“As the economy changes, and our capacity to achieve creative insights becomes more important than ever, the need for fast originality is even more urgent.“
-Charles Duhigg
#Quotes
“Instead of seeing philosophy as an end to which one aspires, see it as something one applies. Not occasionally, but over the course of a life—making incremental progress along the way. Sustained execution, not shapeless epiphanies.”
-Ryan Holiday
#Quotes
“Time is a river, a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already carried past us, and another follows and is gone.”
-Marcus Aurelius
#Quotes
“Every individual is unavoidably an investor, too. When you choose a career, you act on your belief that the kind of work you do will be valuable decades from now.”
-Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
#Quotes
Proprietary formats rot
I keep returning to these two recent articles that extoll the virtues of using simple, open, resilient file formats:
Markdown and the Slow Fade of the Formatting Fetish
A love letter to the CSV format
This is how simplicity scales within the ecosystem. Plain text persists. The more open and universal your format, the longer your message lives.
Our ideas deserve a fighting chance to outlive our software stack.
“If you want to kill creativity: Get five hours of sleep a night, fight traffic for two hours a day, and start each day with a piping hot thermos of a psychoactive drug. This is the unfortunate and inescapable reality of most Americans today.”
-David Kadavy
#Quotes
“The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
-C. S. Lewis
#Quotes
“Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one.”
-Heraclitus
#Quotes
“Leaders who stay ‘above the details’ may do well in stable times, but riding a wave of change requires an intimate feel for its origins and dynamics.”
-Richard Rumelt
#Quotes #Strategy
”Myth and map became coincident.”
-John Foley (linguistic anthropologist at the University of Missouri)
#Quotes
“If you don’t look back at yourself and wonder how you could be so wrong, then you haven’t put much effort into learning.”
From Expertise in the Age of Infinite Information by Curtis McHale
#Quotes
“Bureaucracies form when people’s jobs are tied strictly to rules and procedures rather than the effect those things are supposed to have on the world.”
-Scott Berkun
#Quotes
“Candor isn’t cruel. It does not destroy. On the contrary, any successful feedback system is built on empathy, on the idea that we are all in this together, that we understand your pain because we’ve experienced it ourselves.”
-Ed Catmull & Amy Wallace
#Quotes
Space to think
“Thing is, not only is the news all the bloody same, all about the same country and the same handful of main characters, and every news service reports all the incremental updates to the same bloody stories every sixty seconds: but that constant battering tide of zone-flooding shit compresses time and shrinks space to think.“
-Warren Ellis
#Quotes
I quote my father to people almost every day.
“I quote my father to people almost every day. Part of that is because if you dispense your own wisdom, others often dismiss it; if you offer wisdom from a third party, it seems less arrogant and more acceptable. Of course, when you have someone like my dad in your back pocket, you can’t help yourself. You quote him every chance you get.”
-Randy Pausch
#Quotes
“Some men have shrunk so far into dark corners that objects in bright daylight seem quite blurred to them.”
-Pomponius
#Quotes
“The moment you rigidly follow a plan set in your youth, you lock yourself into a position, and the times will ruthlessly pass you by.”
-Robert Greene
#Quotes
The young king from Gilgamesh is in my thoughts this morning:
“He will face a battle he knows not, he will ride a road he knows not.”
“I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen but as the years wasted on nothing ever did unless I caused it.”
-Charles Bukowski
#Quotes