Shaan Puri - 7 Semi-Controversial Rules For Success

I come from Silicon Valley—and in Silicon Valley, the cynics get to be right and the optimists get to be rich.

Hard work will let you win the game that you're playing, but it doesn't help you if you chose the wrong game.

If you do what you did at the beginning, there would never be an end.

The quote is this: 'At the end of the day, you got to feel some type of way, so why not feel unbeatable? Why not feel untouchable? Why not feel like the best to ever do it?'

If you want to feel differently, you can either think something different or do something different—and doing is just way easier.

Often, the fastest way to change how you feel is a rapid change in your physiology, which then will lead you to think a different thought, which then will lead you to feel a different way and have a different action. It's just a hack. It's just a complete hack that most smart people don't utilize.

I've learned how much of what we believe is just simply stories that we're told. This goes from everything—religion to school to being taught what you should be doing for your career and all this stuff. And so I've actively tried to just de-program myself and question the assumptions.

What you do is far more important than how hard you work on that thing.

Once you realize that it's all just stories anyways, pick the ones that serve you. Pick the ones that make you feel the way you want to feel, that get you to the outcomes you want to have and not the ones that make you feel like crap.

The ability to paint a picture that excites you, the ability to bring excitement to a situation, sounds cheap, sounds fun, sounds totally frivolous—until you're around a group of people that don't have it.

Minimal belief leads to minimal action, which leads to a minimal result, which only reinforces your shitty original belief.

Storytelling is massively underrated because stories are the natural transfer mechanism between individuals. So, if you want something to stick in somebody else's head, you really have two choices: Music or story.

Knowledge is knowing what you should do, and wisdom is doing what you should do. Like, to me, that is my definition of wisdom—it's knowledge applied; it's doing what you should do.

Our memories are generally quite bad. Our memories of our own thoughts are worse. Our memories of our thoughts when we were wrong, you kidding me? Like, there's no chance we have an accurate view of that.

Don't follow what most people do because most people don't have a result that you would want.

Every story must have, at its underpinning, an intention and obstacle. That's the first key principle of storytelling.