Jack Reacher's Rules

Drinking coffee increases short-term recall, and decreases the risk of gout in men over the age of forty.

After petroleum, coffee is the second most traded product in the world.

In North America and Europe the quantity of coffee drunk is about a third of that of tap water.

Finland consumes more coffee per head than any other country.

“I’m not scared of anybody … But certainly I preferred it when he was dead.”

Some things are worth being afraid of. And some things are not.

To be afraid of a survivable thing is irrational.

Focus on the job at hand.

“Reacher didn’t like crowds. He was a mild agoraphobic—from agora, the Greek word for a crowded public marketplace. Random crowds … organized crowds … riots and revolutions. A crowd is like the largest animal on earth—the heaviest, the hardest to control, the hardest to stop.”

A courageous guy is someone who feels the fear but conquers it.

“Why are you going back?”

“Because they told me not to.”

“Sometimes if you want to know if the stove is hot the only way to find out is to touch it.”

Try not to get trapped in the dark in close, tight spaces.

“He was a guy who survived most things, and he was a guy who was rarely afraid. But he had known since his early boyhood that he was terrified of being trapped in the dark in a space too small to turn his giant frame. All his damp childhood nightmares had been about being closed into tight spaces.”

Confront your enemies.

Take things exactly as they come, for exactly what they are.

Analyze your fear; it’s probably not rational.

Turn your fear into aggression.

“You see something scary, you should stand up and step toward it, not away from it.

Instinctively, reflexively, in a raging fury.”

THINGS YOU’LL NEVER HEAR REACHER SAY

My knees are trembling and my hands are shaking.

“I’m not afraid of death, death’s afraid of me.”

It’s a part of life, missing the dead.

“People live and then they die, and as long as they do both things properly, there’s nothing much to regret.”

Life’s a bitch and then you die.

Soldiers contemplate death. They live with it, they accept it. They expect it. But deep down they want it to be fair.

“In his head Reacher had always known he would die. Every human does. But in his heart he had never really imagined it.”

The meaning of life is that it ends.

Get into their minds, think like them.

Try birthdays, wedding anniversaries, house numbers; these are the passwords most people use.

Most people can’t remember all their passwords. If you look, you can find where they’ve written them down.

Try two-digit prime numbers, or the number whose square root is the sum of its digits.

Watch the position of their fingers when keying in a code so you can copy it.

The perfect PIN:

“I’d probably write out my birthday, month, day, year, and find the nearest prime number. Actually that would be a problem, because there would be two equally close, one exactly seven less and one exactly seven more. So I guess I’d use the square root instead, rounded to three decimal places. Ignore the decimal point; that would give me six numbers, all different.”

“I like dogs. If I lived anywhere I’d have three or four.”

Don’t leave dogs out overnight in a place where there are mountain lions. That’s a sure way of having no dogs in the morning.