Category: Personal

“Things that have never happened before happen all the time,” says Stanford professor Scott Sagan.

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Anthropologist Ashley Montagu on aging well:

“The goal of life is to die young — as late as possible!”

Source: Growing Young

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Novelist Jeanette Winterson on the value of darkness:

“I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing — their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses.

To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative. I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights — then I start thinking about projects, deadlines, demands, and the shadows and shapes of the house become objects, not suggestions, things that need to done, not a background to thought.”

Source: Why I Adore the Night

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“Deconstruct the cool things you see.

If you’d like to become a better musician and you see an amazing performance, start paying attention to how they do it. How did they promote the event? What happens in the first ten seconds of each song? How frequently are they engaging directly with the audience? Is there a progression of energy throughout the show?

When something fascinates you, pay attention to the details. The person who thinks, “That was cool” is a consumer. The person who thinks, “How did they make something that cool?” is on the path to being a creator.

Don’t just taste the recipe, look for the ingredients.”

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“The hard way is the fast way.

Do it right the first time and you won’t have to do it over the next time.”

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Treat every experience as though it is the last time you will have it

“There will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the ocean, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. Yet usually there’ll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you’re doing it for the last time. Harris’s point is that we should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it. And indeed there’s a sense in which every moment of life is a “last time.” It arrives; you’ll never get it again—and once it’s passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before. To treat all these moments solely as stepping-stones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren’t for the fact that we all do it, all the time.”

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David Brooks makes the distinction between “resume virtues” and “eulogy virtues.”

Resume virtues are things like income, job title, and the size of your house. Eulogy virtues are things like being helpful, being loved, being honest, and being remembered.

An irony is that many people aspire for the latter, but put all their effort into the former. (Link)

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I had a professor in college who used to work for Adobe. He said the engineers who built Photoshop had no clue how users would use every filter and tool in the software. They just tried to develop every imaginable way to manipulate an image and had faith that artists and designers would discover a creative use for it.

A lot of things work like that – their value to the world isn’t entirely known, or predicted, by their creator.

Visa founder Dee Hock said, “A book is far more than what the author wrote; it is everything you can imagine and read into it as well.”

Author James Patterson said, “One of the best things about reading is that you’ll always have something to think about when you’re not reading.”

Mark Twain, as he does, put it best when he said: “Wagoner’s music is better than it sounds.”

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Investor Howard Marks once told the story of an investor whose performance was never in the top half of his peers in any given year. But, cumulatively, over a 14-year period, he ranked in the top 4% of his peers.

Bond giant PIMCO has an idea called “strategic mediocrity”: You’re never the best in the short run, but you stick around long enough to outlive the competition and come out on top.

My thoughts: I think this is what made Tiger Woods so prolific. He rarely shot a 63, but also rarely shot a 73. That’s not to imply he was mediocre. He just knew that 3 or 4 under for four days was going to win a lot of tournaments.

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Henry Ford had a rule for his factories: No one could keep a record of the experiments that were tried and failed.

Ford wrote in his book My Life and Work:

I am not particularly anxious for the men to remember what someone else has tried to do in the past, for then we might quickly accumulate far too many things that could not be done.

That is one of the troubles with extensive records. If you keep on recording all of your failures you will shortly have a list showing that there is nothing left for you to try – whereas it by no means follows because one man has failed in a certain method that another man will not succeed.

That was Ford’s experience. “We get some of our best results from letting fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” He wrote: “Hardly a week passes without some improvement being made somewhere in machine or process, and sometimes this is made in defiance of what is called “the best shop practice.”

The important thing is that when something that previously didn’t work suddenly does, it doesn’t necessarily mean the people who tried it first were wrong. It usually means other parts of the system have evolved in a way that allows what was once impossible to now become practical.

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Novelist Paulo Coelho on taking action:

“One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted. Do it now.”

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Growth and comfort cannot coexist

When you run a knowledge business. You manage hearts; not parts

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From start to finish, I put my thumbprint on this process in my own unique way. It’s a twist on what’s expected and executed in my own language. The deeper you look, the more you find.

My shop neighbor here in Fortuna works on old custom cars. Just beautiful stuff. He said to me once when we were talking shop on a Friday looking at one of his cars, “If you see this drive by, it needs to look like a Mustang. It has to be instantly recognizable. But when I park it, and you really can take a moment, every single line on this car is different. No piece of this is what it used to be. It’s still a Mustang, but it doesn’t share a single curve, sweep, part or component of what it came in here with. I’ve left my mark on every single part of this car I’ve touched. The people who truly appreciate what it is, and truly understand, those are the people that I make this car for.”

For me, that car is the putters I am creating. And the car gear heads who really appreciate the difference? Well, that’s the No. 1 golfer in the world. LINK