No. 628 – May 11, 2025
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Tiny Thoughts
When your priorities are clear, every ‘no’ becomes a step toward what matters.
The person who finishes one race beats the person who starts a hundred and never finishes.
Life comes down to two things:
1. Knowing how to get what you want
2. Knowing what’s worth wanting
Insights
Steve Jobs on persistence powered by love:
“Often times, the ones that are successful loved what they did so they could persevere when it got really tough.”
Economist John Kenneth Galbraith on being open-minded:
“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”
Poet Sylvia Plath on the courage to close doors:
“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
The Knowledge Project [Outliers]
When Rose Blumkin fled Russia with just a few dollars in her purse, no one could have predicted she’d become a business legend. At 43, this immigrant who couldn’t speak English opened a basement furniture store in Omaha with a deceptively powerful formula: Sell cheap, tell the truth, never cheat.
Her Nebraska Furniture Mart store grew so formidable that Warren Buffett famously said he’d “rather wrestle grizzlies than compete with Mrs. B.”
This woman worked until 103, drove her cart around the sales floor well into her 90s, and had such sound business principles that Buffett himself couldn’t resist acquiring her company.
10 powerful lessons I learned researching her.
+ Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Web
+ 10 powerful lessons I learned researching her
The Repository
James Dyson on how our obsession with making big leaps holds us back:
“We always want to create something new out of nothing, and without research, and without long hard hours of effort. But there is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence – and in the end you make it look like a quantum leap …
While it is easy, of course, for me to celebrate my doggedness now and say that it is all you need to succeed, the truth is that it demoralised me terribly. I would crawl into the house every night covered in dust after a long day in the coach house, exhausted and depressed because that day’s cyclone had not worked. There were times when I thought it would never work, that I would keep on making cyclone after cyclone, never going forwards, never going backwards until I died.”
+ Members can read all 118 of my highlights from Dyson’s Autobiography in the repository.
+ Learn more about Dyson by listening to the Outliers episode on the web – Apple Podcasts – Spotify
Thanks for reading,
— Shane Parrish
P.S. The skill involved.