Quotes
On getting lost during a creative effort
“People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things—in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. But it is also confusing. Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees. The details converge to obscure the whole, and that makes it difficult to move forward substantially in any one direction. The experience can be overwhelming.”
-Ed Catmull
#Quotes #Longquotes
”Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life."
–Steve Jobs
#Quotes
“We should always remember that beyond a certain point, hygiene factors such as money, status, compensation, and job security are much more a by-product of being happy with a job rather than the cause of it. Realizing this frees us to focus on the things that really matter.”
-Clayton Christensen
#Quotes
“It may seem like most organizations make rational choices based on deliberate decision making, but that’s not really how companies operate at all. Instead, firms are guided by long-held organizational habits, patterns that often emerge from thousands of employees’ independent decisions. And these habits have more profound impacts than anyone previously understood.”
-Charles Duhigg
#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
“Gray hair signals an enhanced ability to survive—conditional on having reached the gray hair stage, a man is likely to be more resistant to the vagaries of life.”
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#Quotes
“Negative feedback may be fun, but it is far less brave than endorsing something unproven and providing room for it to grow.”
-Ed Catmull
#Quotes
“Place a monkey in a cage, and it is the same as a pig, not because it isn’t clever and quick, but because it has no place to freely exercise its capabilities.”
-Huainanzi
#Quotes
We must acknowledge the random events that went our way
“We must acknowledge the random events that went our way, because acknowledging our good fortune—and not telling ourselves that everything we did was some stroke of genius—lets us make more realistic assessments and decisions. The existence of luck also reminds us that our activities are less repeatable. Since change is inevitable, the question is: Do you act to stop it and try to protect yourself from it, or do you become the master of change by accepting it and being open to it? My view, of course, is that working with change is what creativity is about.“
-Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
#Quotes #Longquotes
”Adopt this ruthless strategy toward the past: Burn all the books, and train yourself to react to circumstances as they happen.”
-Robert Greene
#Quotes
“Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today.“
-Peter Thiel
#Quotes
”We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”
-Ray Bradbury
#Quotes
“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
-Maya Angelou
#Quotes
“If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems.”
-Frank Wilczek
#Quotes
“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
“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