Quotes – Abhishek Nagekar

I’ve been collecting quotes for quite some time now. It all started with a book filled with good quotes that I found in a Reader’s Digest edition. As a result, the first hundred or so quotes are from there. Rest are from books, things said by my friends and colleagues, internet comments and some of my own. Not every quote would make sense without the context. The list serves as a light read for myself when I’m out of things to do 🙂 I’d recommend starting at the bottom if you’re still planning on reading.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Your life is ending one minute at a time. If you were to die tomorrow, what would you do today?
It is never to late to become what you never were.
The revolution will come when hackers meet political activists…
The planet is not dying, it is being killed. And those killing it have names and addresses.
“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” – Karl Marx
The future will only contain what we put into it now.
Commute, work, commute, sleep…
In a society that abolishes adventure, the only adventure is in abolishing society.
Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!
Nature created neither servants nor masters. I want neither to rule or be ruled.
By stopping our machines together we will demonstrate their weakness.
I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires.
Practice wishful thinking.
Be realistic, demand the impossible.
Going through the motions kills the emotions
Constraints imposed on pleasure excite the pleasure of living without constraints
The economy is wounded – I hope it dies!
How sad to love money
No freedom for the enemies of freedom
To hell with boundaries
It is my job to corrupt young people with the contageous, infectious idea of individual freedom.
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and the human stupidity, and im not to sure about the former” – Albert Einstein
“All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing” – Maurice Maeterlinck
Politicians are like diapers. They both need changing regularly and for the same reason.
“Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.” – Sydney J. Harris
“An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.” – T.S. Eliot
“Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?” – Robert Orben
Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.
“The problem with political jokes is they get elected.” – Henry Cate, VII
“Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.” – Oscar Ameringer
“Leet words can be expressed in hundreds of ways.” – Microsoft
“Buddha says, “Know your forms of linux: Mandrake, SUSE, Linspire, Xandros, Lycoris, MEPIS, Fedora Core, and Ubuntu””
“Perceptive abilities are not requisite to using the internet.”-Rijnzael
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication
Be nice to nerds, you will probably end up working for them – Bill Gates
No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other.
Happiness isn’t something you experience; its something you remember.
An expert is a person who avoids small error as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy.
“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.” -Albert Einstein
Information wants to be free.
The smaller the mind the greater the conceit.
When they discover the center of the universe, a lot of people will be disappointed to discover they are not it.
The world tolerates conceit from those who are successful, but not from anybody else.
We are so vain that we even care for the opinion of those we don’t care for.
For God hates utterly The bray of bragging tongues.
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
The less their ability, the more their conceit.
Great ability develops and reveals itself increasingly with every new assignment.
Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
“Of all the things Ive lost, I miss my mind the most.” -Ozzy Osbourne
Nerds don’t just happen to dress informally. They do it too consistently. Consciously or not, they dress informally as a prophylactic measure against stupidity.
They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
Any transition serious enough to alter your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis.
There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
Change your thoughts and you change your world.
Turbulence is life force. It is opportunity. Lets love turbulence and use it for change.
“The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards.” -Gene Spafford
“Being able to break security doesnt make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.” -Eric Raymond
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.
Government is too big and too important to be left to the politicians.
“Social engineering bypasses all technologies, including firewalls.” -Kevin Mitnick
“If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don’t understand the problems and you don’t understand the technology.” -Bruce Schneier
“Every system, no matter how secure and well-designed, will be broken by some idiot user.” -James Gaskin
The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.
Two hashes were walking down the street and one was a salted.
“Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.” – Mark Twain
If you give someone $20 and never see them again, it was probably worth it.
People are most vulnerable when they feel safe.
Never test the water with both feet.
If car technology had advanced as quickly as computer technology, a Dodge Viper would cost $3.99, get a million miles per gallon, and explode twice every year.
“Authority is an illusion.”
When one has not had a good father, one must create one.
“One who annoys you, has conquered you – xenoix “
[A]s we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously. ~ ben franklin
Naked people have little or no influence on society. – Mark Twain
Bees may well have honey in their mouths, but never forget that they have a sting in their tail. – Scottish Proverb
“To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.” -Anonymous
“I never think of the future – it comes soon enough.” – Albert Einstein
“The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.” – Socrates
“I’d love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.” – Anonymous
“If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends, you talk to your enemies.” — Moshe Dayan
“If we don’t speak up, we are cowards and accomplices.” — Judith Hertog
“A real free market does not allow one person to damage another person with impunity.” — Michael Rozeff
“Yes, our regulatory agencies are incompetent. But they are incompetent by design.” –writer David Goldstein
“The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” –Aldous Huxley
“The greatest power of the mass media is the power to ignore. The worst thing about this power is that you may not even know you’re using it.” –Sam Smith
“You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.” –Cesar Chavez, 1984
“If you think you are too small to make an impact, try sleeping in a room with a few mosquitoes. ” –West African proverb
“Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t going away.” — Elvis Presley
“The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. . . The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
“Ye that dare oppose, not only tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!” — Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776
“Unless we change direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed. ” — Chinese proverb
“Don’t fully trust anyone until he has stuck with a good cause which he saw was losing.” –Morton Blackwell
“I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.” — Harriet Tubman
“We don’t need people who can spit back facts. We’ve got Google.” –Professor Roberta Golinkoff
” If you don’t know what your government is doing, you don’t live in a democracy.” –Jane Anne Morris
“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.” –Dresden James
“I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell.” — President Harry Truman
“Any nominee for the position of attorney general who has to defend himself from charges of supporting torture is already an unfit candidate. Any senator voting for this man is unfit to represent his or her constituents.” –Wendy Miller, in a letter to the NY Times
“No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability, or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” — U.N. Convention Against Torture
“Never do anything against conscience — even if the state demands it.” — Albert Einstein
“The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.” — President Dwight Eisenhower
“I think the very concept of an elite commission deciding for the American people who deserves to be heard is profoundly wrong.” –former Congressman Newt Gingrich on the “Commission on Presidential Debates”
“The word ‘radical’ derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonized…” — Gore Vidal
“We do not know what is being done in our name. Worse, we do not ask.” — Ben Ehrenreich, writing on Camp X-Ray (Guantanamo Bay prison)
“Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law breaker, it breeds contempt for the law.” — former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
“If you want to affirm your individuality, you can just donate. Why not? Be yourself.” – Pookleblinky
“By annihilating desires, you annihilate the mind.” — Claude-Adrien Helvetius
“The cost of living is dying.”
“Television is about watching a life instead of having one.” – Beth Mazur
“Where others feel fear I feel only curiosity.” – TheMindRapist
“Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.”
“Caring is the most dangerous of experiences because it means choosing to be vulnerable.”
“Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”
“We never remember days, only moments.” – Cesare Pavese”
Tomorrow’s just a day away
There are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things. – Phil Karlton
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
Live as if you were to die tomorrow; learn as if you were to live forever.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
A man is but the product of his thoughts; what he thinks, he becomes.
The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today. H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
Let us sacrifice our today so that our children can have a better tomorrow. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
Nothing is impossible, the word itself says ‘I’m possible’!
Put your heart, mind, and soul into even your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.
No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.
I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? — T.S. Eliot
When the student is ready the teacher will appear. When the student is truly ready, the teacher will disappear. — Lao Tzu
Inevitability Thinking is thinking and acting as if what you are doing is a forgone conclusion because you set up the conditions for it to happen. — Eban Pagan
“When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates.” — Thomas S. Monson
In the long run, all of us are dead.
You can educate a fool, but you cannot make him think.
A good man once told me to open up to different music, cause it opens you up to different worlds and people. Never stick to only one, but try out many. Every genre has different stories from different times. That story is a life lesson, a sign….you just got to stop and read the sign and keep on walking. – comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YibGpBSPibI
“innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1000 things.”
“A town center without any place to gather is just a strip mall… and those already exist everywhere.”
“Money is just a tool for buying time” – FCC founder
.:Analytics:.? Please Don’t
Some people have big dreams, some people have small dreams. Whatever you have, the important thing is to never stop dreaming. – Doug from Into Thin Air
With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill. The trick is to get back down alive. – Rob Hall – ‘Into thin air’
“If you do not repeatedly profile your code for hot spots while tuning, you will be like a fisherman who casts his net in an empty lake,” said Master Foo.
Master Foo then said: “Which one will reach the other side of the river: The one who dreams of a raft, or the one that hitchhikes to the next bridge?”
Master Foo: “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.”
Master Foo said: “A man who mistakes secrets for knowledge is like a man who, seeking light, hugs a candle so closely that he smothers it and burns his hand.”
Master Foo turned back to the neophyte. “The housecat may mock the tiger,” said the master, “but doing so will not make his purr into a roar.”
The ability to simplify is an underrated skill – Dara Khosowshahi, Uber
The person who says it can’t be done shouldn’t interrupt the person who’s doing it.
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
Don’t do things just because everyone is doing them. It’s not worth anything if you finish reading the book just for the sake of telling everyone that you read it, like you have some kind of checklist. Take your time, chill, have fun.
The best engineering manager I ever saw served often as a giant flywheel, his inertia damping the fluctuations that came from market and management people.
Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.
The only consistency is change itself.
Two steps forward one step backward.
How does a project get to be a year late?…One day at a time.
Coding, for a counterexample, is “90 percent finished” for half of the total coding time. Debugging is “99 percent complete” most of the time. “Planning complete” is an event one can proclaim almost at will.
Of all the great programmers I can think of, I know of only one who would voluntarily program in Java. And of all the great programmers I can think of who don’t work for Sun, on Java, I know of zero.
Practice is the best of all teachers
“You’re like a mechanical engineer who wants to work on wind turbines.”
“I never trust anyone who’s more excited about success than doing the thing they want to be successful at”
“Until lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter”
To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is. – Master Bruce Lee
Programmers lie frequently about being math geniuses when they really aren’t. If they were math geniuses, they would be doing math, not writing ads and social network games to steal people’s money.
There is no failure. Only trying.
You don’t know if you’re oppressed if you have nothing to compare against.
Sanity is not statistical.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
A proprietary software company harvests personal information from a centralized government database using unaudited technology in a jurisdiction without a proper privacy or data protection law, sounds perfect to me!
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.
He who does not move does not notice his chains.
A programmer who has never used a debugger to look at the inner workings of a program is like a seventeenth-century doctor who has never used a microscope.
It is not good to drive faster if you can’t stay on the road.
Something that is untested is broken.
Strong winds make trees take deeper roots.
Don’t confuse motion with progress
The easy way is also the right way
To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity
Forging your tools depending on circumstances.
I felt that I have been elevated to great spiritual and moral heights by communication with the best and wisest people whose books I read.
Winning means being unafraid to lose.
FOCUS – Follow One Course Until Successful
Winning is better than losing, but everyone loses when the war isn’t one worth fighting
“You only get one shot at life, which is scary. But it sets you free… If our life is all we get to experience, then it’s the only thing that matters… If the universe has no purpose, then we get to dictate what that purpose is.” — Kurzgesagt
Life is a pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
“jo dikhta hai vohi bikta hai”
Security isn’t really sexy to most companies, so if it can be overlooked, it will be. Rotating token-based authentication isn’t something most companies can put on a marketing brochure, so lots of product managers struggle to dedicate resources unless someone is pounding the table saying, “this shit is important.”
None of us is as smart as all of us.
If you start a startup, don’t design your product to please VCs or potential acquirers. Design your product to please the users. If you win the users, everything else will follow. And if you don’t, no one will care how comfortingly orthodox your technology choices were.
Software is eating the world.
“I, a universe of atoms. An atom in the universe”
Growth mindset: Believing that you can get smarter with practice.
“Ships don’t sink because of the water around them; ships sink because of the water that gets in them. Don’t let what’s happening around you get inside you and weigh you down.”
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in
For all your days prepare; And meet them ever alike; When you are the anvil, bear; When you are the hammer, strike.
All reasonable men adapt themselves to the world. Only few unreasonable ones persist in trying to adapt the world to themselves. All progress in the world depends on these unreasonable men and their innovative and often non-conformist actions.
There is no such thing as a best solution, be it a tool, a language, or an operating system. There can only be systems that are more appropriate in a particular set of circumstances.
You are a pack rat for little facts, each of which may affect some decision years from now.
Kaizen
The greatest of all weaknesses is the fear of appearing weak.
Telling your boss “the cat ate my source code” just won’t cut it.
The cross-pollination of ideas is important; try to apply the lessons you’ve learned to your current project.
The best way to prevent mistakes is to anticipate them.
Nothing is more dangerous than an idea if it’s the only one you have.
Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will
The limits of language are the limits of one’s world.
“I am not young enough to know everything.”
If you have a positive attitude and constantly strive to give your best effort, eventually you will overcome your immediate problems and find you are ready for greater challenges.
To live only for some unknown future is superficial. It is like climbing a mountain to reach the peak without experiencing its sides. The sides of the mountain sustain life, not the peak. This is where things grow, experience is gained, and technologies are mastered. The importance of the peak lies only in the fact that it defines the sides. So I went on towards the top, but always experiencing the sides. I had a long way to go but I was in no hurry. I went in little steps — just one step after another — but each step towards the top.
“There’s no big shot in our team, how will we be able to break through?”. “A big shot is a little shot who keeps on shooting, so keep trying”
The first man to raise a fist is the man who’s run out of ideas
One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
“Don’t hope for a life without problems,” said the panda. “There’s not such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.”
Listen, don’t wait to speak.
Don’t ruin a Tuesday wishing it was Friday.
Saying ‘what kind of an idiot doesn’t know about the Yellowstone supervolcano’ is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.
The art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
You never know when the next person who starts just fixing a misspelling in the documentation ends up implementing the next great feature. But you stand a chance to find out if you smile and say thank you for whatever small contribution that gets the motivation flowing.
It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day — that’s the hard part. But it does get easier
If you continue catching the vase when it falls, everyone will continue thinking the shelf is sturdy.
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to ne unhappy until you get what you want
With a greater sense of understanding comes a greater sense of wonder, and a greater realization that we are part of, and not apart from, the rest of nature
If we’re doomed to toil away until we die, we may as well pretend to like it. Even on Mondays.
You can often view glimpses of ingeniousness not as inexplicable miracles, but as the residue of experience; and when you do, the idea of genius goes from being mesmerizing to instead being actively inspirational.
Pause and ponder.
I have read 347 questions that began, “Could this be a bug?” One was a bug. (in the platform/framework)
There’s no greater thing than knowing nothing, because then there’s so much left to learn!
Yes, learning can prepare you for a career, but you don’t need to work in a field for its great lessons to enrich your life.
I believe in a future where the value of your work is not determined by the size of your paycheck but by the amount of happiness you spread and the amount of meaning you give. I believe in a future where the point of education is not to prepare you for another useless job but for a life well lived. I believe in a future where an existence without poverty is not a privilege but a right we all deserve.
Beware the barrenness of a busy life. – Socrates
And deep down I suspect that my need for perfect is a kind of excuse to not go. A way of avoiding all the fear that comes with leaving. Fear that if it’s not perfect it won’t work. Fear that something will go wrong. Whatever. Something will go wrong anyway. And you know what? A lot of times it’s the things that go wrong that turn out to be the most fun. Maybe not at the time, but later. – https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2016/07/change-ideas-the-worst
We’re all tourists on this planet.
You are putting yourself on a slippery slope when you start believing that the outcome of your effort represents or embodies who you really are as a person – what your value as a person is
Nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
Fixing stuff we broke and deleting stuff we wrote. – Sir Ed’s productivity summary
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
Working with git reset –hard on a production branch at 6pm on a friday evening. I’m too weak for this shit.
Resilience
Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one has counted the failed attempts.
He makes an analogy with a very large clothing store: “If there is a large stock of clothing, you’re not surprised to find a suit that fits.”
“Huge parts of the world are still unexplored” “In terms of trilobites?” “No, in terms of everything”
Oh fuck, not another phylum
It is very easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advvantage of all the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours — arguably stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be. But — and here’s an interesting point — for the most part it doesn’t want to be much.
To a firrrst approximation, as David Raup likes to say, all species are extinct.
…but you could have all bdelloid rotifer experts in the world to dinner and not have to borrow plates from the neighbors.
“And I suppose that’s why you value someone who spends forty-two yeras studying a single species of plants, even if it doesn’t produce anything terribly new?” “Precisely”
From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material.
It cannot be said too often: All life is one. That is, and I suspect will forever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is.
I’ve decided to stick with love. Hate is too much of a burden to bear.
Don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus
A healthy person wants a million things. A sick person wants just one.
Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others (often reworded as “Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept”).
If your web-app is slow, it’s because of your code, not the DOM.
We live in a hype-driven economy. No one is doing anything sustainable, and you aren’t interesting if you aren’t growing 1000% year on year. The goal is the same everywhere, hype yourself up until either investors or one of the major companies is fooled into believing that you have something valuable, and then wait until the money starts flowing in before you scrap the junk you were working on and start over. You survive and create “brand awareness” until you look like a real company, and hopefully don’t piss off too many people in the meantime. This is not an environment for honest people who want to make a sustainable business, it is for grifters and idealists who care more about image than substance and will say anything to get their way. – https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/mobile-linux/1133747-an-interview-with-zlatan-todoric-open-source-developer-former-purism-cto
You can often view glimpses of ingeniousness not as inexplicable miracles, but as residue of experience. And when you do, the idea of genius goes from being mesmerizing to being actively inspirational. – Grant Sanderson
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
At a certain point, we can assume that making things better will make things better
Rationality is not about knowing facts, it’s about recognizing which facts are relevant.
Evidence should not determine beliefs, but update them
Levels of understanding: What is it saying? Why is it true? When is it useful?
“that $100 steak dinner you had 18 years ago really cost you $13,000 because you didn’t put it into Apple stock”
One day, you’re 17 and you’re planning for someday. And then quietly, without you ever really noticing, someday is today. And then someday is yesterday. And this is your life.
When I Wrote It, Only God and I Knew the Meaning; Now God Alone Knows
In the end we remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Back in Grandpa’s day, he would feel like shit and think to himself, “Gee whiz, I sure do feel like a cow turd today. But hey, I guess that’s just life. Back to shoveling hay.” But now? Now if you feel like shit for even five minutes, you’re bombarded with 350 images of people totally happy and having amazing fucking lives, and it’s impossible to not feel like there’s something wrong with you.
Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law”—the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.
Remember, nobody who is actually happy has to stand in front of a mirror and tell himself that he’s happy.
In other words, negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it’s because you’re supposed to do something.
But then there are those people who overidentify with their emotions. Everything is justified for no other reason than they felt it. “Oh, I broke your windshield, but I was really mad; I couldn’t help it.” Or “I dropped out of school and moved to Alaska just because it felt right.” Decision-making based on emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, pretty much always sucks. You know who bases their entire lives on their emotions? Three-year-old kids. And dogs. You know what else three-year-olds and dogs do? Shit on the carpet.
What determines your success isn’t, “What do you want to enjoy?” The relevant question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The path to happiness is a path full of shitheaps and shame.
Technology has solved old economic problems by giving us new psychological problems. The Internet has not just open-sourced information; it has also open-sourced insecurity, self-doubt, and shame.
Being “average” has become the new standard of failure. The worst thing you can be is in the middle of the pack, the middle of the bell curve. When a culture’s standard of success is to “be extraordinary,” it then becomes better to be at the extreme low end of the bell curve than to be in the middle, because at least there you’re still special and deserve attention. Many people choose this strategy: to prove to everyone that they are the most miserable, or the most oppressed, or the most victimized.
The fact that this statement is inherently contradictory—after all, if everyone were extraordinary, then by definition no one would be extraordinary—is missed by most people.
The rare people who do become truly exceptional at something do so not because they believe they’re exceptional. On the contrary, they become amazing because they’re obsessed with improvement.
All of this “every person can be extraordinary and achieve greatness” stuff is basically just jerking off your ego. It’s a message that tastes good going down, but in reality is nothing more than empty calories that make you emotionally fat and bloated, the proverbial Big Mac for your heart and your brain.
This is why these values—pleasure, material success, always being right, staying positive—are poor ideals for a person’s life. Some of the greatest moments of one’s life are not pleasant, not successful, not known, and not positive.
Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it, and that we are responsible for it.
As a general rule, we’re all the world’s worst observers of ourselves.
Aristotle wrote, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
If you think about a young child trying to learn to walk, that child will fall down and hurt itself hundreds of times. But at no point does that child ever stop and think, “Oh, I guess walking just isn’t for me. I’m not good at it.”
Basically, the more options we’re given, the less satisfied we become with whatever we choose, because we’re aware of all the other options we’re potentially forfeiting.
But depth is where the gold is buried. And you have to stay committed to something and go deep to dig it up. That’s true in relationships, in a career, in building a great lifestyle—in everything.
Bukowski once wrote, “We’re all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by life’s trivialities; we are eaten up by nothing.”
“Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.”
“If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months?”
Humans are imperfect creatures. You don’t “succeed” because you have no weaknesses; you succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them.
Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. The heroes in this book are no different. Everyone struggles. Take solace in that.
I think of Siddhartha’s answers often and in the following terms: “I can think” → Having good rules for decision-making, and having good questions you can ask yourself and others. “I can wait” → Being able to plan long-term, play the long game, and not misallocate your resources. “I can fast” → Being able to withstand difficulties and disaster. Training yourself to be uncommonly resilient and have a high pain tolerance.
It’s not that bad things don’t happen to me. I don’t label a lot of things good/bad. [Instead, I ask] can I evolve from this? What do I want now? Where is my center now?”
No matter how shitty your day is, no matter how catastrophic it might become, you can make your bed. And that gives you the feeling, at least it gives me the feeling, even in a disastrous day, that I’ve held on to the cliff ledge by a fingernail and I haven’t fallen. There is at least one thing I’ve controlled, there is something that has maintained one hand on the driver’s wheel of life.
“We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.”
The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home.
“Go to all the meetings you can, even if you’re not invited to them, and figure out how to be helpful. If people wonder why you’re there, just start taking notes. Read all the other notes you can find on the company, and gain a general knowledge that your very limited job function may not offer you. Just make yourself useful and helpful by doing so. That’s worked for me in a few different environments, and I encourage you to try it.” TF: Chris
“Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
‘It sounds like, from where you are, your decision is not between yes and no. You need to figure out whether you’re feeling like, “Fuck yeah!” or “No.” ’
Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
“Everyone is interesting. If you’re ever bored in a conversation, the problem’s with you, not the other person.”
HOPE IS NOT A STRATEGY. LUCK IS NOT A FACTOR. FEAR IS NOT AN OPTION.
“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”
“It’s always the hard part that creates value.”
“CREATIVITY IS AN INFINITE RESOURCE. THE MORE YOU SPEND,THE MORE YOU HAVE.”
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
“My parents always taught me that my day job would never make me rich. It’d be my homework.”
Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means you’re the least important person in the room—until you change that with results.
This is the first thing you must do in your career: switch your mindset from that of an indentured servant to a business person who is running their own business. Just having this mindset at the start will change the way you think about your career and cause you to be mindful and present in the active management of it.
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!’”—Hunter
Those of you who often over-commit or feel too scattered may appreciate a new philosophy I’m trying: If I’m not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, then I say no. Meaning: When deciding whether to commit to something, if I feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!”—then my answer is no. When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say, “HELL YEAH!” We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” —Richard P. Feynman
“If you’re looking for a formula for greatness, the closest we’ll ever get, I think, is this: Consistency driven by a deep love of the work.”
So any time you hear something that you think is a cliché, my tip to you is to perk your ears up and listen more carefully.” He had heard certain phrases like “Eat more vegetables” a million times, but ignored them for years, as it all seemed too simplistic. Ultimately, it was the simple that worked. He didn’t need sophisticated answers.
“On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice. It’s actually very easy to give people good advice. It’s very hard to follow the advice that you know is good. . . . If someone came to me with my list of problems, I would be able to sort that person out very easily.”
‘Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.’
In a world of distraction, single-tasking is a superpower.
SIT, SIT. WALK, WALK. DON’T WOBBLE.
“What I discovered, which is what many writers discover, is that I write in order to think. I’d say, ‘I think I have an idea,’ but when I begin to write it, I realize, ‘I have no idea,’ and I don’t actually know what I think until I try and write it. . . . That was the revelation.”
When you’re young, you want to be prolific and make and do things, but you don’t want to measure them in terms of productivity. You want to measure them in terms of extreme performance, you want to measure them in extreme satisfaction.”
‘What’s the worst that can happen? Well, the worst that can happen is that I’d have a backpack and a sleeping bag, and I’d be eating oatmeal. And I’d be fine.’”
“Our life is frittered away by detail. . . . Simplify, simplify. . . . A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” —Henry David Thoreau
“When I first had money—I grew up without any money—I got a car. . . . It was a Lexus hybrid, and the first day I got it, I filled it up with diesel fuel. I destroyed it. It was awful. I got this great joke out of it, though, a 7-minute bit that probably paid for all the damage. So now, I’m in this place where when something bad happens, I think: ‘Oh, good, I can use that.’” BAD DECISIONS MAKE GOOD STORIES.
I had people around me who’d say things like, ‘Oh, a flower, nice.’ A little part of me was thinking, ‘You absolute loser. You’ve taken time to appreciate a flower? Do you not have bigger plans? I mean, this the limit of your ambition?’ and when life’s knocked you around a bit and when you’ve seen a few things, and time has happened and you’ve got some years under your belt, you start to think more highly of modest things like flowers and a pretty sky, or just a morning where nothing’s wrong and everyone’s been pretty nice to everyone else. . . . Fortune can do anything with us. We are very fragile creatures. You only need to tap us or hit us in slightly the wrong place. . . . You only have to push us a little bit, and we crack very easily, whether that’s the pressure of disgrace or physical illness, financial pressure, etc. It doesn’t take very much. So, we do have to appreciate every day that goes by without a major disaster.”
“What are some of the choices you’ve made that made you who you are?”
We’re born with everything we’ll ever need.
“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.”
“Free education is abundant, all over the Internet. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.”
how you do anything is how you do everything
“A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.”
The big question I ask is, ‘When I had the opportunity, did I choose courage over comfort?’”
If I’m not a little bit nauseous when I’m done, I probably didn’t show up like I should have shown up.”
IS IT AN ITCH OR A BURN?
As Paul might ask you, “Is that a dream or a goal?” If it isn’t on the calendar, it isn’t real.
“Enjoy it.” —the best answer I’ve heard to what I always ask close friends: “What should I do with my life?”
What about you? How many times have you reacted to a request by saying yes without really thinking about it? How many times have you resented committing to do something and wondered, “Why did I sign up for this?” How often do you say yes simply to please? Or to avoid trouble? Or because “yes” had just become your default response?
Weniger aber besser. The English translation is: Less but better.
Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done.
If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.
Psychologists call this “decision fatigue”: the more choices we are forced to make, the more the quality of our decisions deteriorates.
EACH NIGHT, WHEN I GO TO SLEEP, I DIE. AND THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN I WAKE UP, I AM REBORN. —Mahatma Gandhi
The concreteness of the objective made it real. The realness made it inspiring. It answered the question: “How will we know when we have succeeded?”
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing
In a reverse pilot you test whether removing an initiative or activity will have any negative consequences
Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so.
With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system by all of them together since collecting began (in 1951) is “less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground,” in the words of Carl Sagan.
NEVER DOUBT THAT A SMALL GROUP OF THOUGHTFUL, COMMITTED CITIZENS CAN CHANGE THE WORLD; INDEED, IT’S THE ONLY THING THAT EVER HAS. —Margaret Mead
“Scientifically, it’s clearly more or less complete nonsense,” Columbia University physicist Peter Woit told the New York Times, “but these days that doesn’t much distinguish it from a lot of the rest of the literature.”
that Earth was “deliberately seeded with life by intelligent aliens,” an idea that Gribbin calls “at the very fringe of scientific respectability”—or, put another way, a notion that would be considered wildly lunatic if not voiced by a Nobel laureate.
Einstein marveled at when he wrote, “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”
That’s the big idea behind calculus. Everything becomes simpler at infinity.
“You’re a jerk!” “Yeah, well, you’re a jerk times two!” “And you’re a jerk times infinity!” “And you’re a jerk times infinity plus one!” “That’s the same as infinity, you idiot!”
We could just as well have claimed that a line of length 3 centimeters, or 49.57, or 2,000,000,000 is made up of infinitely many points of zero length. Evidently, multiplying zero by infinity can give us any and every conceivable result—6 or 3 or 49.57 or 2,000,000,000. That’s horrifying, mathematically speaking.
If that is so, it means that the complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive today—that’s 270 million people with 206 bones each—will only be about fifty bones, one quarter of a complete skeleton. That’s not to say of course that any of these bones will actually be found. Bearing in mind that they can be buried anywhere within an area of slightly over 3.6 million square miles, little of which will ever be turned over, much less examined, it would be something of a miracle if they were. Fossils are in every sense vanishingly rare. Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.
Think of how philosophically disturbing this is. I said that the digits of pi are out there, but where are they exactly? They don’t exist in the material world. They exist in some Platonic realm, along with abstract concepts like truth and justice.
Indeed, the classical mathematics is relatively straightforward. Gravity, friction, angular momentum, center of mass, and so forth, can be demonstrated with less than a page full of equations. Given those formulae I could prove to you that bicycle riding is practical and give you all the knowledge you needed to make it work. And you’d still fall down the first time you climbed on that bike.
Of course you have been impeded by bad code. So then—why did you write it? Were you trying to go fast? Were you in a rush? Probably so. Perhaps you felt that you didn’t have time to do a good job; that your boss would be angry with you if you took the time to clean up your code. Perhaps you were just tired of working on this program and wanted it to be over. Or maybe you looked at the backlog of other stuff that you had promised to get done and realized that you needed to slam this module together so you could move on to the next. We’ve all done it.
They may defend the schedule and requirements with passion; but that’s their job. It’s your job to defend the code with equal passion. To drive this point home, what if you were a doctor and had a patient who demanded that you stop all the silly hand-washing in preparation for surgery because it was taking too much time? Clearly the patient is the boss; and yet the doctor should absolutely refuse to comply. Why? Because the doctor knows more than the patient about the risks of disease and infection. It would be unprofessional (never mind criminal) for the doctor to comply with the patient. So too it is unprofessional for programmers to bend to the will of managers who don’t understand the risks of making messes. The Primal Conundrum Programmers face a conundrum of basic values.
Clean code always looks like it was written by someone who cares.
Too much freedom leads to chaos. Creativity needs constraint as much as it needs freedom
If there’s one thing I like, it’s a quiet life. I’m not one of those fellows who get all restless and depressed if things aren’t happening to them all the time. You can’t make it too placid for me. Give me regular meals, a good show with decent music every now and then, and one or two pals to totter round with, and I ask no more. –Bertie Wooster in Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves
Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not understanding. Understanding is not wisdom. — Clifford Stoll
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. – Rabindranath Tagore
Poverty annihilates the future – Orwell
You remember the past as better than it was and expect the future to be worse than evidence suggests it would be – from https://open.spotify.com/episode/0hlUNQ8IdzvjuNaN9sDKb1?si=uTl8I5XzSoGVQM0vPxcTdQ
Disinformation for profit business model
90% of the evaluation of a leader is the kind of people who work for them.
Learn in public – https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2020/12/14/learn-in-public/
If you believe in trying to make the best of the finite number of years we have on this planet (while not making it any worse for anyone else), think that pride and self-righteousness are the cause of most conflict and negativity, and are humbled by the vastness and mystery of the Universe, then I’m the same religion as you.
If You Know How Quickly People Forget the Dead, You’ll Stop Living to Impress People
To live in the hearts we leave behind is to never die
If love is the answer, you’re home
Goal is to be better, not perfect
“Even if you had a personal score to settle with the chickens, how we treat them is beyond broken” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxvQPzrg2Wg
If you’re arguing with a fool, he’s probably doing the same.
I now see that the circumstances of one’s birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are – Mewtwo
“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI
“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” -Teller
When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than your ability. Your tastes only narrow & exclude people. So create. — _why
The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both. — Buddha
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit. – Aristotle
Be intentional
The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.
Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes it is a quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow.” -Maryann Radmacher
6 months from now, you’d wish you’d started 6 months ago
“We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.” – Charles Bukowski
“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” – C. S. Lewis
”If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.” Jean-paul sarte
‘Today is the oldest you’ve ever been in your life and the youngest you’ll ever be again’
It’s possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness. That is life.
Be kind. For everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.
When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi)
1. “I’m ready.” Ready, he meant, to remove the breathing support, to start morphine, to die.
2. Shouldn’t terminal illness, then, be the perfect gift to that young man who had wanted to understand death?
3. “Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?” she asked. “Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?” “Wouldn’t it be great if it did?” I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.
4. It occurred to me that my relationship with statistics changed as soon as I became one.
5. The days are long, but the years are short.
6. I came to believe that it is irresponsible to be more precise than you can be accurate. Those apocryphal doctors who gave specific numbers (“The doctor told me I had six months to live”): Who were they, I wondered, and who taught them statistics?
7. The families who gather around their beloved—their beloved whose sheared heads contained battered brains—do not usually recognize the full significance, either. They see the past, the accumulation of memories, the freshly felt love, all represented by the body before them. I see the possible futures, the breathing machines connected through a surgical opening in the neck, the pasty liquid dripping in through a hole in the belly, the possible long, painful, and only partial recovery—or, sometimes more likely, no return at all of the person they remember. In these moments, I acted not, as I most often did, as death’s enemy, but as its ambassador. I had to help those families understand that the person they knew—the full, vital independent human—now lived only in the past and that I needed their input to understand what sort of future he or she would want: an easy death or to be strung between bags of fluids going in, others coming out, to persist despite being unable to struggle. Had I been more religious in my youth, I might have become a pastor, for it was the pastoral role I’d sought.
8. Pretty tasty, I thought, picking chocolate chips out of my teeth as the family said its last goodbyes. I wondered if, in my brief time as a physician, I had made more moral slides than strides.
Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor E. Frankl)
1. We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may be few in number but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way – Viktor Frankl
2. “George, you must realize that the world is a joke. There is no justice, everything is random. Only when you realize this will you understand how silly it is to take yourself seriously. There is no grand purpose in the universe. It just is. There’s no particular meaning in what decision you make today about how to act.”
3. But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, “mercy” killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.
4. “As a professor in two fields, neurology and psychiatry, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is subject to biological, psychological and sociological conditions. But in addition to being a professor in two fields I am a survivor of four camps —concentration camps, that is—and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.”
5. What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? “No, thank you,” he will think. “Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.”
6. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
7. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.
8. To put the question (of meaning of life) in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent.
9. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, “homeostasis,” i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. What man needs is not homeostasis but what I call “noö-dynamics,” i.e., the existential dynamics in a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by a meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who has to fulfill it.
10. From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of “pure race”—and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards.
11. “Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben.” (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.)
12. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”
13. The death rate in the week between Christmas, 1944, and New Year’s, 1945, increased in camp beyond all previous experience. In his opinion, the explanation for this increase did not lie in the harder working conditions or the deterioration of our food supplies or a change of weather or new epidemics. It was simply that the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naïve hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near and there was no encouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them. This had a dangerous influence on their powers of resistance and a great number of them died.
14. “Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.” Varying this, we could say that most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.
15. Otto, where are you now? Are you alive? What has happened to you since our last hour together? Did you find your wife again? And do you remember how I made you learn my will by heart—word for word—in spite of your childlike tears?
16. But the desperately ill received no medicine. It would not have helped, and besides, it would have deprived those for whom there was still some hope.
17. When we arrived the first important news that we heard from older prisoners was that this comparatively small camp (its population was 2,500) had no “oven,” no crematorium, no gas! That meant that a person who had become a “Moslem” could not be taken straight to the gas chamber, but would have to wait until a so-called “sick convoy” had been arranged to return to Auschwitz. This joyful surprise put us all in a good mood.
18. A man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little.
19. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
20. “How beautiful the world could be!”
21. One morning I heard someone, whom I knew to be brave and dignified, cry like a child because he finally had to go to the snowy marching grounds in his bare feet, as his shoes were too shrunken for him to wear. In those ghastly minutes, I found a little bit of comfort; a small piece of bread which I drew out of my pocket and munched with absorbed delight.
22. Since I had always been especially sorry for people who suffered from fearful dreams or deliria, I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand which was ready to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.
23. While my cold hands clasped a bowl of hot soup from which I sipped greedily, I happened to look out the window. The corpse which had just been removed stared in at me with glazed eyes. Two hours before I had spoken to that man. Now I continued sipping my soup.
24. “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.”
25. Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.
“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one” – Confucius
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So, throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover.” -Mark Twain
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. . . . Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.’ I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.” – Carl Sagan
“How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?”
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it – Upton Sinclair
Look for tradeoffs, not benefits – https://www.simplethread.com/relational-databases-arent-dinosaurs-theyre-sharks/
I have only one wish for 2016: I want to see a revolution happen. There is going to be a revolution like the French revolution in this country. Everything has collapsed in this country. All the institutions are a joke. I want to see a revolution happen.
How to make the world add up
1. Of course, we shouldn’t be credulous, but the antidote to credulity isn’t to believe nothing, but to have the confidence to assess information with curiosity and a healthy scepticism.
2. I worry about a world in which many people will believe anything, but I worry far more about one in which people believe nothing beyond their own preconceptions.
3. Yes, it’s easy to lie with statistics – but it’s even easier to lie without them.
4. Van Meegeren wasn’t an artistic genius, but he intuitively understood something about human nature. Sometimes, we want to be fooled.
5. Behavioural economists call this ‘the ostrich effect’. For example, when stock markets are falling, people are less likely to log in to check their investment accounts online.
6. Psychologists call this ‘motivated reasoning’. Motivated reasoning is thinking through a topic with the aim, conscious or unconscious, of reaching a particular kind of conclusion. In a football game, we see the fouls committed by the other team but overlook the sins of our own side. We are more likely to notice what we want to notice.
7. Benjamin Franklin commented, ‘So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to.’
8. They produced more arguments in favour of their own views, and picked up more flaws in the other side’s arguments. They were vastly better equipped to reach the conclusion they had wanted to reach all along.
9. Consider this claim about climate change: ‘human activity is causing the Earth’s climate to warm up, posing serious risks to our way of life’. Many of us have an emotional reaction to a claim like that; it’s not like a claim about the distance to Mars. Believing it or denying it is part of our identity; it says something about who we are, who our friends are, and the sort of world we want to live in. If I put a claim about climate change in a news headline, or in a graph designed to be shared on social media, it will attract attention and engagement not because it is true or false but because of the way people feel about it.
10. the more persuasively we can make the case for what our friends already believe, the more our friends will respect us.
11. Psychologists have a name for our tendency to confuse our own perspective with something more universal: it’s called ‘naive realism’, the sense that we are seeing reality as it truly is, without filters or errors.
12. Economists tend to cite their colleague Charles Goodhart, who wrote in 1975: ‘Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.’12 (Or, more pithily: ‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.’)
13. Before we figure out whether nurses have had a pay rise, first find out what is meant by ‘nurse’. Before lamenting the prevalence of self-harm in young people, stop to consider whether you know what ‘self-harm’ is supposed to mean. Before concluding that inequality has soared, ask ‘Inequality of what?’ Demanding a short, sharp answer to the question ‘Has inequality risen?’ is not only unfair, but strangely incurious. If we are curious, instead, and ask the right questions, deeper insight is within easy reach.
14. Consider the financial news. There is a big difference between the rolling business coverage of Bloomberg TV, the daily rhythm of the newspaper the Financial Times (my employer), and the weekly take of The Economist, even if the three outlets have a similar interest in business, economics and geopolitics. Bloomberg might pick up on sharp market moves over the past hour. The same moves won’t merit a mention in The Economist. Weekly, daily, hourly – the metronome of the news clock changes the very nature of what is news.
15. Similar results emerge if you ask people about their personal job situation versus their view of their country’s economy: most people think that all is well for them personally but are worried about the society they live in.
16. Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, puts it succinctly: ‘To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.’
17. ‘In each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations . . . it was you, only you, that emerged. To distil so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold . . . that is the crowning unlikelihood . . .’ ‘You could say that about anybody in the world!’ ‘Yes. Anybody in the world . . . But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles, that they become commonplace and we forget . . .’ —ALAN MOORE, Watchmen
18. As we saw in the previous chapter, public scrutiny is vital. It’s what distinguishes science from alchemy.
19. And just as a verbal argument can be logical or emotional, sharp or woolly, clear or baffling, honest or misleading, so too can the argument made by a chart.
20. The goal of the graphic is not to convey information but to stir feelings.
21. We’ve been powerfully reminded of something we already believed. We are more passionate, more engaged, but are we truly any more informed?
22. ‘The greater the proficiency, the more acute the polarization,’
23. George Loewenstein, a behavioural economist, framed this idea in what has become known as the ‘information gap’ theory of curiosity. As Loewenstein puts it, curiosity starts to glow when there’s a gap ‘between what we know and what we want to know’. There’s a sweet spot for curiosity: if we know nothing, we ask no questions; if we know everything, we ask no questions either. Curiosity is fuelled once we know enough to know that we do not know.
This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.
How to Be Miserable in Your Twenties
1. Most of the harm done in the world is done by those who think they know what happiness is for other people and try to help them achieve it.
2. There are few things more lonely than the end of a party when everyone has gone home but you. For misery, stay and finish up the leftover drinks. Otherwise, learn when to call a cab and switch off the lights.
3. To become an adult, he must not wait for Mom and Dad to hand over his freedom like some kind of belated Bar Mitzvah gift. Ultimately, the key must be taken, as it will not be bestowed.
4. I would wait for people to give me the signal, then ask, “During that memory, raise your hand if you’re looking at a computer, phone, or television.” This little gambit is virtually foolproof.
5. Internationally, users average about two hours per day on social media—the nutritionally empty aspartame of tribal life.
6. Heedless hedonism is one of the best ways of achieving misery. Try it and see.
7. Relying on talent is an excellent path to misery. It nurtures our incapacity, undermines our perseverance, encourages our anguish, and blinds us to the truth: practice and sweat are almost always the larger determinants of success.
8. Increasing your misery is easy. Avoid anything that causes the slightest heart flutter and you’ll have a smaller and smaller life.
9. For a bigger life, you would need to embrace the reality: confidence is the result of taking action, not a prerequisite for it.
10. For happiness, this feeling of uncertainty is a goal to be pursued. For misery, it is a threat to be avoided.
11. It’s not venting. It’s rehearsal.
12. We stress the importance of passion, then distract people from the reality: passions are cultivated, not found.
13. A big part of growing up is bringing all of yourself into a space, not just the parts of yourself that relate to the people in the room. —Lin-Manuel Miranda
14. Every label is like a lobster’s carapace—an enticingly cozy shell that quickly proves too small and begs to be shed. Much of our self-knowledge isn’t knowledge at all—it is an edited version of reality, a comforting security lock on the door to a larger life.
15. Once a person has been diagnosed with a mental quirk or disorder, it can become a seemingly fixed part of their identity. The diagnosis gets strapped into the driver’s seat.
16. Do a quick inventory of your friends. Reduce them to a single scale: adaptability. Some of them you could take to any restaurant, on any road trip, to any social event. Snow camping? No problem. Meet the governor? Great. Try a yak-milk latte? Hand it over. With others you have to be more careful. For Andre it’s a five-star hotel or nothing. Jessica couldn’t handle your crazy aunt. William freaks out if he sees a spider. Rae-Lyn goes ballistic at the friendliest advice. Now consider: who is happiest?
17. To be miserable, become a princess for whom no pea or pebble under the mattress is too small to be noticed.
18. Resiliency is for people too stupid to realize they are being insulted, or too numbed by their lives to know any better.
19. A man tells his grandson that two wolves fight perpetually within each of us. One is filled with anger, hate, jealousy, and selfishness; the other with kindness, bravery, and love. He pauses for a moment, giving the boy a chance to ask the inevitable question. “Which one wins, Grandpa?” The grandfather smiles. “The one you feed.”
20. Ignore the fact that what we do creates who we are. We are not kind, or considerate, or loving, until these characteristics appear in our behavior.
21. The prefrontal cortex is a late bloomer among the brain’s components, coming into its full power only midway through one’s twenties. Before then, it struggles to keep a leash on the impulses, straining and sputtering and sometimes giving out altogether.
22. Dream big and dream far, and keep your eye on that distant and improbable ball. Focus so intently on that distant shore that you can’t find the bridge leading there.
In business, there’s only one thing more important than “Make it better”. And that’s “Don’t fuck it up”.
Your choices should be a reflection of your hopes, not fears.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity
If the world plays out in 10 different ways, I want to do OK in all of them.
Make today the first day that everything falls into place for you
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them. – Mark Twain
Talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not
Alan Watts (from Goodreads quotes page)
1. Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth
2. Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun
3. We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society
4. The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves
5. You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself
6. The menu is not the meal
7. The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless
8. Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes
9. And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words… As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning
10. You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago
Here’s a lesson I learned very early on after I started working full-time as a programmer (and that’s a peculiar sentence for me to read, as I no longer program for a living). I’d be looking at some code at my desk, and it made no sense. Why would anyone write it like this? There’s an obvious and cleaner way to approach the same problem. So I’d go down the hall to the person who wrote it in the first place and start asking questions…and find out that I didn’t have the whole picture, the problem was messier than it first appeared, and there were perfectly valid reasons for the code being that way. This happened again and again. Sometimes I did find a real flaw, but even then it may have only occurred with data that wasn’t actually possible (because, for example, it was filtered by another part of the system). Talking face to face changed everything, because they could draw diagrams, pull out specs, and give concrete examples. I think that initial knee-jerk “I’ve been looking at this for ten seconds and now let me explain the critical flaws” reaction is a common one among people with engineering mindsets. And that’s not a good thing. https://prog21.dadgum.com/57.html
Hath mai jadu hata hai. Khana toh koi bhi bana leta hai
Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.
When the pieces fit perfectly, there’s always a strange sense of serendipity. I’m sure all artists can attest to that, those are moments that remind us why we fell in love with creating. — Shing02
Everything is mostly nothing
I think we did okay
The world is a banquet of knowledge and each of us has brought a dish to the table
Odd as it may seem,” Kahneman writes, “I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.
If you crush a cockroach, you’re a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you’re a villain. Morals have aesthetic criteria
Maybe the real art was the friends we made along the way. https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/twhfmh/place_has_ended/
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
1,500 jets have flown in here to hear David Attenborough speak about how we’re wrecking the planet
Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this and that, but hope and enterprise and change
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
“I think it had just never ever been written before. The price you pay for being truly original in a world of algorithms built on the aggregation of sameness” – Wisdom flowing through Edward’s mind
Expressions of anger are frequently followed by feelings of shame, which propagated further anger – Another Edward original
Growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of a cancer cell
Wenn man einen Freund hat, braucht man sich vor nichts zu fürchten!
The message I have to you is, don’t take your time and ability to do what you love for granted. One day you will regret not spending more time doing what you love and being around the people you love. – https://www.reddit.com/r/Guitar/comments/qjohtd/oc_a_79_year_olds_message_to_young_guitarists_the/
You leave a megaphone in a public space, and mostly assholes pick it up to yell thinly veiled hatred in it. No one cares, except for the other assholes in the megaphone line, who cheer to the bile and can’t wait to be cheered in return. But then, when I picked the megaphone and asked for help, I found help. And when I picked the megaphone and offered some, I found people to help. The regular people are here. They just aren’t ranting or cheering the rants
Shoot the adjective, not the noun.
Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon
You could be forgiven for thinking that this generation of billionaire entrepreneurs that got launched into their massive wealth by riding a wave of digital transformation by being the first to plant their flags maybe aren’t business geniuses.
But, as they say on the Internet, now you have two problems.
Joining a new company is akin to an organ transplant — and you are the new organ
Someone who shares your values, who matches your level of (for lack of a better word) selflessness or selfishness, and someone who is going to grow in the same direction that you do over many years. That last one depends a lot on good luck.
Maybe the real career progression is the friends we make along the way
“Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.” “At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his 1841 essay, “Self-Reliance.” “I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
Anthony Bourdain said: “Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride.”
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
The essence of design is leaving things out
Kisi ki muskurahato pe ho nisar, kisi ka dard mil sake toh le udhar, kisi ke waste ho tere dil mai pyaar, jeena isi ka naam hai
The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is just something we make, and can just as easily make different.
Your best photo is the one you take tomorrow
When that woman hugged me and said that I had brought her a moment of joy, it was possible to believe that I had been placed on earth for the sole purpose of providing her with that last ride. https://kentnerburn.com/the-cab-ride-ill-never-forget/
I’ll be remembered for my values, my attitude. For what I represented and how I did it. That’s what I think people leave. More than victories, or defeat, more than numbers. Success is on the inside. If you feel fulfilled by what you do, that is success. – Dani Pedrosa
Change is a direction, not destination. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75d_29QWELk
So I’ll just say it how it is. Life is Strange came out of nowhere and has quickly become not only my favorite game of all time, but one of my favorite things of all time. Never has any piece of media impacted me with such gravitas that this game has over the past few weeks. Like to the point where I didn’t even want to get out of bed the day after I played it through a second time. It’s doing things to me man. Changing perspectives. Forcing me to lower my defenses. Evaluating myself from the inside out and creating a more empathetic, selfless, and loving image to strive towards. I’m genuinely shocked that this thing has existed for over two years and I never knew about it. I didn’t beat this game. It beat me…and then some.
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be
One needs to be able to believe passionately and also be able to see the absurdity of one’s own beliefs and laugh at them
There are no silver bullets on how to do it right. You have to do everything. And everything slightly better all the time. Maybe learn from your mistakes and do slightly better the next time.
You’ll crash if you spend too much time looking in the rear view mirror
There’s no “cloud” only vapour
The thing about making your own grilled cheese sandwich is you can do it anywhere.