Hand-picked quotes about lifestyle from the best non-fiction books

Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase.

Weirdness is what bonds us to our colleagues. Weirdness is what sets us apart, gets us hired.

To have an uncommon lifestyle, you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decisions, both for yourself and for others.

Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W’s you control in your life: What you do, When you do it, Where you do it, and with Whom you do it. I call this the “freedom multiplier.”

The world has agreed to shuffle papers between 9:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M., and since you’re trapped in the office for that period of servitude, you are compelled to create activities to fill that time.

So first things first: cash flow and time. With these two currencies, all other things are possible. Without them, nothing is possible.

I am a big believer that if you have a very clear vision of where you want to go, then the rest of it is much easier.

In the strictest sense, you shouldn’t be trying to do more in each day, trying to fill every second with a work fidget of some type. It took me a long time to figure this out. I used to be very fond of the results-by-volume approach.

Don’t encourage people to chitchat and don’t let them chitchat. Get them to the point immediately.

Don’t wait until you need options to search for them. Take a sneak peek at the future now and it will make both action and being assertive easier.

Start thinking of income and expense in terms of monthly cash flow—dollars in and dollars out—instead of grand totals.

Tomorrow becomes never. No matter how small the task, take the first step now!

When you take a small retirement, two interesting things happen upon returning to the working world. First, you will get more interviews because you will stand out. Second, interviewers bored in their own jobs will spend the entire meeting asking how you did it!

Check e-mail twice per day, once at 12:00 noon or just prior to lunch, and again at 4:00 P.M. 12:00 P.M. and 4:00 P.M. are times that ensure you will have the most responses from previously sent e-mail.

Your inbox is a to-do list to which anyone in the world can add an action item.

Learn to slow down. Get lost intentionally. Observe how you judge both yourself and those around you. Chances are that it’s been a while.

The question you should be asking isn’t, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”

Though you can upgrade your brain domestically, traveling and relocating provides unique conditions that make progress much faster.

One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.

Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.

Never automate something that can be eliminated.

Too much free time is no more than fertilizer for self-doubt and assorted mental tail-chasing.

Being financially rich and having the ability to live like a millionaire are fundamentally two very different things.

As long as you have a supply of it, heroin will never let you down; if it’s there, it will always make you happy. But if you expect another person to make you happy, you’ll be endlessly disappointed.

If you start off aiming to sell a product to dog- or car-lovers, stop. It’s expensive to advertise to such a broad market, and you are competing with too many products and too much free information. If you focus on how to train German shepherds or a restoration product for antique Fords, on the other hand, the market and competition shrink, making it less expensive to reach your customers and easier to charge premium pricing.

Smart people should make things.

For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks.

Everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people that were no smarter than you.

Fun things happen when you earn dollars, live on pesos, and compensate in rupees, but that’s just the beginning.

If you want to become richer, it is important to continually upgrade your environment. This does not mean running out and buying a big house, flashy cars, new clothes, and getting into piles of bad debt. What I mean is to consciously and intelligently challenge yourself to improve your standard of living by increasing your financial intelligence.

If you can free your time and location, your money is automatically worth 3–10 times as much.

In the experience of those I’ve interviewed, it takes two to three months just to unplug from obsolete routines and become aware of just how much we distract ourselves with constant motion.

Make no mistake, maximum income from minimal necessary effort (including minimum number of customers) is the primary goal.

Lifestyle Design is not interested in creating an excess of idle time, which is poisonous, but the positive use of free time.

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.

“If only I had more money” is the easiest way to postpone the intense self-examination and decision-making necessary to create a life of enjoyment—now and not later.

Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.

Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.

People can dislike you—and you often sell more by offending some—but they should never misunderstand you.

If tolerating a punishing work environment for years at a time is a prerequisite for promotion in your field, could it be that you’re in a game not worth winning?

Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness.

Learning to replace the perception of time famine with appreciation of time abundance is like going from triple espressos to decaf.

The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up all the pins either.

Subtracting the bad does not create the good. It leaves a vacuum. Decreasing income-driven work isn’t the end goal. Living more—and becoming more—is.

If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.

Rather than seeking to see the world through photo ops between foreign-but-familiar hotels, we aim to experience it at a speed that lets it change us.

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.

Our goal is simple: to create an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time.

We tend to judge wealth by what we see, because that’s the information we have in front of us. We can’t see people’s bank accounts or brokerage statements. So we rely on outward appearances to gauge financial success. Cars. Homes. Instagram photos.

If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.

If more information was the answer, then we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs.