Yes and no.............

No’s mean more than yes’s. Saying yes is easy—people say yes to things they don't care about all the time.

Saying no requires you to be willing to lose something. That's how you know it's real.

-Mark Manson, from here

a very mysterious thing..........

 

     So you see that, in a sense, I know very little about how this story was born.  That is, I don't know where the pictures came from.  And I don't believe anyone knows exactly how he 'makes things up'.  Making up is a very mysterious thing.  When you 'have an idea' could you tell anyone exactly how you thought of it?

-C. S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds, from the chapter describing the birth of Aslan and Narnia

a faint flutter................

 

Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves.  Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope.  Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man.  I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history.  As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own sufferings and joy, builds for all.

-Albert Camus, from this collection of essays

Slopulism....................

 

In general, this tax idea fits into the increasing trend toward “slopulism” in Democratic policymaking — the idea that a modern government can be funded solely on the backs of the super-rich, while the merely-rich get big tax cuts.

-Noah Smith, as he looks at California's "one time" billionaire tax

Old school.....................

 

The American university is broken. The people running the universities know it, which is why they have redoubled their efforts to make sure you can’t do anything about it.

-Colin Redemer, from this essay

via

Go tell a story......................

 

Stories transfer ideas intact: they enable understanding to travel from one consciousness to another without loss of potency.

On big, shiny ideas..............

 If you find yourself wondering how no one has thought of this before, that’s a warning sign. Chances are, there’s a quiet graveyard of leaders who learned something expensive that you haven’t yet uncovered. Go talk to them.

I’m pro-innovation. I believe in big ideas. But I’m skeptical of shiny ones—too clean, too theoretical, too detached from human realities. The best strategies are forged in constraint, humility, and patience. They’re honest about how many variables they’re trying to solve at once.

-Mike Sharrow, from here

via

Speed and patience..................

 

Speed creates opportunity. Patience compounds it.

Moving fast will generate more chances. But if you quickly jump from thing to thing, growth will stall.

Get moving and find what works, then do it for decades.

-James Clear

the best test of truth............

Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care wholeheartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment

-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, from this dissent

the initiative individual...........

 

      Here the initiative individual—the "great man," the "hero," the "genius"—regains his place as a formative force in history.  His not quite the god that Carlyle described, he grows out of his time and land, and is the product and symbol of events as well as their agent and voice; without some situation requiring a new response his new ideas would be untimely and impractical.  When he is a hero of action, the demands of his position and the exaltation of crisis develop and inflate him to such magnitude and powers as would in normal times have remained potential and untapped.  But he is not merely an effect.  Events take place through him as well as around him, his ideas and decisions enter vitally into the course of history.  At times his eloquence, like Churchill's, may be worth a thousand regiments: his foresight in strategy and tactics, like Napoleon's, may win battles and campaigns and establish states.  If he is a prophet like Mohammed, wise in the means of inspiring men, his words may raise a poor and disadvantaged people to unpremeditated ambitions and surprising power.  A Pasteur, a Morse, an Edison, a Ford, a Wright, a Marx, a Lenin, a Mao Tse-tung are effects of numberless causes, and causes of endless effects.

-Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

On particulars and generalities......

 

     A hostile commentator might remark that Aristotle (like Nietzsche) criticizes Plato so keenly because he is conscious of having borrowed from him generously; no man is a hero to his debtors.  But Aristotle has a healthy attitude, nevertheless; he is a realist almost in the modern sense; he is resolved to concern himself with the objective present, while Plato is absorbed in the subjective future.  There was, in the Socratic-Platonic demand for definitions, a tendency away from things and facts to theories and ideas, from particulars to generalities, from science to scholasticism; at last Plato became so devoted to generalities that they began to determine his particulars, so devoted to ideas that they began to define or select his facts.  Aristotle preaches a return to things, to the "unwithered face of nature" and reality; he had a lusty preference for the concrete particular, for the flesh and blood individual.  But Plato so loved the general and universal that in The Republic he destroyed the individual to make a perfect state.

-Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

The fifty year mortgage..................

 

Been reading that the idea of a 50-year mortgage is being bandied about.  Lots of commentary about why this is a horrible idea.  The amount of extra interest the home buyer would pay—if they kept the mortgage for all fifty years—over a more traditional loan is staggering.  But, while it is not for everyone, it could have its uses.  It is essentially an interest-only loan.  If your intent is to only live in a place for a few years, and you believe housing prices will still be inflating, then it could be a very viable option.  Just be careful to avoid any pre-payment penalties.  It is certainly not a panacea for the affordability problems we are currently facing.

opportunity........................

 

While we tend to think of inspiration as bolt-from-the-blue, God-given brilliance, this instant form of ideation tends to be much rarer than the other kinds—plenary, moral, mechanical, and dynamical—that the medieval intellectuals listed.  But most often, an opportunity begins as a failure.  That's why most of us miss it.

-Jay Heinrichs, Aristotle's Guide to Self-Persuasion

A legal immigrant......................

...........has many questions and a few observations:

 Here’s a common-sense proposition: Since we can’t invite the whole world inside our borders, let’s consider the matter as one of optimal limits. Once the need to restrain immigration is acknowledged, the next step should be to seek consensus on the practicalities—the maximum number the country can absorb each year, the skills we most urgently need to import, and, of course, the most transparent and fair process for those arriving, as I once did, on the shores of this fortunate land.

In other words, our attention must turn fully to legality, not illegality. That should be the content of the politics of immigration: devising rules and procedures for legal entry that are intuitive to Americans as well as to potential migrants. The current system, we should accept, is a soul-devouring labyrinth that deserves to be demolished in its entirety.

-Martin Gurri

the notion of originality..............

 

. . . in the quest for ideas, the entrepreneur should not overly obsess with the new.  That we tend to venerate the original without always penetrating the notion of originality.  Sometimes, if not frequently, the best idea is a refinement of something that already exists or a recombination of parts that no one else has thought to assemble.  And success comes so often in the remorseless perfection of execution.

-Albert Read, The Imagination Muscle

trained and developed..............

 

     The idea of the imagination as a muscle—as a faculty of the mind that could be trained and developed—had lodged with me.

-Albert Read, from his Introduction to The Imagination Muscle: Where Good Ideas Come From (And How to Have More of Them)

Here's an idea................

 

....................................anti-Brahminization:

In reality, the party maintains a meticulous commitment to fiscal responsibility, democratic governance, and material populism.

license....................

 

. . . a playful attitude is fundamental to creative thinking.  I'll bet that you generate most of your new ideas when you're playing in your mental playground.  You give yourself license to try different approaches without fear of penalty.  Your defenses are down, and your likely to have little concern with the rules or being wrong.  You try one thing, and then another—often not getting anywhere.  You ask "what if" and "why not," put things is different contexts, and look at them backwards.  Eventually, you may come up with a worthwhile idea.

-Roger von Oech, A Whack on the Side of the Head

an idea.............................

 

That is the continual manifestation, within each of us, of the Divine Word that generated the cosmos when time and space themselves began.  That is the initial biblical characterization of the spirit of what is highest; the initial manifestation of the spirit of the one God.  This is a stunning idea, a revolutionary idea, a world-ordering idea, a civilization-engendering idea—an idea that is a precondition for optimized psychological and social order alike. It is from that presumption of our implicit individual value—to say it again—that we derive our infinite set of natural rights (and, let us not forget, as we are so prone to, natural responsibility).

-Jordan B. Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine

warning........................

 

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it's the only one we have.

-Émile Chartier