Learning is like love; the more you try to make it happen, the less it happens. It only can happen as a side effect—as a byproduct of something else.

There's a deep fundamental paradox of writing, which is as soon as you know enough to say something interesting, you've completely forgotten what it's like to see that topic for the first time.

This is the paradox of book publishing: Publishers won't give you a book deal until you have a big following, a big email list, a great idea, and they know you can write well and sell books. But then, once you get there, you don't actually need the book publisher.

At certain critical moments in time, you can say something to somebody, and it can be such an off-handed comment, but it can totally change the course of somebody's life, raising their ambitions or unblocking them.

Knowledge can be transmitted, but vision combined with passion is singular. One person's vision and passion will never in all of human history be recombined.

Actual teaching is a very small percentage of what running an online education program is ... When teachers will try to transition into online education, it's where they will continually trip and fall. Online education is a marketing business; it's an entertainment business.

Both teaching and learning are more art than science, and we still treat it like a science.

If you have a goal and you just pay attention, you can sort of guide serendipity. You can push serendipity in certain directions by saying 'yes' to certain things.

One of the very basic assumptions of the Internet—maybe of the world—is that people are lazy. People are fundamentally lazy. They don't like to do anything hard. You always just have to... remove all friction, remove all barriers, remove all difficulties.

What's so great about the Internet is there are few barriers to entry. Anyone can start a website, anyone can open a Twitter account. You can create content so easily ... That's now created a demand for credibility signals.

Our conditioning is fit in, conform, obey, survive. The survival mentality is not compatible with a flourishing mindset. You can't be in survival mode and scarcity mode and, at the same time, flourish and take advantage of any kind of abundance.

Technology and the Internet have given us more degrees of freedom than we realize.

A bigger network is not necessarily a better network; it's the quality of the network, the quality of the people in that network that matter.

When things are difficult, you come together and you build these bonds through challenges in a way that you just can't do if things are all about ease.

I have a theory that the basic shift happening on the Internet right now is, for the first time, you can be your full self online.