.....................................with Adam Grant:
Emotion regulation is not about controlling what you feel. It’s about choosing how you respond.
Wise people don’t suppress emotion—they find constructive ways to express it.
Intense feelings don’t always demand immediate reactions. They often benefit from deep reflection.
................................Matthew McConaughey:
If you cannot stop the lies, become less gullible.
With or without us the future is happening. Tune in.
May our heart carry our feet. Amen
Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.
Life's a miraculous journey of false summits until the end. Surrender to this fact. And climb until then.
...................................Rudyard Kipling:
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
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If you don’t get what you want, it’s a sign either that you did not seriously want it, or that you tried to bargain over the price.
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Everyone is more or less mad on one point.
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If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same
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Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.
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Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
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I keep six honest serving-men:
(They taught me all I knew)
Their names are What and Where and When
And How and Why and Who.
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A people always ends by resembling its shadow.
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Asia is not going to be civilised after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.
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Many religious people are deeply suspicious. They seem—for purely religious purposes, of course—to know more about iniquity than the unregenerate.
........................with Barry Ritholtz:
We spend too much time worrying about big, rare events, while ignoring the mundane everyday factors that are far more dangerous.
On a long enough timescale, everything is transitory. As we work our way through the detritus and minutia of life, we should not lose sight of that.
Those who are least knowledgeable are often the most cocksure about their own skills, abilities, and beliefs. This is an especially expensive error to make in trading and investing.
Once you recognize how little the experts (and the rest of us) know, you come to recognize how much humility investing requires. Accept the wisdom of recognizing our collective ignorance, and you will soon see how much better off you will be then . . .
Success is an iterative process—we often overlook the misses, the almosts, the faceplants, and the failures that precede victory.
Whatever my views are about the economy, markets, my portfolio, etc., I am always ready to discard them as I amass sufficient evidence my beliefs are wrong. "Strong opinions weakly held" means reversing your priors when necessary, cutting losses quickly, and never marrying any holding or belief system—ever.
...............................with Walt Kelly
Having lost sight of our objectives, we redoubled our efforts.
God is not dead — He is merely unemployed...
Looking back on things, the view always improves.
Don't take life so serious, son, it ain't nohow permanent.
We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.
The best break anybody ever gets is in bein' alive in the first place. An' you don't unnerstan' what a perfect deal it is until you realizes that you ain't gone be stuck with it forever, either.
Halp! My powerful brain is blowed itself up!
.......................................with Scott Adams:
Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.
The office is designed for "work," not productivity. Work can be defined as "anything you'd rather not be doing." Productivity is a different matter. Telecommuting substitutes two hours of productivity for ten hours of work.
......................................with Albert Ellis:
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
You never truly need what you want. That is the main and thoroughgoing key to serenity.
Convince yourself that worrying about many situations will make them worse rather than improve them.
The trouble with most therapy is that it helps you feel better. But you don't get better. You have to back it up with action, action, action.
You mainly feel the way you think.
There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.
The goal of all life is to have a ball.
.................................with Mark Manson
People like to make happiness complicated, but it’s actually quite simple.
..................................with Joseph Schumpeter:
We always plan too much and always think too little. We resent a call to thinking and hate unfamiliar argument that does not tally with what we already believe or would like to believe.
Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they’re going
The masses have not always felt themselves to be frustrated and exploited. But the intellectuals that formulated their views for them have always told them that they were, without necessarily meaning by it anything precise.
The way in which we see things can hardly be distinguished from the way in which we wish to see them.
Created by wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required.
History is a record of "effects" the vast majority of which nobody intended to produce.
. . .the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.
Every piece of business strategy must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative destruction.
I felt it my duty to take, and to inflict upon the reader, considerable trouble in order to lead up effectively to my paradoxical conclusion: capitalism is being killed by its achievements.
...................................Edward Gibbon:
Conversation enriches understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.
We improve ourselves by victory over our self. There must be contests, and you must win.
The principles of a free constitution are irrecoverably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.
All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
History is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself
There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.
It was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline that good soldier should dread his own officers far more than the enemy.
Instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.
..................................with Morgan Housel:
I try to keep in mind that there are two ways to use money. One is as a tool to live a better life. The other is as a yardstick of success to measure yourself against other people. The first is quiet and personal, the second is loud and performative. It’s so obvious which leads to a happier life.
.........................................Mel Brooks:
Comedy is a very powerful component of life. It has the most to say about the human condition because if you laugh you can get by. You can struggle when things are bad if you have a sense of humor. Laughter is a protest scream against death, against the long goodbye. It’s a defense against unhappiness and depression.
Failure is vital. It is an incredibly important quotient in the equation of a career. After you wipe away your tears, it’s not a bad experience and under the right circumstances it will make you better, both as a person and as an artist. I think it’s important to fail, especially between the ages of twenty and thirty. Success is like sugar. It’s too good. It’s too sweet. It’s too wonderful and it burns up very quickly. Failure is like corned beef hash. It takes a while to eat. It takes a while to digest. But it stays with you.
Feeling different, feeling alienated, feeling persecuted, feeling that the only way to deal with the world is to laugh - because if you don't laugh you're going to cry and never stop crying - that's probably what's responsible for the Jews having developed such a great sense of humor. The people who had the greatest reason to weep, learned more than anyone else how to laugh.
Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.
Look, I really don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive, you've got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy, colorful and lively.
As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes.
I've been accused of vulgarity. I say that's bullshit.
Hope for the Best. Expect the worst. Life is a play. We're unrehearsed.
....................................with Chris Lynch:
People have said that every great fortune is based on a crime. Most of the members of Congress are millionaires. Just saying...
.............................with Jasper Johns:
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| Three Flags 1958 |
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| Target 1961 |
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| Between the clock and the bed 1989 |
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| Scent 1975-76 |
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| False Start 1959 |
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| Bread 1969 |
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| Dancers on a Plane 1981 |
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| 0 through 9 1961 |
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| Map 1961 |
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| Flag above white 1955 |
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| Target 1955 |
................................with Alain de Botton:
Maturity: The confidence to have no opinions on many things.
The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.
Being a good listener is one of the most important and enchanting life skills anyone can have.
Soberingly, despite all our advances in technology and material resources, we are not much more advanced in the art of delivering emotionally healthy childhoods than generations before us.
...............with Joseph Heller's Catch-22:
Insanity is contagious.
it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.
Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian's fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.
There was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to.
Major Major had been born too late and too mediocre. Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.
He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.
Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskoph had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times.
The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.
History did not demand Yossarian's premature demise, justice could be satisfied without it, progress did not hinge upon it, victory did not depend on it. That men would die was a matter of necessity; WHICH men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance. But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.
He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
Now you've given them hope, and they're unhappy. So the blame is all yours.
“From now on I'm thinking only of me." Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: "But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way." "Then," said Yossarian, "I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?”
............................Shane Parrish:
The formula for failure is a few small errors consistently repeated.
When you don't communicate what's most important, people are left guessing about what matters.
The future is not like the weather. It doesn't just happen to us. We shape our future with the choices we make in the present, just as our present situation was shaped by choices we made in the past.
Admitting you're wrong isn't a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength.
The biggest mistake people make isn't their initial mistake. It's the mistake of trying to cover up and avoid responsibility for it. The first mistake is expensive; the second one costs a fortune.
The most critical step in any decision-making process is to get the problem right.
The way you define a problem changes what you see.
Shifting your frame of reference is a powerful safeguard against blind spots.
Show me your role models and I'll show you your future.
Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people.
You don't tap into peoples' resourcefulness, intelligence, and skills by command-and-control.
..........................with Montesquieu:
I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.
If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.
Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.
I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should appear like a fool but be wise.
I can assure you that no kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ.
History is full of religious wars; but, we must take care to observe, it was not the multiplicity of religions that produced these wars, it was the intolerating spirit which animated that one which thought she had the power of governing.
Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.
..............................with Louis Brandeis:
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent.
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.
At the foundation of our civil liberty lies the principle which denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.
Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.
If you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you.
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