fire for days, weeks, months, years, decades, maybe even the rest of your entire life.

Luck is something that happens to you, largely out of your control.

Return on luck is what you make of your luck (good or bad) when it comes.

The question is not whether you will get luck, both good luck and bad, but what you do with the luck that you get.

“Is the tape on?” he said suddenly, his eyes still closed.

“Yes, yes,” I quickly said, pressing down the play and record buttons.

“What I’m doing now,” he continued, his eyes still closed, “is detaching myself from the experience.”

“Detaching yourself?”

“Yes. Detaching myself. And this is important—not just for someone like me, who is dying, but for someone like you, who is perfectly healthy. Learn to detach.”

He opened his eyes. He exhaled. “You know what the Buddhists say? Don’t cling to things, because everything is impermanent.”

“But wait,” I said. “Aren’t you always talking about experiencing life? All the good emotions, all the bad ones?”

“Yes.”

“Well, how can you do that if you’re detached?”

“Ah. You’re thinking, Mitch. But detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That’s how you are able to leave it.”

"As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on-in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.”

His voice was raspy, which usually meant he needec to stop for a while. I placed the plant back on the ledge and went to shut off the tape recorder. This is the last sentence Morrie got out before I did:

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”

Q: Where does first-principles thinking come from?

“When you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physicists discover counterintuitive new things, like quantum mechanics. They do that by thinking from ‘first principles’: building their reasoning from the ground up.”

“I would encourage people to use the mental tools of physics and apply them broadly in life. They are the best tools.”

“The normal way we conduct our lives is reasoning by analogy. That means we do something because it’s similar to something else, or what other people are doing.”

“When you think this way, you only get slight iterations. It’s easier to reason by analogy rather than from first principles, so that’s what we do most of the time.”

—

“You’re not going to create revolutionary cars or rockets in forty hours a week. It just won’t work. Colonizing Mars isn’t going to happen on forty hours a week.”

“Nobody ever changed the world on forty hours a week.”