Collecting these little ideas has become a major focus. Here’s this month’s installment.
- Small talk is the tax that God extracted for the privilege of human speech.
- It is a different skill to communicate an idea than to understand it.
- If someone says there was too much, then something about it was unappealing.
- Why not? is a terrible reason.
- Remember the creative power of paring back.
- Narrow intelligence is not on a continuum with general intelligence.
- Intelligence is embodied and cannot be located in the brain.
- “Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third-story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”—Terence McKenna
- The days of top-down cultural consensus are over.
- You are what you think about all day long.—Ralph Waldo Emerson, paraphrased
- “When the time is right” means “not now.”
- Trust is not transferable.
- You only have to be lucky once.
- Consensus does not function in spaces of true diversity.
- Leadership tends to reenforce accountability and rights.
- Business cards are for selling something. Have one? What are you selling?
- The iron law of institutions: people care more about their own power within an institution than the total power of that institution.
- Elitism can only happen in the context of relationships. If you are better, you need a comparison class.
- You were interrupted. What were you going to say?
- What did you mean by that?
- Any study of Internet culture is basically a study of crazy people.
- “Be careful who you pretend to be, because you are who you pretend to be”.—attributed to Kurt Vonnegut
- No thaw is forever.
- It’s not an apology if it comes with an excuse. It is not a compliment if it comes with a request.
- In all things — except love — start with the exit strategy. Prepare for the ending. Almost anything is easier to get into than out of.
- The foundation of maturity: Just because it’s not your fault doesn’t mean it’s not your responsibility.
- Be strict with yourself and forgiving of others. The reverse is hell for everyone.
- Your best response to an insult is “You’re probably right.” Often they are.
- If you can avoid seeking approval of others, your power is limitless.
- Contemplating the weaknesses of others is easy; contemplating the weaknesses in yourself is hard, but it pays a much higher reward.
- Write down one thing you are grateful for each day.
- Ignore what others may be thinking of you, because they aren’t.
- Always say less than necessary.
- Don’t treat people as bad as they are. Treat them as good as you are.
- Bad things can happen fast, but almost all good things happen slowly.
- If you meet a jerk, overlook them. If you meet jerks everywhere everyday, look deeper into yourself.
- All the greatest gains in life — in wealth, relationships, or knowledge —come from the magic of compounding interest — amplifying small steady gains.
- You don’t marry a person, you marry a family.
- Always give credit, take blame.
- Epitaph: when I die, a few people will be sorry, and a couple of people will remember me for several days.
- Repair what you helped break. Collective freedom is impossible without interpersonal repair.
- You turn yourself into the weapon when you strike someone else—in the end, another way to erase yourself—and so you do that last.—Alexander Chee
- In conclusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time.—Robert Anton Wilson
- Kindness is going soft where the world would make you hard.
- Learn a brute force method, acquire intuition as to how to speed it up, and apply it until you get stuck then figure out a new insight.
- Try harder to reinvest our environments with the meaning that belligerent materialism has sucked out of them.—Alan Moore
- Gell-Mann Amnesia, believing news articles outside expertise even after noticing errors in reporting in one’s area of expertise.
- Enjoy yourself. The alternative is to kill yourself. The first option is better, always.
- I won’t miss the circus around here, but I might miss some of the clowns.—Former Rep. Steve Stivers (R-OH)
- Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.—Mark Twain
- It is better to be generally paranoid than to be bureaucratically prepared.
- Amateurs talk strategy and professionals talk logistics.
- Real success is succeeding, then bombing on a new idea or approach.
- Is it performance or is it actual?
- The more incompetent one feels, the more eager he is to fight.—Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection.—Voltaire
- Caution can also be a risk.
- What you resist, persists. —Carl Jung
- Help wanted. No complainers, know-it-alls, whiners, sloths, manipulators, roamers, hiders, shirkers, liars, haters, clock watchers, controllers, passive aggressors, pukers, or splitters. Pukers are people that tell other people their troubles and then go about their day. Splitters are people that like to create division and sides.
- You can’t use reason to argue someone out of a position that they did not arrive at by reason.
- Even the best ideas get brushed aside by real-world data, don’t take it personally.
- I can’t stand it. I know you planned it.
- Have the right enemies.
- Consider the possibility that a visceral defense of the physical, and an accompanying dismissal of the virtual as inferior or escapist, is a result of superuser privileges.
- Change your perspective, change yourself.
- Everyone and every thing has a story to share, if we are willing and able to hear it.
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