Towards the end of every episode of his wildly popular podcast, Tim Ferriss asks guests a series of questions he labels “Rapid-fire.” They’re basically the same set for every guest so each interviewee has a few questions they can prepare for. One of his standard questions is:

“If you could put one billboard anywhere, with anything on it, where would it be and what would it say?”

I loved Derek Sivers’s answer to this question (“It won’t make you happy,” and he would place his billboard outside of any big shopping mall or car dealership). It has since become my new mantra before making any discretionary purchase.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Ryan Holiday’s Ego Is the Enemy was my favorite book of 2016. I was looking back over some of the pages I bookmarked and highlighted earlier this morning when this passage from the chapter “Become A Student” caught my eye:

“Think about what [Kirk] Hammett could have done – what we might have done in his position were we to suddenly find ourselves a rock star, or soon-to-be-rock star in our chosen field. The temptation is to think: I’ve made it. I’ve arrived. They tossed the other guy because he’s not as good as I am. They chose me because I have what it takes. Had he done that, we’d probably have never heard of him or the band. There are, after all, plenty of forgotten metal groups from the 1980s.”