Most of us enter adult life with great ambitions for how we will start our own ventures, but the harshness of life wears us down. We settle into some job and slowly give in to the illusion that our bosses care about us and our future, that they spend time thinking of our welfare.
What matters in the Sun-tzu universe are not positions of strength and power, but situations in which you have options, full of potential force.
What happens if you stick at something long enough, and study it for so long, you have a different kind of intelligence. It's not an intellectual thing. It's almost like an animal intelligence. I call it our form of instinct, almost how a lion knows exactly where its prey is.
The great thing about America is that you can come from the worst circumstances and become something remarkable.
Smooth functioning of social life has always depended on the recognition of certain basic limits to behavior. We cannot simply say or do anything we wish, or offend people, without paying consequences - isolation, ostracism, etc.
To not follow your passion in life is a recipe for failure and unhappiness.
When I say 'Crush your enemy', I don't literally mean it.
The things that transfixed you as a child, that you found most exciting was not a passing fancy, but a message about what you're supposed to do.
To Sun-tzu and the ancient Chinese, doing something extraordinary had little effect without a setup of something ordinary. You had to mix the two - to fix your opponent's expectations with some banal, ordinary maneuver, a comfortable pattern that they would then expect you to follow.
Over the years I've met quite a few big rappers. Then it exploded with 50 Cent, and I did a book with him. It's always a strange meeting of two worlds, it's very exciting.
Always remember that your calmness under fire is your best defense in any argument or discussion.
I've always loved black culture; I don't know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music and early jazz, Sly and the Family Stone. I'm older - I'm in my early 50s - so you'll have to excuse me. That was always very exciting to me to connect to the culture on that level.
Even as a child, Muhammad Ali got perverse pleasure out of being different. He liked the attention it got him, but most of all he just liked being himself: odd and independent.
The Nihilistic Troll might pretend to be acting in the service of some cause or leader, but don't be fooled. The cause and their supposedly strong convictions are simply a way to justify and provide cover for their abusive behavior.
For as one star another far exceeds, So souls in heaven are placed by their deeds.
Though men determine, the gods doo dispose: and oft times many things fall out betweene the cup and the lip.
I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.
Plumbers can be masters, the guy who did my patio is a master, some people are masters at raising really great children.
I remember I was flying home to Los Angeles one day. I was talking to the woman next to me and the flight attendant tried to tell me I was sitting next to somebody that I should know. I didn't recognize her but it ended up being Beyonce's sister, Solange Knowles.
I had noticed that many of these successful people, historical and contemporary, shared certain common traits. They had a way of thinking that was exceptionally fluid; they could adapt to almost any circumstance; when confronted with problems, they could look at them from novel perspectives and solve them.
