Collecting these little sayings has turned into a major focus of mine. I’m going to aim for a year of monthly posts of them.
- It’s always new and astonishing when it’s yours.
- The center defines something differently than the periphery.
- “Act with zest one day at a time, and never mind the rest.” –Ode 11 of Book I of Horace’s Odes
- Faction is integral to dissatisfaction. A life of us vs. them is a life at war with itself.
- What would it take to be contentment in this moment, just as it is? Changing our minds; both the hardest and easiest thing we can do.
- Always aspire to act in a way that cancels out someone else’s cruel or stupid behavior.
- Be an astute judge of character, and learn to judge quickly.
- The dreamer is in no position to judge what is real or who is awake.
- Fooling people only requires telling them what they want to hear, over and over again. People love hearing how right they are.
- There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.—Norwegian saying
- Reality is a hard master.
- Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.—Teddy Roosevelt
- It’s not the action; it’s the reaction.
- Be a presence that comforts or transforms.
- Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.
- The wealthy play the stock market with each other, the middle class goes to the casinos, and the poor play the lottery.
- If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. — Robin Jones Gunn
- A foreign accent is a sign of bravery. — Amy Chua
- To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing. — Picasso
- The reward for good work is more work. — Tom Sachs
- The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck. — Paul Virilio
- If all I’d ever wanted to do was make money, I’d probably be really poor by now. — Brian Eno
- Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. — Rumi
- On average, bad things happen fast and good things happen slow. — Stewart Brand
- What I cannot create, I do not understand. — Richard Feynman
- Find out who you are and do it on purpose. — Dolly Parton
- There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity.—Big Daddy
- Thinking about theories and concepts outside the mainstream can help us grow until we believe them. Belief is the death of intelligence and opposes growth.
- Pay attention to anomalies.
- “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”—Voltaire
- Eventually politics creeps into everything.
- The license never belongs to the licensed.
- The world doesn’t owe you happiness.
- Always look for the silver lining.
- What lessons are you refusing to learn?
- On some level, oppression requires cooperation.
- To believe is to know you believe and to know you believe is not to believe.
- Seriousness closes itself to open possibilities. Playfulness allows for possiblity at a cost to self.
- History must always be reforged in the present, and imagination expands the boundries of possible pathways of the future.
- Training prevents surprise; education is preparation to be transformed by it.
- Education is discovery. Training is definition.
- Die before ye die.
- Sometimes the key comes before the lock.
- The more you want, the more you get.
- You can control the conversation, and if you can’t, you can always walk away.
- Violence has a long tail.
- We are not what we know, but what we are willing to learn.—Mary Catherine Bateson
- Bad performance isn’t self-correcting.
- Chunk book reading into 30 minutes or more.
- Things tend to get worse before they get better.
- Develop an epistemology that takes unusual ideas seriously without falling for them all.
- True expertise requires tight feedback loops and a close connection between the outcome we care about (e.g. “truth”) and the metric that generates prestige.
- The division of labour is limited by the extent of the market.—Adam Smith
- Comparison is futile, and it is the thief of happiness.
- “Focus on remedies, not faults.”—Jack Nicklaus
- Time is a checking mechanism on market activity.
- Too much and too little doubt leads to dysfunction; impotence to fanaticism.
- Sometimes you lose. Sometimes you win. The main thing is to get up the next day and try again.
- Kindness multiplies and it increases the universe of the possible.
- What is the bounding scenario, i.e. the goals of the project, discussion, etc.? Creativity requires friction and limits.
- A future is a world, a timespace, and the human way of relating to space is exploration.
- Heaven is just another kind of hell, and hell can be a heaven, depending on your place in it.
- Learn how to plan strategically under a fixed set of rules. What makes game play educational is the game’s creation of stakes for decisions and not fidelity to reality.
- “No one wants a lecture. Everyone wants a story.”—Morgan Housel
- When you think: I’ll just do this and then I’ll stop, stop then and leave it as the first thing for next time.
- Fame is like a razor-sharp scalpel with no handle; it easily cuts both ways.
- “We are not to be saved by the captain, but by the crew.”—Frederick Douglass
- “A lie is a fiction made up to take away someone else’s power.”
- Don’t let past trauma’s control your life.
- Sometimes setting yourself on fire sheds light on the situation.
- Relevancy is the only currency.
- It’s easier to predict what will happen, it turns out, than when it will happen. —Ahmed Elbakari, Tom Macky, and Igor Vasilachi
- Save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist.—Morgan Housel
- Regret can be more painful than loss itself.—Phil Pearlman
- If pure collective will can create a valuable financial asset, without any reference to cash flows or fundamentals, then all you need is a collective and some will.
- “Take chances, make mistakes. That’s how you grow.”—Mary Tyler Moore
- Slogans cloud the mind and sap the resolve.
- It’s not the will to win that matters—everyone has that. It’s the will to prepare to win that matters.—Paul “Bear” Bryant
- Given high enough stakes, no one is your friend. Best to know where those limits are.
- Assume positive intent.
- States win in the end.
- Is something special just because it is rare?
- Don’t get caught up in the sociology of the last five minutes, cf. Michael Mann.
- Mistrust is expensive.
- Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.—Feynman
- I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine!
- Search for happiness where you are likely to find it.
- “The practices that carry the greatest potential for transformative change are usually counter-instinctual.”—Bruce Tift
- One way or another, change is going to feel bad.
- Have a high degree of tolerance for everyone’s nonsense.
- Don’t relish conflict, but confront it. Get it out in the open and reduce it.
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