The world bursts at the seams with people ready to tell you you’re not good enough. On occasion some may be correct. But do not do their work for them. Seek any job; ask anyone out; pursue any goal. Don’t take it personally when they say “no” – they may not be smart enough to [...]

Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.
– Laurence J. Peter
The World’s Fastest Man in 1980, Allan Wells, would not have made the podium in the 100-metre races at the Beijing Olympics last year. In fact, his winning time of 10.25 would not have even qualified him for the [...]

Morten Lund is as entrepreneurial as it gets. He has invested in more than 80 companies around the world, most famously Skype.
The first couple minutes of this video, a speech Lund gave about entrepreneurship at Le Web ‘08 in Paris, are rough going as they get the presentation set up. But the remaining 10 minutes [...]

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.
– Aristotle
As Ayn Rand pointed out in her excellent book, Philosophy: Who Needs It, we are all philosophers.
We all have a certain attitude towards life, we all have different hypotheses regarding Flying Spaghetti Monsters, and we all have a standard by which [...]

A common recipe for personal growth is to start with what you have, identify what sucks about it, and try to make it suck less. Software developers call this “fixing bugs.”
“Fixing bugs” may seem like a natural metaphor for personal development, but in most cases this is actually an extremely limited, even harmful, perspective. [...]

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.
– Elizabeth Drew
In my recent article, How to Read a Book, I offered some ideas for extracting value from dead trees. I focussed primarily on non-fiction in that article. Now I want to offer you an approach for [...]

Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.
– Ezra Pound
I run a One Man University.
I’m the Dean, the Professor, and the entire student body of OMU. My major is the conscious pursuit of happiness; my minor, everything else. My [...]

The first step is to find out what you love–and don’t be practical about it. The second is to start doing what you love immediately, in any small way possible.
– Barbara Sher
There have been three key moments in my life so far that have, more than anything else, shaped who I am today. In every [...]

Update (Sep 4, 2010): Due to the overwhelming, and ongoing popularity of this post (over 22,000 comments and counting!), I’ve recently started working on a new tool to make tracking and sharing your progress quitting drinking a whole lot easier and more fun.

It’s called Quitfest. Please feel free to check it out!

There are [...]

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
– Isaac Asimov
Happiness is hard work. While personal development sometimes gets a bad rap, it’s nothing more, and nothing less, than the process of curiosity, self-education, and hard work, that gives you the knowledge and skills to make your life as juicy as you [...]