Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Do the times make the leader or does the leader shape the times? How can a leader infuse a sense of purpose and meaning into people's lives? What is the difference between power, title, and leadership? Is leadership possible without a purpose larger than personal ambition?
-Doris Kearns Goodwin, from the Forward to her book, Leadership In Turbulent Times
The price of certainty is high: surrendering to a limited experience of life, designed by individuals and corporations who do not know us, whose interests are not ours. In this condition, convenience is passivity and choice obedience. . . . Every generation of human being has lived with uncertainty and unpredictability: that's how we developed our staggering human capacity for invention, discovery, improvisation, and creativity. Our ability to invent came from necessity, not comfort.
-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
We pass our existence within this warm wobble of flesh and yet take it almost entirely for granted. how many among us know even roughly where the spleen is or what it does? Of the difference between tendons and ligaments? Or what our lymph nodes are up to? How may times a day do you suppose you blink? Five hundred? A thousand? You've no idea, of course. Well, you blink fourteen thousand times a day—so much that your eyes are shut for twenty-three minutes of every waking day. Yet you never have to think about it, because every second of every day your body undertakes a literally unquantifiable number of tasks—a quadrillion, a nonillion, a quindecillion, a vigiantillion (these are actual measures), at all events some number vastly beyond imagining—without requiring an instant of your attention.
-Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide For Occupants
Ed Note: To save you the trouble, a vigintillion is, in US measurements, a number equal to 1 followed by 63 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
You can look up the spleen yourself.
It’s not until you consider the time factor of compounding that you realize maximizing annual returns in a given year and maximizing long-term wealth are two different things.
Carl Richards once made the point that a house might be the best investment most people ever make. It’s not that housing provides great returns – it does not. It’s not even the leverage. It’s that people are more likely to buy a house and sit on it without interruption for years or decades than any other asset. It’s the one asset people give compounding a fighting chance to work.
-Morgan Housel, from this post
Read the paragraph below and you likely say: "Yep, that's true." Except, it hasn't happened in other parts of the world. What's up? Culture matters. Interesting take here.
One of the simplest explanations offered for the continued strength of the U.S. stock market in recent years is generationally low interest rates. If there are no safe yield alternatives, investors are forced to go out further on the risk curve.
Government rulebooks may not be the place to look for the authoritative word on state-of-the-art technology, whether in communications or in sustainability. Regulatory usurpation of decision-making by individuals voluntarily engaging with one another to fund and build transformative technologies will be harmful to liberty and to our shared goals for a greener, safer, healthier, and more prosperous world.
-Hester Peirce, as culled from here
..........................................The Courthouse lighting: this is how we know Christmas is coming to Licking County
Good strategy grows out of an independent and careful assessment of the situation, harnessing individual insight to carefully crafted purpose. Bad strategy follows the crowd, substituting popular slogans for insights.
Being independent without being eccentric and doubting without being a curmudgeon are some of the most difficult things a person can do. . . .
An important virtue of a good leader is putting the situation in perspective and having cool-minded judgment. Both virtues help mitigate the bias inherent in social herding and the inside view. The inside view describes the fact that people tend to see themselves, their group, their project, their company, or their nation as special and different.
Today, we are offered a bewildering variety of tools and concepts to aid in analysis and the construction of strategies. Each of these tools envisions the challenge slightly differently. For some it is identifying important trends; for others it is erecting barriers to imitation. Yet, there is a more fundamental challenge common to all contexts. That is the challenge of working around one's own cognitive limitations and biases—one's own myopia. Our own myopia is the obstacle common to all strategic situations.
Being strategic is being less myopic—less shortsighted—than others.
-Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
One interpretation of trends today is that the Rise of the Rest challenges the free values of the West. Focusing on the last few decades, the high growth in autocratic China seems like a particular assault on the Western model. But this book has offered another interpretation from a longer-run perspective: free values are gradually spreading from the West to the Rest, including to China, and the Rise of the Rest reflects precisely that spread of free values. The idea that individual rights are "Western values" may be an anachronism that is becoming clearer.
The global double standard of rights for the rich and not for the poor is very much alive in the technocratic world view of development. But this, too, could be a casualty of the Rise of the Rest and the spread of freedom. The disrespect for poor people shown by agencies such as the World Bank and the Gates Foundation, with their stereotypes of wise technocrats from the West and helpless victims from the Rest, may become increasingly untenable. Development may have to give up its authoritarian mind-set to survive.
On the third day of their honeymoon, infamous environmental activist Stewie Woods and his new bride, Annabel Belloti, were spiking trees in the forest when a cow exploded and blew them up. Until then, their marriage had been happy.
-C. J. Box, Savage Run
As the Italian economist and culture researcher Guido Tabellini puts it: "Lack of trust and lack of respect for others are typical of hierarchical societies, where the individual is regarded as responding to instinct rather than reason, and where instinct often leads to a myopic or harmful course of action. In such societies, individualism is mistrusted and to be suppressed, since nothing good comes out of it: good behavior is deemed to result from coercion. Hence, the role of the state is to force citizens to behave well."
-William Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and The Forgotten Rights of the Poor
Remembering that technology outsources human activity to a machine should be enough to steer us clear of apps whose ambitious developers hope will produce better humans than humans. Treating each other first as objects and then as groups, mediated by technological interfaces, just makes it cheaper, faster, easier to isolate and demonize one another. Relying on such systems means that we trade judgment for efficiency, reflection for obedience, inquiry for conformity, and independence for constraint. Only organizations or individuals that are implicitly authoritarian would arrogate to themselves the right to tell people who they are and what they might become.
-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
I'd like to live in a country where the official motto was, "You never know." It would help me relax.
By definition, winging it is not a strategy.
-Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
4. Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realize the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of that controlling Power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set on it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never to your power again.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Two
............that Dasher, Donner, Blitzen, et. al. had character issues, but was always willing to give Santa a free pass:
...................................It is more of an art than science.
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