Quotes
A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".
His father said no more. The next day, he gave his son a pouch that held three ancient Spanish gold coins.
"I found these one day in the fields. I wanted them to be a part of your inheritance. But use them to buy your flock. Take to the fields, and someday you'll learn that our countryside is the best, and our women the most beautiful."
And he gave the boy his blessing. The boy could see in his father's gaze a desire to be able, himself, to travel the world — a desire that was still alive, despite his father's having had to bury it, over dozens of years, under the burden of struggling for water to drink, food to eat, and the same place to sleep every night of his life.
Free people make free choices. Free choices mean you get unequal outcomes. You can have freedom, or you can have equal outcomes. You can’t have both.
The next string theory may well hit someone as they're strolling on the beach, but you can be sure that person will have known his quantum physics - and banged his head for years against the equations he's about to throw out the window.
Success in America today comes more often to groups who resist today's dominant American culture.
When the situation was manageable, it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand, we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in thi sstory. It is as old as the Sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience, and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong - these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.
Software contracts are better than first-lien debt. You realize a company will not pay the interest payment on their first lien until after they pay their software maintenance or subscription fee. We get paid our money first. Who has the better credit? He can’t run his business without our software.
Capitalism is what happens when people drop their time preference, defer immediate gratification, and invest in the future. Debt‐fueled mass consumption is as much a normal part of capitalism as asphyxiation is a normal part of respiration.
The primary risk of entrepreneurship and other free agent lifestyles is not financial or even social — it is the risk to a person’s very self-concept as someone who does what they set out to do.
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
I wish I could say I felt something different when I was in the presence of a mass murderer, handing me a cup of espresso in an empty convent. In the movies, some foreboding music might play in the background or the light might dim. But there was none of that. Evil has an ordinary face. It laughs, it cries, it deflects, it rationalizes, it makes great pasta.
"You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?" We didn’t understand his question, and it was a damned good question.
I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.
We tried never to fall in love with a plan, because that breeds complacency.
Don't be intimidated by anything. In the vast majority of the professions and vocations, the people who succeed are not any cleverer than you. The adult world is not full of gods, just people who have acquired skills and habits that work for them. And specialize—the great human achievement is to specialize as a producer of goods or services so that you can diversify as a consumer. Self-sufficiency is another word for poverty.
Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.
I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.
Equally in the future one are the milestones by which you measure your financial success will be not just how many zeros you can add to your net worth, rather whether you can structure affairs in a way that enables you to revise full individual autonomy and independence.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
Still, as one IBM insider remembered it, 'Every time I talked to Bill, he gave me the impression I was his most important customer.'
Look at what caused people to make a lot of money and you will see that usually it is in proportion to their production of what the society wanted.
I wasn’t the fastest guy in the world [...] I wouldn’t have done well in an Olympiad or a math contest. But I like to ponder. And pondering things, just sort of thinking about it and thinking about it, turns out to be a pretty good approach.
It's not what you say, it's what the other person hears.
And that's one of the key lessons I’ve learned over the years – don't be over-protective of your own work, understand that it might not always be quite right, and that there's always something new to learn or understand.
If you want to build a ship,
don't drum up the people
to gather wood, divide the
work, and give orders.Instead, teach them to yearn
for the vast and endless sea.
Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.
A vision without a task is but a dream,
a task without a vision is drudgery,
a vision and a task is the hope of the world.
[W]ealthy people tend to have their preferences dictated by a system meant to milk them.
If anyone can refute me – show me I'm making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective — I'll gladly change.
It's the truth I'm after and the truth never harmed anyone.
What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.
No carelessness in your actions. No confusion in your words. No imprecision in your thoughts.
Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.
Work is love made visible. And if you can't work with love, but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of the people who work with joy.
Everything that happens is either endurable or not.
If it's endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining.
If it's unendurable... then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well.
Just remember: you can endure anything your mind can make endurable, by treating it as in your interest to do so.
This is what you deserve. You could be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow.
When you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, remember that your defining characteristic - what defines a human being - is to work with others. Even animals know how to sleep. And it's the characteristic activity that's the more natural one - more innate and more satisfying.
The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.
The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.
Fundamentalism is the philosophy of the powerless, the conquered, the displaced and the dispossessed.
We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc., but only by doing our work.
Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure.
The worst fate of any shipping of any product is that nobody cares. You don’t get any feedback at all. That’s what most features or most products do. They’re just dead weight.
Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done.