No. 632 – June 8, 2025
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Tiny Thoughts
Motivation has perfect attendance. It always shows up after you do.
Every choice is a brushstroke.
No single stroke creates a masterpiece, but eventually the portrait emerges.
Most people are too loyal to their distractions to ever meet their destiny.
The courage isn’t in taking on more, it’s in cutting off everything that doesn’t feed your goal.
Focus requires subtraction.
Insights
American psychologist Helen Schucman on the silence that speaks:
“In quietness are all things answered.”
Historian Edward Gibbon on the duality of originality:
“Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.”
Steve Jobs on why thinking without doing is incomplete:
“My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person. And if we really go back and we examine, you know, did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years out in the future what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it? Of course not. Leonardo was the artist, but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. He knew about pigments, knew about human anatomy. And combining all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, was what resulted in the exceptional result. And there is no difference in our industry. The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.”
The Knowledge Project [Outliers]
Most business leaders panic in a crisis. Harvey Firestone thrived.
When a brutal recession hit, he didn’t flinch. “The situation did not frighten me. It put new life into me.” His team was falling apart, but he saw opportunity where others saw disaster. He cut prices aggressively, jumped into sales himself, and came out the other side with a company that was stronger than before.
This episode is different. I built it around Harvey Firestone’s autobiography, Men and Rubber, which I’ve probably given away more than any other book. Written in 1926, it shocks everyone who reads it with how much practical wisdom gets packed into those pages. And how current it still feels a century later.
You’ll discover the greatest aid to judgment that exists, why obsessing over inputs beats chasing results, and how one man bounced back to build an empire that thrives today.
+ Listen and Learn on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Web | Transcript
+ Lessons I learned researching this episode
+ Go Deeper: Members can find all 69 of my highlights from Men and Rubber in the repository.
Thanks for reading,
— Shane Parrish
P.S. An incredible 211-shot rally in badminton.