September 15, 2016
In a world of boundless abundance, the only thing standing between us and fulfillment of our dreams is self-imposed friction, a poison that saps our willingness to step out of what feels comfortable. location 134
We define hustle as: Decisive movement toward a goal, however indirect, by which the motion itself manufactures luck, surfaces hidden opportunities, and charges our lives with more money, meaning, and momentum. location 151
Hustle is how we use our idiosyncrasies to find our unique means and our own personal successes. Discovering our own way, not blindly aping the success of others, is the truest way forward. location 158
Hustle is the most important tool of the New American Dream, in which we reassert power and control over the system by owning our dreams. location 159
The work we choose to do reflects who we are. location 297
The age-old tropes for how to live are just models for complacency and conformity: Sit at your school desk, do your work, get good grades, get a car, get hitched, string together some decent jobs, purchase a home and have 2.2 kids, and in 40 years you can retire, idle, and die. Gotcha! location 342
Even amid the most extreme situations, when we’re overcome by fear and self-doubt, we must pursue an upside path. When not under dire Communism or threat of life in prison, the Hustle Generation discovers power in doing. We must trust that the reward is worth the risk and find the courage to put ourselves in motion. location 438
We owe it to ourselves to steal back control of our lives from a broken system. location 440
Owning Your Dreams Gives You Unlimited Upside location 443
Choose for Yourself or Others Will Choose for You location 458
Dream. Every day, millions of us wake up and decide between McDonald’s or Dunkin’ Donuts, The Real Housewives of Wherever or Keeping Up with the Kardashians. These “choices” provide us with the illusion of free will, the sense that we have a modicum of control over our lives. But these are bread-and-circus distractions. They satiate our need for immediate comfort, but they’re banal in the bigger scheme of things; at best, they’re temporary distractions from the real goal of owning our dreams. When it comes to the big choices in life, the really BIG ones—a career we find stifling or one that’s fulfilling, a relationship we find suffocating or one that allows us to grow—too many of us choose not to choose. We location 460
Renting our dreams means taking our current set of choices as givens, playing within the system, and never stopping to think about what might be genuinely best for ourselves. location 467
Owning your dreams feels different, perhaps even strange. location 471
Every moment you don’t make a stand against the landlords of society, you’re losing ground. location 483
Own your dreams. If you refuse to, you become a tenant in someone else’s dream. location 497
Too much dreaming leads to too little doing. location 509
leads us down the path of self-sabotage, because avoiding failure is not a goal that we can actually achieve. It’s an illusion. location 556
Avoiding failure becomes a permanent state of paranoia that leads to paralysis that dramatically increases your hidden-risk profile. location 557
the goal is not to avoid risk and failure altogether, the goal is to achieve success by taking bite-size risks. location 562
A 2006 Cornell University study estimated that in the 2 years following 9/11, an additional 2,302 people died from road accidents that they wouldn’t have encountered had they chosen to fly. location 584
Addictions can mask other needs, like maybe we might consider other ways to generate a burst of energy or clarity in the morning. location 633
Hustling is about shaking things up, letting go of the old patterns that suck the life out of us, and beginning anew. location 634
The Mediocrity of Meh tricks us into thinking that this is how it was meant to be. location 661
innate talent isn’t what separates the best from the pretty good—rather it’s simple persistence and dedication to practice. location 693
“Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” location 714
Success = hustle × luck × your unique talents location 721
negative dreaming about who we wish we were that makes for one of the most unrecoverable and regretful of hidden risks: that we don’t ever discover and see and make use of our real talents. location 724
When others doubt your abilities to deliver, overconfidence can go a long way in assuaging their fears. location 745
human nature also inclines us to let ourselves be judged harshly by people who have no business weighing in on our dreams. location 753
All too frequently, when we self-judge, we unfairly interrogate our talents in front of a kangaroo court whose goal is not justice or understanding but humiliation, fear, and punishment. location 759
You’re Not a Cockroach: Specialization Is for Insects location 904
Most of us equate risk with danger—something to be avoided altogether. But think of risk like oxygen. It’s neither good nor bad. It’s essential and inescapable. location 937
Either too much or too little can harm you, but no matter, as a human, you’re already breathing oxygen and taking risks everyday just by being alive. It’s unavoidable. location 938
If you hold enough risk in your stock portfolio, you actually don’t bear any idiosyncratic risk. location 948
They buy more total risk to take on less downside risk. This means that, theoretically, the more risks you take in the market, the less risky investing actually is overall. location 951
You don’t hustle to be perfect. location 965
When it comes to our brains, small doses of pain pay us back in spades. location 1066
We actually need small amounts of pain to make gains to prevent our existing skills from atrophying, to grow our future skills and knowledge, and to anticipate and solve complex challenges. location 1070
Type 1: Random Luck. This is what many people call dumb luck, the kind that happens without any effort or influence on your part. location 1169
Type 2: Hustle Luck. This is the kind of luck that’s created by your momentum and motion. location 1174
Type 3: Hidden Luck. These are the camouflaged opportunities that silently tiptoe in and out of your life each and every day, unnoticed by the unlooking unlucky. This kind of luck can be summed up by the saying “Chance favors only the prepared mind.” location 1184
“Luck is where opportunity meets preparation.” location 1199
Type 4: Quirky Luck. This is the type of luck that seeks you out because of your inherent weirdness. location 1201
Charles Dickens combed his hair hundreds of times a day. location 1203
whether we hit a single or strike out during the next at bat—we should just concentrate on getting up to bat. location 1267
it doesn’t make much sense to let something as fleeting as a passion dictate something as important as your career. location 1364
What doesn’t appear to change all that much are your innate talents. The catch is, you need to do stuff—stuff that moves you—to really discover those talents. location 1366
subtle not seismic shifts are the key to reversing the Cycle of Suck. location 1372
Before you can hustle, you must learn to see differently. location 1439
one of the greatest traps you can find yourself in is, in Emerson’s words, maintaining a “foolish consistency” between your past self and your present self. location 1498
Habits create identities, identities don’t create habits. location 1500
“Think for the life you want, not the life you have.” location 1509
This, ladies and gentlemen, is obliquity: the principle that the fastest, clearest, and most legible path isn’t always the one that will get you where you actually want to go. location 1554
Far too many of us set our sights on a dream and then grind it out trying to put together the resources, skills, network, and opportunities in a sequence prescribed by conventional wisdom that might make that dream possible. location 1557
the best way to achieve complex goals is through “oblique,” that is, indirect, means. location 1579
“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” location 1584
What’s so beautiful about obliquity is that we can tailor it to our own skills and needs. location 1642
As a hustler, it is critical that you always design your own way from point B to point A—creating a path optimized for yourself. location 1644
The Fourfold Path 1.Outside/Inside Hustle is getting a foot in the door. 2.Inside/Upside Hustle is proving your value and earning a promotion. 3.Inside/Outside Hustle is diving into entrepreneurial waters. 4.Outside/Upside Hustle is accelerating epic entrepreneurial and creative achievements. location 1719
Inside/Upside Hustle, a pathway best described as an ascent, one characterized by growth and new challenges within an organization. location 1766
DeJoria’s motto is “Success unshared is failure.” location 1974
The act of creating anything is, in effect, a rebellion against the universe. location 2165
Proof is your opportunity magnet: location 2180
The great irony is that POP is like the investment portfolio we mistakenly seek elsewhere. location 2198
Individually, none of my skills are anywhere near world-class. But combined, they create a powerful market force.” location 2276
A combination of skills smooths out your risk profile and makes you more resilient to changes in the labor market. location 2287
Adding skills to your Potential Piece isn’t about being the best—although that’s great, too—it’s about being smart enough to be good enough. location 2295
How do we develop our potential? There are four steps. 1.We recognize that neither others nor we ourselves are particularly good at recognizing our innate talents. 2.We do lots of different projects in dynamic and varied environments to force our natural talents to the surface. 3.We see through unseen job descriptions; we analyze and track our progress. 4.We surface our talents; we invest in our intrinsic strengths and proceed to ignore our weaknesses. location 2298
Binary thinking is childish and inaccurate, and it prevents us from seeing the unseen. location 2345
The Quest: A special hero is called for some reason to achieve a particular difficult goal. location 2402
Rags to Riches: Ordinary people achieve extraordinary things with a little bit of luck and timing. location 2406
Stranger in a Strange Land: Characters find themselves in a metaphoric “new land,” where their old ways of thinking and doing are no longer relevant. location 2408
Revenge Story: The protagonist aims to reestablish order and justice in an unfair world. location 2411
Love Story: Two people or things meet and fall in love. location 2412
Tertius gaudens is Latin for “the third who enjoys.” In the case of social networking, tertius gaudens (TG) enjoys exploiting structural holes in networks, typically by playing two parties against one another. location 2524
Everything begins and ends with your relationships. location 2539
Instead of trying to be the bee that pollinates a thousand flowers, why not be the object that attracts bees from near and far? location 2620
The focal point of any people development you do with respect to your network, honeypot, and community is to help, serve, contribute, and lead. location 2708
Proof is allowing others to experience your abilities of creation directly: location 3009
Trying to increase oxygen makes it more difficult to use oxygen, because hemoglobin needs carbon dioxide to oxygenate your tissues. location 3231