“Other people - store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America - other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things.What a fucking rat race that is.”

“Seeing no better jobs on the horizon than flipping hamburgers with so much grease it would make Portugal, Italy, and Spain jealous, I decided to go back to school. It reminds me of something Zelda’s mom told her in November 2007: “Some people flip condos and make millions. Your boyfriend couldn’t even flip burgers and make minimum wage.”

“You are not in competition with anybody except yourself;plan to outdo your past not other people.”

“You know how Burger King often employs mentally handicapped people to wipe down tables at their restaurants? What those people are to Burger King, paralegals are to lawyers. It's the lowest job you can possibly get and still technically be considered in the legal profession”

“I can't see any point to hanging around a Burger King all day, no matter how much money you make. .... I'll tell you why. Your life would depend on the random desires of people who wanted a hamburger. So you can just forget about Burger King.”

“As a thinker, and most writers would consider themselves thinkers, your competition is not only the whole world, but it’s also the people of the past, and the people of the future. And the people of the future are the dangerous ones, because you’ll never know how good they are.
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