Technically, zuihitsu are longer reflections than what I tend to collect. But, the general idea is right. Here’s this month’s installment. If you want the complete set, please download the fortune file.
- Architecture is what you do with the potential of life. —Sir Peter Cook
- Specialization tends to shut off the wide-band tuning searches and thus to preclude further discovery.—Buckminster Fuller
- Walk the line between chaos and the man.
- Want to be irascible? Better be entertaining.
- Learn to recognize when it is not your turn.
- Know your why.
- The price of a free press is torrents of bullshit.
- Nothing in life is sure.
- We all have chapters we would rather stay unpublished.
- Everybody goes down the aisle with half the story hidden.
- New market benefit most from contrarian viewpoints.
- Cui bono? Who benefits?
- The more you own it, the more you learn.
- You have to speculate to accumulate.
- Four quadrants: truths, probabilities, possibilities, and lies.
- Never make an enemy by accident.
- Never mistake a wish for a certainty.
- A group will reflect the larger culture in which it is part.
- Dreams are greater than facts.
- Investing: start early, live below your means, save regularly, diversify broadly, and stick to your investment plan.
- Take a chance and fail spectacularly. That’s how you learn to succeed.
- You must be your own master and call your own tune.
- The materials dictate what needs to be done.
- Principles are like prayers. Noble but awkward at a party.
- A mind can only solve problems of similar size.
- Develop a core strength of taste and select for beauty.
- Complain less.
- Contemplate what the world looks like long after you are gone.
- Everything worthwhile is done with other people.
- Time favors truth.
- A bet is a tax on bullshit.
- Avoid disputes. Disputes are a time sink and prevent you from getting real work done.
- Avoid becoming an administrator, a job that consists of dealing with money and disputes.
- What we need today more than anything else is to invest in beauty.—Vangelis
- Temporal bandwidth is the width of your present, your now. How far into the past (or the future) is now?
- Half-truths are lies. Every statement is a half-truth. All statements are lies. Q.E.D.
- The perfect is the enemy of the possible.
- Environment beats self-control every time.
- Beware bullish borrowers.
- Art is what you make for yourself or give to others. Sell it and art becomes a business.
- Earn, learn or relax.
- Life is a single player game.
- Omniscience has no need for memory.
- Be curious about change.
- Embrace anomalies and outliers.
- Hold exploratory views, but loosely.
- Use tools that make you think differently.
- Look for patterns rather than timescales.
- Each of us must lives with inescapable loneliness, and the temptation is to destroy ourselves to escape it. —paraphrase of Jim Harrison
- Shift imagination from the periphery to the foundation of all knowledge.
- The less you know, the harder it is to learn.
- There are more stupid people to factor in than you imagine.
- The tool or platform we are using can keep us stupid, even when we’re smart.
- Ignorance is insufficient data to solve a problem; stupidity is where no amount of data will solve it.
- Rules inflexibly applied lead to poor outcomes.
- It is not what you do not know but what you know that is not so that gets you into trouble.
- Avoiding open disagreement reduces the collective intelligence of any group.
- Craving the safety of clarity will make you stupid.
- Two points define a line. Three a playing field.
- No net is so fine or strong that nothing can get through.
- Endure the blow, accept the damage, and let someone else strike back.
- Death or hardship is not fearful, but our fear of them can destroy us.—paraphrase of Epictetus
- If you spend enough time in spaces that demand you be interesting, you eventually become boring.
- Once a strongman loses the ability to terrorize, a loss of respect is rarely far behind.
- Populism’s animating spirit is hatred of cultural elites.
- If you do not need it and will not use it, do not buy it.
- Mistakes are inevitable, the cost of tuition.
- Choose one: creativity or productvity.
- Competition gets in the way of being oneself.
- No fool like an old fool.
- Marriage is a novel, not a short-story.
- Marriage is like going to church. You need to believe in it.
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