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Avoiding Problems

October 31, 2021

Welcome to Sunday Brain Food: a weekly newsletter full of timeless ideas and insights for life and business.

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FS

“I don’t want to be a great-problem-solver. I want to avoid problems – prevent them from happening and doing right from the beginning.”

— Peter Bevelin on Seeking Wisdom, Mental Models, Learning, and a Lot More

Explore Your Curiosity

“As a general rule, crises leave an unpredictable mark on history. It didn’t seem obvious that the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 would lead to a revolution in architecture, and yet, it without a doubt contributed directly to the invention of the skyscraper in Chicago.”

— Accelerating

“Merchants Parcel considered painting their cars and vans bright yellow to attract attention or even painting them different colors to make people think the company was larger than it was. But Charlie warned that they should not try to show up their retail customers, who were proud of their brightly decorated delivery vehicles. He had studied the more subtle Pullman brown, the color used on railroad sleeping cars to minimize signs of dust and dirt. Thus the partners decided to go with brown—only slightly modified in today’s UPS brown.”

— The History of UPS

Insight

“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”

— Raymond joseph teller

Tiny Thought

Ideas are cheap. Execution is expensive. The ability to execute separates people, not the ability to come up with ideas.

Et Cetera

  • The nature of desire.
  • The gasoline-powered leaf blower pollutes more than a car?
  • How do deal with failure.

P.S Photos of the year.

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