A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
Do not be envious of evil men, nor desire to be with them.
2. For their minds devise violence, and their lips talk of trouble.
3. By wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established.
4. And by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches.
-The Holy Bible, Proverbs 24:1-4
The next time you face a political dispute or a personal disagreement, ask yourself: Is there any reason to fight about this? Is arguing going to help solve anything? Would an educated or wise person really be as quarrelsome as you might initially be inclined to be? Or would they take a breath, relax, and resist the temptation for conflict? Just think of what you could accomplish—and how much better you would feel—if you could conquer the need to fight and win every tiny little thing.
-Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic
We do ourselves a disservice when we think of human beings as exclusively logic—or knowledge—driven, and fail to pay attention to the role of emotions. The two systems are enmeshed because that is the way our brain and our organism have been put together by evolution. . . .
Emotions and feelings are not a luxury; they are a means of communicating our states of mind to others. But they are also a way of guiding our own judgments and decisions. Emotions bring the body into the loop of reason.
-Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
Technology was an exciting tool we could use to make our lives better. But instead of humans using technology as a tool, it now wants to use us as a tool to harvest and sell the data it reaps from us to the highest bidder, which has enormous market value.
The partnership between technology and Wall Street sees humans as a profit-making venture for investors to "make a killing" and become unicorn billionaires. Many of us, however, are now having second thoughts about all the "surveillance capitalism" operating in our lives. We're not comfortable with Google tracking our every move, Facebook's outsized role in influencing politics, X's propensity to divide us into extreme camps, Instagram's effect on mental health and body-conscious concerns, and TikTok's ability to monetize our attention and shape our opinions . . .
-Kevin Ervin Kelley, Irreplaceable: How to Create Extraordinary Places That Bring People Together
...........if you are interested in the goings on at the various hot spots around the world, do yourself a favor and visit the Institute for the Study of War.
The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in seeing with new eyes.
Everyone in business wants to know, "What's new?" But a better question for creating new market opportunities is to ask, "What's missing?"
One of the major voids we see across demographics . . . is people's need and desire to make good friends, feel less isolated and lonely, and belong to something more meaningful.
-Kevin Ervin Kelly, Irreplaceable
We learn best through other people. Our ability to learn from each other greatly exceeds our ability to solve problems on our own. . . . "The secret to our species' success lies not in our raw, innate intelligence or in any specialized mental abilities," writes Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich. Instead, he argues it's the ability to learn easily from the innovations of others that makes us uniquely capable as a species. . . . Imitation is the foundation for human ingenuity.
-Scott H. Young, Get Better at Anything
The legendary music producer Rick Rubin was asked if there's anything the artists he's worked with (which includes some of the all-time greats: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, Run-D.M.C., Eminem, Adele, Dr. Dre, and on and on) have in common.
They all struggle with self-doubt.
To overcome self-doubt, Rubin tells them, "Make it your goal to just be better than you were."
Make it your goal, he says, to focus on goals you have control over. "Compete only with yourself. If you say, 'I don't want to write unless I can write better than The Beatles,' that's a hard road. But if you say, 'I want to write a better song today than I wrote yesterday,' that can be done."
-Paul Rabil, The Way of the Champion
All art is a form of poetry. It's always changing, never fixed. We may think we know what a piece we made means, yet over time that interpretation may change. The creator stops being the creator once they finish the work. They then become the viewer. And the viewer can bring as much of their own meaning to a piece as the creator.
We will never know a work's true meaning. It's helpful to remember that there are forces at work beyond our comprehension. Let's make are, and let others make the stories.
-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
If we accept that life is imperfect, we'll make fewer self-defeating demands for perfection on ourselves and others.
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