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Quotes

The Iconic Think Different Apple Commercial Narrated by Steve Jobs

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… …

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Letting the World Do the Work for You

If you don’t see the world the way it is, you’ll think it works in a way that it doesn’t and make terrible mistakes. The key to getting what you want out of life is to identify how …

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Brené Brown: Your Critics Aren’t Always The Ones Who Count

Brené Brown, author of Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead with an excellent talk on how we should think about critics. I love that …

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“We get to think the world is progressing when it is only repeating itself.”

If we pay no attention to words whatever, we may become like the isolated gentleman who invents a new perpetual-motion machine on old lines in ignorance of all previous plans, and then is surprised …

Continue reading“We get to think the world is progressing when it is only repeating itself.”

The role of error in innovation

The British economist William Stanley Jevons in 1874: It would be an error to suppose that the great discoverer seizes at once upon the truth, or has any unerring method of divining it. In all …

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Ignorance Increases the Further Away you Are

While I’m not sure of the math, I enjoyed this quote from Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics: Ignorance increases the square of the distance from …

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Arthur Schopenhauer: Men of learning …

“Men of learning are those who have read the contents of books. Thinkers, geniuses, and those who have enlightened the world and furthered the race of men, are those who have made direct use of …

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Giving people what they want

Giving the public what the public supposedly wants is like asking your kids what they want for dinner and they say, “Oh, we want fries.” — Francis Ford Coppola

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Susan Sontag: The Function of Common Sense

I made it through Susan Sontag’s recently released notebooks: As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980. “As Consciousness” is the second of three …

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Become A Learning Machine

When successful people from different fields offer the same advice, I listen. Often they have different vocabulary around an idea, but when you break it down you realize they’re talking about …

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Christopher Hitchens: On The Trouble with Causation

From Hitch-22: A Memoir: In his brilliant book What Is History?, Professor E.H. Carr asked about ultimate causation. Take the case of a man who drinks a bit too much, gets behind the wheel of a car …

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Warren Buffett on Temperament

“Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people …

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The Focus to Say No

The difference between average results and exceptional ones is what you avoid. Saying no to mediocre opportunities is easy. Saying no to good opportunities is hard. We all have the same number of …

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We’re in the (bad) Habit of Associating Value with Scarcity

James Gleick, author of The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, says: We’re in the habit of associating value with scarcity, but the digital world unlinks them. You can be the sole owner of a …

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Overvaluing Hard Work

From Leisure: The Basis of Culture.

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The long chains of reasonings …

The long chains of reasonings, simple and easy, by which geometricians are wont to achieve their most complex proofs, had led me to suppose that all things, the knowledge of which man may achieve, are …

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