Other highlights (36)
“I start companies from scratch, assemble teams capable of extraordinary success, and turn abstract ideas into billions of dollars of tangible value.”
“When I create a company, it starts in my mind. I want to have a very clear mental picture of what the business will look like out of the gate, then a year later, five years later, a decade later. Next, I gather a group of supersmart people to be the founding management team.”
“Here’s the crucial thing: You’ve got to think extraordinarily big from day one. Nobody achieves massive success by thinking small and hoping to become big.”
“If you do want to make a lot of money, you have to move fast. Be decisive, confident, courageous. You’re not going to make all the right moves. Chances are, you’ll make some dumb decisions—maybe a few dozen swings and misses out of thousands of decisions over time. As long as they aren’t fatal mistakes that derail the whole business plan, you can afford a misstep here and there. And yes, taking appropriate risks is part of the gig. If you won’t accept some risk, you won’t achieve much.”
“I’m constantly on the hunt for opportunities with a high probability of success—a massive upside and a manageable downside.”
“A lot of it comes down to striving for clarity and reducing my own bias. I can look at a situation and know where I went wrong and where I got it right. I can see the idiosyncrasies—even the eccentricities—that enable my team’s success. And I’m comfortable with a little bit of anxiety, even fear, when facing a decision that has huge consequences because I believe that’s a healthy trait in a leader.”
“A human being is part of a whole, called by us “universe”—a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest. . . . Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion . . . —Albert Einstein, on the optical delusion of consciousness”
“Keeping your head in a good place is crucial for business success.”
““Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom” and “Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.””
“Arrogance is the enemy in both business and life.”
“Mental synthesis is how we imagine what doesn’t exist. Then we build it.”
“TM is a process of thinking a thought in an increasingly abstract way, until you go beyond the thought and experience a state of unbounded awareness. One metaphor that’s sometimes used is the ocean, where all evident activity is near the surface—waves, fish, boats, birds—and the more you sink down into the depths, the more boundless and abstract it becomes. In those early days, meditation felt to me like entering a vast space that was both calming and exhilarating at the same time. I was hooked. It wasn’t just about the relaxation; I was discovering a deeper, subtler state of awareness that was beyond everyday thought yet profoundly practical for daily life. Maharishi had described it as experiencing bliss within yourself, and for me, it delivered exactly that: a sense of ease that made everything feel more manageable.”
“Maharishi just laughed. “We’re doing research into consciousness as a field of all possibilities,” he told me. “If it’s natural and blissful, Brad, go for it.” Those words freed me to explore even more deeply, blending meditation with other schools of thought, including Milton H. Erickson’s self-hypnosis, Richard Bandler’s Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Paramahansa Yogananda’s Kriya Yoga, and the teachings of Thích Nhất Hạnh, the father of mindfulness.”
“There are some steps I go through to prepare for meditation—again, nothing rigid or prescribed. I go with what feels natural to me in the moment. These days, I typically start with yoga. The yoga poses don’t take long, maybe six or seven minutes in total. I hold each position for 10 to 30 seconds and emphasize the positions where my head is lower than my waist so blood flows to my brain.”
“Then, I often do some Qigong techniques, which combine breathing with posture and the visualization of time, space, feelings, or thoughts. This utilizes many different parts of the brain. One Qigong exercise I especially enjoy is called raising the qi (the life force). I slowly, deeply inhale and exhale while holding my hands in front of my navel and moving them upward while I’m inhaling and downward while I’m exhaling. I move them up a little higher with each new inhalation. This is calming, and at the same time, it improves posture and mind–body connection. Raising the qi gives me a warm feeling of being immersed in all the love in the entirety of existence, putting me into a blissful frame of mind to start the day.”
“While Qigong-inspired visualizations expand consciousness outward, I also want to turn my focus inward before I meditate. For this, I use techniques I adapted from hypno-therapy to deepen the connection between my mind and body. I’ll do a technique, based on a Qigong practice, where I open my hands outward, close my eyes, and think, I am in the universe. As I do this, I’m picturing the entire observable universe—all 546,000 billion trillion miles of it. I let myself become a mind without a body, floating in a vast, mostly empty space. It’s a very liberating feeling. Then I’ll bring my arms inward, cupping them as if I’m holding a globe or egg in front of me, and think, And the universe is in me. I picture Hiranyagarbha, the Hindu golden egg of the universe, between my hands. I lift that imaginary egg to my mouth and, visualizing the universe being placed in my mouth, I swallow it, repeating silently, The universe is in me. Sometimes I’ll take it further. After I swallow the universe, I’ll think, I love the universe and feel love pouring out of me, filling every speck of the cosmos. Then I’ll think, And the universe loves me, as my arms come in, almost like a self-hug. I imagine this is how a baby might feel wrapped in a mother’s hug but multiplied by a million. If I want to deepen the experience, I envision not just…”
“The next step in my non-routine routine is something I learned when I studied under a brilliant hypnotherapist named Ernie Rossi. I would visit Ernie and his wife at their home in California for three days at a time, once or twice a year. This went on for a few years. During most of those visits, Ernie put me into a guided hypnotic trance state that’s so radically different from being awake that it’s hard to describe. The best way I can put it is a kind of blend between dreaming, fantasizing, watching a brightly colored cartoon, remembering long-forgotten memories, and reliving things that took place a long, long time ago. At the same time, it felt contemporaneous, not in the past. I was discovering all kinds of new interactions between the senses—smelling sights,…”
“Having great leadership talent on board is a huge milestone. I tell them, “Here’s my vision” and challenge everyone to poke holes in the plan and suggest ways to improve it. I listen carefully and gather lots of perspectives; then I retreat into solitude to reflect, visualize, and strategize.”
“Try it now: Stare at your hands as if you’ve never seen them before. This puts most people into a unique state of mental relaxation, creativity, and focus. You might see colors or creases in your hands you’ve never noticed before. When I use the technique myself, I stare at my hands as I inhale, and I picture my breath coming in through my right hand. When I breathe out, my breath is passing through my left hand. I don’t need to do this for long to get into an unbounded state of awareness—maybe four or five breaths in and out. It’s both calming and energizing. And I never know what will emerge as I breathe through my palms. Sometimes it’s the universe, multiverse, or all the love they contain. Sometimes I’m breathing in the image of someone I love through my right hand and breathing out something toxic through my left hand.”
“This is often the moment when gratitude kicks in. I breathe in things I’m grateful for in my life through my right hand and breathe out negativity through the left. Then I sit without back support, with my spine very straight, as if there’s a string pulling my head up to the ceiling, and do what’s called pranayama, an Indian form of breath control. Prana is the Sanskrit counterpart to the Chinese word qi. As I do several minutes of slow, deep breathing, I’m picturing warmth, light, and energy coming in through the base of my spine, up my spinal cord, and out the top of my head.”
“Your best ideas won’t come from thinking harder, but from thinking in different ways.”
“Each of us can actively create numinous experiences. Breathing in and out isn’t inherently numinous, but breathing love into the universe can be. A musical chord alone is not numinous, but an inspiring series of notes and chords can be. I want to become that music and live a life filled with numinous experiences. Numinosity is a high priority for me as a person, an entrepreneur, and a CEO because it enhances the creativity that inspires success. Meditation is my main method for achieving that.”
“Playing with Time, Space, and Love A lot of what I do with meditation these days has to do with changing perspectives, such as looking at space from a different perspective than the way we humans think about space from our little piece of Earth, or even through the lens of NASA’s most powerful eye, the James Webb Space Telescope. I use meditation to expand my mind from the Earth to our Sun, through the Solar System, across the Galaxy, and outward through the universe and beyond—visualizing my mind with no body, floating in cosmic space.”
“You can play with this technique in all kinds of ways during meditation. For example, I may expand my awareness like an accordion, stretching across galaxies, bathing in the exhilarating multiverse, then contracting to compress into subatomic space. I’ll visualize going inside a molecule, then into an atom, into its nucleus, and finally, deep inside, to the gluons, the force carriers. I’ll do the same thing with time, picturing my life over the last few decades, then going back centuries and millennia. I’ll keep going back 13.8 billion years to the Big Bang, sometimes earlier. And I can switch it up again, coming all the way forward, picturing the world going on and on into the future.”
“Every great company starts as an audacious idea that someone dared to take seriously.”
“When that happens, I use one or more of the five techniques in my return-to-center tool-box. They are Albert Ellis’s rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT), Aaron Beck’s cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), Marsha Linehan’s dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), Martin Seligman’s positive psychology, and mindfulness.”
“An Imperfect 13.8 Billion Years The history of the cosmos is filled with chaos, imbalances, and extinction events—things that went bump in the night, again and again. But those bumps didn’t break the universe; they built it. Thirteen billion years ago, matter and antimatter, in theory, should have canceled each other out. Instead, from the tiniest imbalance—just a sliver more matter than antimatter—the scaffolding of the universe was born. It was disruption, not harmony, that fueled the creation of matter and evolution. Nearly everything we know or infer about the development of the universe after the Big Bang points to asymmetry, anomaly, and error. Atoms needed instability to bond into molecules, which needed asymmetry to give rise to life. And life, through countless random mutations, gave rise to human brains that now ponder the imperfections that made them possible. The rest is a stunning history of beautiful mistakes. If perfection had ever ruled at any point, you and I likely wouldn’t be here.”
“Success comes from persistence and the ability to act quickly, rather than from aiming for perfection.”
“When we recognize these inherited tendencies for what they are—outdated survival strategies—we give ourselves the power to step out of their grip. Evolution explains why anxiety and self-criticism show up so strongly, but it doesn’t dictate how we respond to external events today.”
“It’s inevitable that you’ll get knocked off-center. What matters is finding your way back.”
“Ellis would then ask the person to close their eyes and get in tune with that negative emotion. When he felt they were ready, he’d say “Okay, now make yourself half as upset as you just were.” He’d let them sit in silence for a minute or two and then ask, “Do you now feel roughly half as upset?” If the person said yes, he’d respond, “Okay, great. Now open your eyes,” followed by “Tell me what you told yourself in order to feel less upset by half.” The person would answer something like, “My boss is acting like a jerk, but so what? He’s under a lot of pressure, and I’m optimistic that once that passes, he’ll return to his pleasant self” or “Sure, I have an illness I wish I didn’t have, but it’s not fatal. I can live with it.” This was a brilliantly simple technique because Ellis was demonstrating that external events, in and of themselves, don’t make you upset; what makes you upset is what you tell yourself.”
“Successful people are humble. They know they’re not always right.”
“How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything—Yes, Anything!1 “No matter how badly you act, no matter how unfairly others treat you, no matter how crummy the conditions you live under are—you virtually always have the ability and the power to change your intense feelings of anxiety, despair, and hostility. Not only can you decrease them; you can annihilate and remove them.” “When you rigidly hold certain irrational beliefs—when you dogmatically command that you must do well, have to be approved by others, have got to have people treat you fairly, and always ought to live with easy and enjoyable conditions—when you stoutly hold these irrational beliefs, you will tend to make yourself needlessly miserable and will probably defeat some of your most cherished goals.” “You largely (not completely) create and control your own disturbed thoughts and feelings, and therefore you have the power to radically change them.””
“I’m always ready to change my beliefs based on new information.”
“What I learned from CBT is that we’re all born with schemas—cognitive frameworks that shape how we interpret the world. Core beliefs are part of schemas; so are behaviors and emotions, which are often developed during childhood. These schemas act as prisms through which a person interacts with life. Anything that fits neatly into a schema’s structure passes through it and is accepted. Anything that contradicts the schema tends to get filtered out. Over time, this can lead to cognitive distortions in how a person thinks, especially when the schemas are rigid and overfiltering or negative to begin with.”
“Great mentors rewire how you see the world.”
