It’s really hard to make something beautiful, but it’s really worthwhile. Make one thing in your life beautiful, then you’ve established a relationship with beauty. And then you can start to expand that relationship with beauty out into the world and into other elements of your life such as building systems.

People are terrified of this, and they are terrified of color. They paint their walls beige. People are terrified of art. They buy some mass-produced things because they don’t want people laughing at them due to their lack of taste. You have to develop a sense of what is beautiful and you will stumble, which is natural as you learn.

You have to steer clear of the con artists and the frauds because it’s difficult to distinguish between the real thing and the frauds, but it is unbelievably worthwhile. Artistic types are also entrepreneurial types, they are the same types of personality, so it’s worthwhile to make a practical and economical case for this kind of thing.

If you can read, think and communicate, you will never fail. There is nothing we can do that is more useful than to teach people to articulate and communicate because then they can:
– Identify problems
– They can formulate solutions
– They can negotiate to a consensus
– They can negotiate on their behalf and on behalf of others
– There is no downside to it, except for the responsibility that comes with it.

Man does not live by bread alone. We live by beauty, we live by literature, we live by art, literally, not metaphorically. We can’t live without it because life is too dismal and tragic in the absence of beauty.

There is no way around it; we have to be fit and we love it. Except for functional workouts and boxing classes at the office, we’ve dedicated a space to shower and change after a run or bike ride into or out of the office.

We measure everyone’s resting heart rate, blood pressure, and blood oxygen levels on a monthly basis and allow each individual to improve their stats over time.

Due to this focus on our health, we rarely see sick leave or serious health issues and all of this helps us to build stable, emotionally healthy, and physically fit individuals

“The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep,” wrote EM Cioran, the patron saint of night owls whose weary visage kept floating into my mind as I read Why We Sleep. Walker’s worldview may not be as bleak as that of the Romanian essayist, but he does paint an intolerably grim portrait of a society in which an increasingly large proportion of us is getting a decreasing amount of sleep. What he calls our “cultural sleep norms” are under assault on multiple fronts:

Midnight is no longer ‘mid night’. For many of us, midnight is usually the time when we consider checking our email one last time – and we know what often happens in the protracted thereafter. Compounding the problem, we do not then sleep any longer into the morning hours to accommodate these later sleep-onset times. We cannot. Our circadian biology, and the insatiable early-morning demands of a post-industrial way of life, denies us the sleep we vitally need.

Basically, if you’re regularly clocking in at under seven hours a night, you’re doing yourself a disservice as grave as that of regular smoking or drinking to excess. And as someone who tends to chalk up six hours as a solid victory, and who feels – or at least felt before reading this book – that he can get by on five, I was especially disturbed by the revelation that sleep-deprived people often don’t recognise themselves as such.

That low-level exhaustion becomes their accepted norm or baseline. Individuals fail to recognise how their perennial state of sleep deficiency has come to compromise their mental aptitude and physical vitality, including the slow accumulation of ill health. A link between the former and the latter is rarely made in their mind.

It’s no secret that the food we eat has a direct impact on our overall well-being, both physically and mentally. A balanced diet that includes a variety of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, and healthy fats can help reduce the risk of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and certain types of cancer.

Additionally, a nutritious diet can also improve our mood, cognitive function, and mental health. But this is not a diet, it is a lifestyle and a state of mind. By making smart choices about what we eat, we nourish our bodies and minds, and strive to live happier, healthier lives