- A great meeting has three key elements: the options, desired outcome, and the roles of the participants are clear.
- Solitude is freedom from inputs from other minds.
- Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.—Ray Bradbury
- Life is a game that is played on a five-inch field — the distance between your ears. —apologies to Bobby Jones, the American golfer.
- There’s a market for confirming people’s opinion and not for the truth.
- The catastrophe we think will happen has in fact already happened.—Donald Winnicott
- An engaged practice does not permit unengaged labels and objectification.
- Perfection and beauty are created by happiness.
- Be there when the stillness comes.
- “Discipline is choosing between what you want now, and what you want most.”—Abraham Lincoln
- Between sense and nonsense, there is no right or wrong.
- Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the Will.—Nietzsche
- Dangerous grifter-led subcultures generally appeal to “lost young men.”
- Make the revolution irresistible.—Toni Cade Bambara
- There are two religions in the world: the religion of being right and the religion of being in love, and you can’t be a member of both at the same time.
- A decrease in common sense and an increase in superstition and gullibility are infallible signs of alienation.
- Changez vos amis.
- There can be no separate survival.
- Hold faith with the sun in a sunless place.
- Broaden definition enough and you make a sieve of meaning.
- People are myopic.
- Every job looks easy when you aren’t the one doing it.—Jeff Immelt
- Münchhausen Trilemma, when asked for more proof the end is either circular, regressive, or dogmatic.
- Don’t be afraid to take. Takers never worry about taking too much. If you worry, then you aren’t solely a taker. Relax about it.
- Kind and reasonable people using coalition-building, science, and determination to solve problems. Are you in that room?
- The prior can often only be understood in the context of the likelihood.
- With distance, every conflict seems solvable and senseless.
- Stories not explanations.
- Truth only comes at the end of the line.
- Find a place of radical expression and acceptance.
- Ignore the bullshit of the day.
- Apocalypse is the suburb of utopia.
- The land of the possible has many paths, and we can know only one.
- It’s possible to be both empathetic and strong.
- Pictures, luggages and life; everything’s impermanent.
- A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance.
- Morals are like aesthetics, best left for interpretation.
- Living under the constant threat of destruction.
- ”A trip through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat.”—Wilson Mezner on time spent in Hollywood
- The labor of thought, the labor of writing and the labor in reality builds our character.
- Everything is a delibrate construction.
- Analog shuts out digital distractions.
- Look for the extraordinary intruding on ordinary life.
- Strip away complexity and simplify.
- Humility is thinking of yourself less.
- One person’s apocalypse is another person’s day-to-day.
- Knowing isn’t doing.
- Stupid cannot be educated.
- One person with a mind and knows it can always beat ten people who haven’t and don’t.
- Take the trouble to find the right thing to say, then say it with levity.
- Desperate people do desperate things.
- Right don’t come to you doing wrong.
- LOVE, life’s only valid expression.
- What is conversation for? One answer: leaving the other person better off emotionally.
- Start with something that works.
- Pain is the body registering a departure from what it regards as “normal.” If you can train yourself to think of pain as normal, then the pain will cease to exist.
- Serve the material.
- The dynamics of the high school clique are social dynamics everywhere.
- Respect the individual.
- People want to believe in something, even if it is false.
- Every road is new.
- Our lives are measured not by gain but by giving.
- Don’t share opinions on topics that have low thresholds to having opinions and where there is little to differentiate them.
- Don’t run towards ruin.
- Only the dead are without fear.
- The meaning we overlay onto our experience is primary of our many manufactured fictions.
- Every signal has a cost. No costs; no need to communicate it.
- Don’t feed the mouth that bites you.
- Your fantasies have cursed your realities.
- Ask a question. Find forty answers.
- It’s too dark at night to wonder around with your eyes closed.
- Do the small thing.
- Create fun and a little weirdness. —Zappos motto
- Change the initial conditions.
- Puzzles over facts.
- The people that need to read, don’t.
- Wipe your feet at the door. Meaning: Your personal business shouldn’t be a problem for your business.
- Power yields nothing without demand.
- If it’s important and you stop, someone else will do it.
- If you wish to know something, pay it careful attention.
- Humanity is rife with brand and tribal loyalty.
- Pragmatism > Culture Defense Warrior
- A vantage point can only be occupied by one person at a time.
- Better to try and fail than do nothing.
- Be present in the present.
- Invite the witness inside.
- There is no final, fixed answer.
- Keep increasing the number of sensed experience per second until the illusion of continuity shatters.
- Intellect subs for faith. Faith subs for wisdom. Wisdom subs for both intellect and faith.
- Balance and strengthen. Strengthen and balance.
- Cities are full of weird, wonderful people, and people can teach us a lot.
- Every experience can be a source of wisdom.
- Labels not stories. Stories provide unnecessary detail that is wrong. Labels bypass thought.
- Sick leaders attract sick followers.
- Selection effects are everything.
- Ideological conflict has no easy solutions.
- It’s expensive to be both comfortable and to appear virtuous.
- No one wants to be reincarnated as the fly eating poop.
- It is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.—Warren Buffett
- It’s easier to train an expert to manage well than to train a manager to be an expert.
- World-class talent wants to work for and with other world-class talent, or As hire other As, Bs hire Cs. Cs don’t hire As or Bs.
- Wiping your mouth (or your ass) with paper isn’t making it clean.
- Mine is classy, yours is crassy.
- The measure of government is how many quiet tragedies it has authored.
- Class and demographic biases rule over expertise.
- Happiness is the difference between what you have, and your definition of enough.
- Boats rowing the stream are harder work, but frequently have better company.
- There are ways to eliminate suffering in ourselves and others. We need only discover and master them.
- Advice requires context. What is good for the grey beard isn’t good for the novice.
- Can you apologize for someone else?
- Wanting things to be different (which includes wanting them to remain the same) is the cause of suffering.
- Thinking blocks experiencing, like seeing an image taken with a camera rather than using your eyes.
- Labels define culture, personally and socially.
- Tests check but also drive performance.
- Bridge the gap.
- Don’t be The Other for people to define themselves against if you can help it.
- Keeping free time scarce means keeping people unambitious and increases the market for convenience, gratification, and any other form of relief.
- To be is to be related.
- Socratic method: Let them talk. Ask questions. Let them expose their ignorance. Do not cheer when that happens.
- Dread is lack of agency.
- Spend over a year with no address.
- Check if there’s a Japanese camping version.
- Be more curious.
- Social interaction in any medium is always a balance between self-expression and the accommodation of others.
- Simple pastiches reign, signs of humanity’s lack of imagination.
- Pursuing one kind of truth tends to obscure other kinds.
- Many visions, many maps.
- Your priorities are reflected in where you spend your money.
- What ordinary thing has become invisible to you?
- Practice analytically, perform intuitively.
- Keep complexity in mind, enough to drive good decision-making.
- You’re never too young to die.
- Five big things instead of 500 half-assed things.
- Cultivate an obsessive desire to make the world a weirder place.
- Float to the top or sink to the bottom. Everything in the middle is the churn.—Amos in Season 5, Episode 2
- Nobody really saves anyone. She taught me how to save myself.
- Just because someone’s the underdog doesn’t mean they are the good guy.
- Not every stain comes out.
- Philanthropy is scooping soup, not solving the problem of soup lines.
- Everyone has an eye on the self.
- Every choice rules out a panoply of others.
- Following models or trying to discover yourself avoids the hard work of creation, the difference between prefab or bespoke.
- Education is sticking around until you get it.
- We see what we need to see in other people.
- The greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
- The brave find their courage in adversity.
- You do not have to be good.
- Support people not projects or ideologies.
- Every childhood is strange in its own way.
- People are not composed entirely of their facts.
- Save what you can save.
- Turn yourself away from what you think is happening so that you can see what is really happening.
- The worries of others are a largely unknown landscape.
- See people as their best and most complete selves.
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