Here’s how to live: Intertwine with the world.

You can’t see your own culture while you’re inside of it. Once you get out and look back, you can see which parts of your personality actually come from your environment.

Here’s how to live: Master something.

Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.

Here’s how to live: Do whatever you want now.

People think they’ll do something later. They think they’ll have more time in the future than they do today, as if later is a magical time when everything will happen.

Here’s how to live: Value only what has endured.

The modern life is shallow and distracted. The timeless life is deep and focused.

Live in the past. Watch the greatest movies of all time. Read the classics. Listen to the legends. These things have lasted because they work so well. Time is the best filter.

Study the past — understand Chesterton’s fence — before thinking you know better.

Find happiness and perspective in nature. It reminds you that you don’t need anything the modern world is pushing. Everything they’re shouting about will soon be gone.

Here’s how to live: Learn.

Learn time-tested skills that were just as useful in your grandparents’ time as they are today. Speaking, writing, gardening, accounting, persuasion, and survival skills. These skills have hardly changed in a century. They’re unlikely to change in your lifetime.

If you’re not embarrassed by what you thought last year, you need to learn more and faster. When you’re really learning, you’ll feel stupid and vulnerable — like a hermit crab between shells.

To communicate clearly, you have to think clearly. Writing is refined thinking. Public speaking tests your writing on a real audience. Great public speaking comes from great private thinking.

Here’s how to live: Prepare for the worst.

Luxury is the enemy of happiness because you adapt to its comforts. Luxury makes you soft, weak, and harder to satisfy.

Here’s how to live: for others.

Psychologists, philosophers, and religions all agree on one thing. Helping others is a better path to happiness than helping only yourself.

After age twenty, you need deliberate effort to make new friends. Friends are made, not found. If you sincerely appreciate someone, and really engage with their interests, you will become friends.

Whenever you’re thinking something nice about someone, tell them. A sincere compliment can put a lot of fuel in someone’s tank. People don’t hear enough compliments.

Here’s how to live: Get rich.

Speculating is not investing. Never speculate. Never predict. Be humble, not arrogant. Never think for one second that you know the future. Remind yourself over and over again that nobody knows the future. Ignore anyone that says they do.

Here’s how to live: Love.

We think walls protect us from enemies, but walls are what create enemies in the first place.

Here’s how to live: Create.

It’s better to create something bad than nothing at all. You can improve something bad. You can’t improve nothing.

Here’s how to live: Balance everything.

A schedule makes you act according to the goals of your highest self, not your passing mood.

Schedule quality time with dear friends. Schedule preventative health checkups. Schedule focused time to learn. Schedule each aspect of your life, ignoring none. List what makes you happy and fulfilled, then schedule those things into your year.