“How many hours of our youths—and adulthoods—were spent plugged in to various iterations of karaoke machines, Walkmans, and Game Boys? These things were more than the fads of a global consumer society. They had a strange ability to nourish our dreams as they entertained, to deliver and cultivate new fantasies in us.”
16 Apr 2024 at 7:32 AM
Pure Invention
Matt Alt
“But if you make your best effort just to continue your practice with your whole mind and body, without gaining ideas, then whatever you do will be true practice. Just to continue should be your purpose. When you do something, just to do it should be your purpose.”
16 Mar 2024 at 9:56 PM
Zen mind, beginner's mind
Shunryū Suzuki
“Everything is sales. This is usually framed as career advice—no matter what your role in a company is, your ultimate job is to help sales.
\\t\\t\\tBut it applies to so many things.
\\t\\t\\tEverything is sales also means that everyone is trying to craft an image of who they are. The image helps them sell themselves to others. Some are more aggressive than others, but everyone plays the image game, even if only subconsciously. Since they’re crafting the image, it’s not a complete view. There’s a filter. Skills are advertised, flaws are hidden.”
21 Jan 2024 at 9:14 pm
Same as Ever
Morgan Housel
“(Best story wins) … Author Bill Bryson is the same. His books fly off the shelves, which can drive the little-known academics who uncovered the things he writes about crazy. One of his books—The Body: A Guide for Occupants—is basically an anatomy textbook. It has no new information, no discoveries. But it’s so well written—he tells such a good story—that it became an instant New York Times bestseller and The Washington Post’s Book of the Year.”
2 Jan 2024 at 9:12 pm
Same as Ever
Morgan Housel
“the constant reminder that wealth and happiness is a two-part equation: what you have and what you expect/need. When you realize that each part is equally important, you see that the overwhelming attention we pay to getting more and the negligible attention we put on managing expectations makes little sense, especially because the expectations side can be so much more in your control.”
1 Jan 2024 at 8:17 pm
Same as Ever
Morgan Housel
“Helping these clients required a skill that came easily to me: writing the way I talked, instead of the way we were taught to write in school—and helping them write the way they talked, too. Most people have a problem breaking rules; it happens to be where I soar.”
19 Dec 2023 at 9:43 pm
Tough Titties
Laura Belgray
“Now that I’m on the right meds, I sort of get it. There is something fun about being at a new or old place with or without other people.”
30 Nov 2023 at 9:34 pm
Sure, I'll Join Your Cult
Maria Bamford;
“Birdseed” was slang for the popular press, the newspapers, broadcasts, and fiction manufactured for the urban working people.”
25 Nov 2023 at 8:47 pm
The Dispossessed
Ursula K. le Guin
“This leverages the first and second ways to get out of a scarcity loop. First, it takes the opportunity away. When we make a big change, new and more enticing opportunities can open up, and those come with their own set of unpredictable rewards. And that alters the second phase. These new rewards outweigh the short-term comfort of substance use.”
21 Nov 2023 at 9:14 pm
Scarcity Brain
Michael Easter
“Once we know something is pleasurable or rewarding, dopamine is primarily released when we’re pursuing and anticipating receiving that pleasurable thing, not when we’re actually receiving the pleasurable thing.”
19 Nov 2023 at 9:17 pm
Scarcity Brain
Michael Easter
“Always wait until the end of designing a process—after you have questioned all the requirements and deleted unnecessary parts—before you introduce automation”
12 Nov 2023 at 7:49 pm
Elon Musk
Walter Isaacson
“There are dozens of new topics on my current list, and that doesn’t discourage me — it excites me.Buy some new clothes and start emptying your head to make room for even more exploration. You should always have a list with getting to “know” topics on it.Quit protecting what you learned in the past and spend that energy on new things right now.”
25 Sep 2023 at 9:45 pm
The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth
David C. Baker
“We are not meeting our full obligations to our clients when we make recommendations that they find easy to ignore. The price we charge for such guidance should be enough that our clients feel compelled to act, lest they experience a profound sense of wasted resources. There must be the appropriate amount of pain associated with our pricing. This implies the need for our pricing to change as the size of the client changes. Larger organizations need to pay more to ensure their commitment.”
24 Sep 2023 at 9:35 pm
A Win Without Pitching Manifesto
Blair Enns
“This led him to develop what he called an “idiot index,” which calculated how much more costly a finished product was than the cost of its basic materials. If a product had a high idiot index, its cost could be reduced significantly by devising more efficient manufacturing techniques.”
24 Sep 2023 at 8:36 pm
Elon Musk
Walter Isaacson
“If we want to build deep expertise we must take pains to document how we work, to define how we will work in the future and to continuously refine and improve our approach.”
12 Sep 2023 at 9:48 pm
A Win Without Pitching Manifesto
Blair Enns
“When your choices turn you into someone who has to worry about money, then you are not rich”
20 Aug 2023 at 8:59 pm
Discipline Is Destiny
Ryan Holiday
“We are hired for our expertise and not our service. It is a mistake to believe that the service sector mantra of “The customer is always right” applies to us. Like any engagement of expertise, we often enter into ours with the client not truly knowing what he needs, let alone recognizing the route to a solution. For us to do our best work we need to leverage our outside perspective.”
6 Aug 2023 at 9:14 pm
A Win Without Pitching Manifesto
Blair Enns
“Expertise is the only valid basis for differentiating ourselves from the competition.”
6 Aug 2023 at 9:09 pm
A Win Without Pitching Manifesto
Blair Enns
“Under his leadership, the teams at Apple and Pixar transformed four very different industries: computing, telecommunications, music, and film. The engine driving these transÂformations was a remarkably consistent set of values that Steve held dear: Life is short; don’t waste it. Tell the truth. Technology should enhance human creativity. Process matters. Beauty matters. Details matter. The world we know is a human creation—and we can push it forward.”
26 Jul 2023 at 9:53 pm
Make Something Wonderful
Steve Jobs
“Why shouldn’t life generally be comfortable? Still, we must understand that the modern world is conspiring against us, working to degrade our ability to endure even the slightest difficulty. It spoils us”
20 Jul 2023 at 9:14 pm
Discipline Is Destiny
Ryan Holiday
“Life is not fair. Gifts are not handed out evenly. And the reality of this inequity is that those of us coming from a disadvantage have to be even more disciplined to have a chance. They have to work harder, they have less room for error.”
25 Jun 2023 at 9:34 pm
Discipline Is Destiny
Ryan Holiday
“When I finally went to Europe, at age 30, it was too late: I was already a tad too old and too bougie to stay in youth hostels and hang out with a bunch of 24-year-olds.”
19 Jun 2023 at 10:12 pm
Die with Zero
Bill Perkins
“Most people fail to realize that in life, it’s not how much money you make. It’s how much money you keep.”
18 Jun 2023 at 9:01 pm
Rich Dad Poor Dad
Robert T. Kiyosaki
“So cursing today is a status symbol, just as oligarchs in Moscow wear blue jeans at special events to signal their power. Even in banks, traders were shown to customers on tours of the firm as if they were animals in a zoo, and the sight of a trader cursing on a phone while in a shouting match with a broker was part of the scenery.”
10 Jun 2023 at 12:06 pm
Skin in the Game
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“Evidence of submission is displayed by the employee’s going through years depriving himself of his personal freedom for nine hours every day, his ritualistic and punctual arrival at an office, his denying himself his own schedule,”
10 Jun 2023 at 11:51 am
Skin in the Game
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“One is never a career academic without a reason.”
9 Jun 2023 at 10:07 am
Skin in the Game
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“Independence, to me, doesn’t mean you’ll stop working. It means you only do the work you like with people you like at the times you want for as long as you want.”
6 Jun 2023 at 9:00 am
The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness
Morgan Housel
“The biggest single point of failure with money is a sole reliance on a paycheck to fund short-term spending needs, with no savings to create a gap between what you think your expenses are and what they might be in the future.”
6 Jun 2023 at 8:35 am
The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness
Morgan Housel
“Anything that is huge, profitable, famous, or influential is the result of a tail event—an outlying one-in-thousands or millions event. And most of our attention goes to things that are huge, profitable, famous, or influential. When most of what we pay attention to is the result of a tail, it’s easy to underestimate how rare and powerful they are.”
5 Jun 2023 at 9:34 am
The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness
Morgan Housel
“But keeping money requires the opposite of taking risk. It requires humility, and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast. It requires frugality and an acceptance that at least some of what you’ve made is attributable to luck, so past success can’t be relied upon to repeat indefinitely.”
4 Jun 2023 at 8:24 pm
The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness
Morgan Housel
“The idea of having “enough” might look like conservatism, leaving opportunity and potential on the table.
I don’t think that’s right.
“Enough” is realizing that the opposite—an insatiable appetite for more—will push you to the point of regret.”
4 Jun 2023 at 8:09 pm
The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness
Morgan Housel
“Bill Gates went to one of the only high schools in the world that had a computer.”
4 Jun 2023 at 7:49 pm
The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness
Morgan Housel
“It was a thrill to express poorly and inelegantly my small and petty and unuseful ideas”
28 May 2023 at 10:07 pm
Really Good, Actually
Monica Heisey
“Keeping a journal seemed like a slower, somehow more tedious way to think about the things I had already bored myself with by overthinking. No.”
22 May 2023 at 9:34 pm
Really Good, Actually
Monica Heisey
“I worked from home and allowed myself to rest and tried almost aggressively to let the soft animal of my body love what it loved, which mostly at that point was potatoes.”
15 May 2023 at 9:18 pm
Really Good, Actually
Monica Heisey
“We laugh at people who still use Windows 95, yet we still cling to opinions that we formed in 1995.”
3 May 2023 at 9:28 pm
Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know
Adam Grant
“[At Apple] we’re just getting simpler and simpler and simpler. Very, very simple. Simple.”
30 Apr 2023 at 10:02 pm
Make Something Wonderful
Steve Jobs
https://books.apple.com/gb/book/make-something-wonderful/id6446905902
“most of us didn’t make the clothes we’re wearing, and we didn’t cook or grow the food that we eat, and we’re speaking a language that was developed by other people, and we use a mathematics that was developed by other people. We are constantly taking.
And the ability to put something back into the pool of huÂman experience is extremely neat.”
30 Apr 2023 at 9:50 pm
Make Something Wonderful
Steve Jobs
https://books.apple.com/gb/book/make-something-wonderful/id6446905902
“One of the reasons I’m here is because I need your help. If you’ve looked at computers, they look like garbage. All the great product designers are off designing automobiles or buildings. But hardly any of them are designing computers.”
30 Apr 2023 at 9:44 pm
Make Something Wonderful
Steve Jobs
https://books.apple.com/gb/book/make-something-wonderful/id6446905902
“This strategy picks specifically on social media because among the different network tools that can claim your time and attention, these services, if used without limit, can be particularly devastating to your quest to work deeper. They offer personalized information arriving on an unpredictable intermittent schedule—making them massively addictive and therefore capable of severely damaging your attempts to schedule and succeed with any act of concentration.”
23 Apr 2023 at 9:25 pm
Deep Work
Cal Newport
“people will usually respect your right to become inaccessible if these periods are well defined and well advertised, and outside these stretches, you’re once again easy to find.”
19 Apr 2023 at 9:11 pm
Deep Work
Cal Newport
“To ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable. It’s better to hire three smart subordinates to think deeply about the problem and then bring their solutions to the executive for a final decision.”
18 Apr 2023 at 9:53 pm
Deep Work
Cal Newport
“Even if the talent advantage of the best is small compared to the next rung down on the skill ladder, the superstars still win the bulk of the market.”
17 Apr 2023 at 11:49 pm
Deep Work
Cal Newport
“the lack of distraction in my life tones down that background hum of nervous mental energy that seems to increasingly pervade people’s daily lives.”
17 Apr 2023 at 11:41 pm
Deep Work
Cal Newport
“Peter Higgs, a theoretical physicist who performs his work in such disconnected isolation that journalists couldn’t find him after it was announced he had won the Nobel Prize.”
17 Apr 2023 at 10:35 pm
Deep Work
Cal Newport