Q. What’s your concept of what it will mean to have lived your life well?

A. People always say you should live every day as though it's your last. I sort of have taken the opposite tack, where I think you should live every day as though it's going to go on forever. You should treat people like you're going to see them again in the future. You should start working on projects that may take a long time. And so I want to live every day as though it's going to go on forever.

From an interview with Peter Thiel on work.

Reminds me a bit of Bezos, who always thought that one advantage that Amazon had over competitors was the patience and endurance for a longer game. Think of the fable of the tortoise and the hare not as being about slow and steady wins the race but that if your competitor wants to run a mile, you should choose to run a marathon, and if they decide to run the marathon, you should make the race an ultra marathon. It helps, of course, if you control enough of the company that the stock market or Board can't shorten the distance on you (one of Twitter's chief challenges now is that they need to put some long-term plans in action, but the stock market may be tightening the leash). When I say distance, of course I largely mean time.

Thief often says not to over-rotate on status but instead on substance. Seems highly intertwined with a longer-term time orientation, perhaps it should be thought of largely as a supporting clause, status typically being short-lived and substance presumably being more durable.