While Newton’s third law was developed with physics in mind, it applies equally well to biology. When pushed on, we push back. The harder we push others, the harder they push back. How well we align with this simple principle of mirrored reciprocation determines whether our outcomes are good or bad.
-Farnum Street, from this mighty fine edition of Brain Food
................................................language.
Makes you wonder, today as people endlessly “pursue perfect” — the perfect family vacation, the perfect athletic experience, the perfect house, the perfect life, are we missing the point? Instead of “searching for perfect”, should we instead be searching for unique experiences and embracing whatever this pursuit brings?
-Ted Lamade, from this guest post
Now, I know of only two methods of establishing equality in the political world; rights must be given to every citizen, or none at all to anyone. . . .
There is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality that incites men to wish all to be powerful and honored. This passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book 1, Chapter 3
If anyone gets intoxicated with his knowledge when he looks beneath him, let him turn his eyes upward toward past ages, and he will lower his horns, finding there so many thousands of minds that trample him underfoot.
-Michel de Montaigne, Complete Works, Book 2, Essay 6
Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man. As long as I hear truth, I am bathed by a beautiful element, and am not conscious of any limits to my nature.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay, Intellect
......................especially about the future:
A master-of-the-universe mentality is pervasive in finance because it’s a group of highly educated, competitive people. They see it as a sign of weakness if you admit you don’t know what’s going to happen next.
The problem is finance people (all people, really) are very good at telling you why something that just happened was obvious in hindsight. They are terrible at telling you what will happen in the future.
-Ben Carlson, from this post
Service, for me, for us, is not a transactional act. It's not a trick we undertake to get people to give us their money. Yes, of course, great service has strategic value. Every day we go out with the belief that we need to re-earn our customer's trust and make it worthwhile for people to want to spend time and money with us. But really, service is a way of being in the world.
Most of the rewards of the Presidency, in these degenerate days, have come to be very trashy. The President continues, of course, to be an eminent man, but only in the sense that Jack Dempsey, Lindbergh, Babe Ruth and Henry Ford are eminent men. He sees little of the really intelligent and amusing people of the country, most of them, in fact, make it a sort of point of honor to scorn him and avoid him. His time is put in mainly with shabby politicians and other such designing fellows—in brief, with rogues and ignoramuses. When he takes a little holiday his customary companions are vermin that no fastidious man would consort with—dry Senators with panting thirsts, the proprietors of bad newspapers in worse towns, grafter praying on the suffering farmers, pawer and movie magnates, prehensile labor leaders, the more pliable sort of journalists, and so on.
-Henry Louis Mencken, from his 8/17/1931 essay, Imperial Purple
"Remember when you got thrown out of the sailing club for leaving the race and sailing all the way across the bay?" I only had to think a moment about that major event in my mis-spent youth. It had been the same kind of a day as today.
"You bet I do," I said with a laugh.
"I never told you, but that was about as proud as I ever was of you. I mean, being the first Buffett to get a college degree was good, don't get me wrong, but that time you just decided to light out on your own, that was the moment."
-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty
Mead was prophesying a revolution with profound social and political consequences. Influence in this new world would accrue to people who could produce computing power and manipulate it with software. The semiconductor engineers of Silicon Valley had the specialized knowledge, networks, and stock options that let them write the rules of the future—rules that everyone else would have to follow. Industrial society was giving way to a digital world, with 1s and 0s stored and processed on many millions of slabs of silicon spread throughout society. The era of the tech tycoons was dawning. "Society's fate will hang in the balance," Carver Mead declared. "The catalyst is the microelectronics technology and its ability to put more and more components into less and less space." Industry outsiders only dimly perceived how the world was changing, but Intel's leaders knew that if they succeeded in dramatically expanding the availability of computing power, radical changes would follow. "We are really the revolutionaries in the world today," Gordon Moore declared in 1973, "not the kids with the long hair and beards who were wreaking the schools a few years ago."
-Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
Comparison makes you unhappy, and there's no end to comparison in the world, if that's the path you choose.
-Dan Sullivan/Benjamin Hardy, The Gap and the Gain
The family adopted a motto: "Live dangerously—carefully."
-Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk
I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film Contact, when Jodie Foster's character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, "They should've sent a poet." I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn't out there, it's down here, with all of us.
-William Shatner, Boldly Go: Reflections of a Life of Awe and Wonder
They live laboriously, in order that they may live better; they fit themselves out for life at the expense of life itself, and cast their thoughts a long way forwards: yet postponement is the greatest waste of life: it wrings day after day from us, and takes away the present by promising something hereafter: there is not such obstacle to true living as waiting, which loses to-day while it depends on the morrow.
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
Despite the fact that it had been around for most of my adult life, I harbored a deep distrust for social media of any kind. The idea of voluntarily revealing all that personal info to strangers had always struck me as dumber than dumb—and I'd seen far too many cases of Internet stalking, fraud, catfishing, and worse to change my mind about it. Ever since my early twenties, when I'd shut down my meager Facebook account after some jerk tried to blackmail me for nudes via private message, I've used the Internet only for work and for the purchasing of shoes—an approach I believe could lead to world peace if more people shared it.
-Alison Gaylin, Robert B. Parker's Bad Influence: A Sunny Randall Novel
One day when he was five, one of his cousins was having a birthday party, but Elon was punished for getting into a fight and told to stay home. He was a very determined kid, and he decided to walk on his own to his cousin's house. The problem was that it was on the other side of Pretoria, a walk of almost two hours. Plus, he was too young to read the road signs. "I kind of knew what the route looking like because I had seen it from the car, and I was determined to get there, so I just started walking," he says. He managed to arrive just as the party was ending. When his mother saw him coming down the road, she freaked out. Fearing he would be punished again, he climbed a maple tree and refused to come down. Kimbal remembers standing beneath the tree and staring at his older brother in awe. "He has this fierce determination that blows your mind and was sometimes frightening, and still is."
-Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk
Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.
The key to productivity is doing more of what matters and less of what doesn't. When you concentrate your mental and physical energy in one direction, you have the most impact. . . .
Being busy and being productive are not
the same thing. Running around in circles is busy. Going toward your
destination is productive. It's easy to be busy. It's hard to be productive.
In some industries – admittedly not all – the executive to employee pay imbalance is in Louis XIV territory, and the peasants are actively rattling the cage doors for their slice of cake.
For instance, while the UAW demands seem insane, greedy, and self-defeating on their face, when you look at them in relation to what they’re paying, say, the insipid head of GM (Her 2022 compensation comes in at a paltry $28,979,570 which, if you can believe it, meant she made a little less than in 2021.)? You have a sense of where the anger may be coming from.
It seems to me that the newspaper reporters of today know very little of the high adventure that bathed the reporters of my time, now nearly thirty years ago. The journalism of that era was still somewhat wild-cattish: all sorts of mushroom papers sprang up; any man with a second-hand press and a few thousand dollars could start one. Thus there was a steady shifting of men from paper to paper, and even the most sober journals got infected with the general antinomianism of the craft. Salaries were low, but nobody seemed to care. A reporter who showed any sign of opulence was a sort of marvel, and got under suspicion. The theory was that journalism was an art, and that to artists money was somehow offensive.
Now all that is past. A good reporter used to make as much as a bartender or a police sergeant; he now makes as much as the average doctor or lawyer, and probably a great deal more. His view of the world he lives in has thus changed. He is no longer a free-lance in human society, thumbing his nose at its dignitaries; he has got a secure lodgment in a definite stratum, and his wife, if he has one, maybe has social ambitions. The highest sordid aspiration that any reporter had, in my time, was to own two complete suits of clothes. Today they have dinner-coats and some of them even own plug hats.
-H. L. Mencken, from a 1/10/1027 Baltimore Evening Sun article
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