849 Quotations Found

In life and business, success is about making good trade-offs. It’s not about having it all. It’s about having what matters most. We all value different things. That’s what makes life rich. Opportunity cost is what you give up when choosing; trade-offs are the balancing acts you perform when deciding between competing options. They’re two sides of the same ­ coin—whenever you make a ­trade-­off, … [ Read more ]

Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure

Wisdom is anticipating the consequences of your choices.

Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Wisdom

The lazy lose to the average.
The average lose to the focused.
The focused lose to the obsessed.

Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

If I hold biases against you, that harms you, absolutely, but it also harms me, and I think this is something that we don’t talk about enough. If I’m biased toward you, this is preventing me from seeing the world clearly. It’s preventing me from really understanding what’s happening. It’s preventing trust between us. It’s preventing us from having a meaningful connection across whatever differences … [ Read more ]

Author: Jessica Nordell | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Facts | Bias, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

Few things are as important to your quality of life as your choices about how to spend the precious resource of your free time.

Author: Winifred Gallagher | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management

We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotion — love, antipathy, charity, or malice — and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test … [ Read more ]

Author: Milan Kundera | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Power, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

At the heart of this murderous self-importance is our troubled relationship to power — the power within and between selves, its confused uses and abuses, its role as a mirror for our emotional incompleteness. Out of it arises the entire dynamic system we call society and all the inner turmoil of discerning where we end and the world begins.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Power

A large part of wisdom is knowing what to ignore. A large part of expertise is knowing where to place your attention.

Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management, Success / Failure, Wisdom

The paradox of progress is that because there is no universal utopia — every utopia is built on someone’s back — there can be no universal progress, no absolute measure of it. Its relativism conceals a euphemism for moving the world in the direction of one’s own desires, relativism laced with myriad hypocrisies.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: History, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.

Author: Zadie Smith | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: History, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

The social rewards for going with the crowd are felt long before the benefits of going against it are gained. One measure of a person is the degree to which they’ll do the right thing when it goes against popular belief.

Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Concepts, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Freedom is inherently risky, which is the reason for rules and limits in the first place.

Author: Ellen Willis | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Life & Society

We can embrace marriage, hoping to transcend its contradictions, or reject it, hoping to find something better. Either way, we are likely to be disappointed.

Author: Ellen Willis | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Life & Society, Love, Relationships

The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime… Each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief unit of a … [ Read more ]

Author: Neil Theise | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Life & Society

The source of problems is blindspots. There is something hidden from us that, if we knew, would change how we thought and acted. One of the best ways to reveal blindspots is simply to lengthen your time horizon. A lot of good advice simply boils down to thinking longer term.

Author: Shane Parrish | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

Not judging is another way of letting go of fear and experiencing love. When we learn not to judge others – and totally accept them, and not want to change them – we can simultaneously learn to accept ourselves.

Author: Gerald G. Jampolsky | Subjects: Life & Society, Love, Personal Improvement, Relationships

The law stands at the intersection of what makes man work as an individual and as a social being. And neither society nor our understanding of it, nor our understanding of what understanding means, stands still.

Author: Robert W. Bennett | Subjects: Law | Legal, Life & Society

If we want free speech then we want less concentration of market power and business models that allow for that. Advertising does not. Token-based business models do.

Author: Fred Wilson | Subjects: Journalism, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Your life is a result of your thoughts, choices, actions and beliefs. If you don’t like your life, try changing one or more of these.

Author: Unknown | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Linear games are won by working harder than others. And the harder other people work, the higher the bar. You need to work harder and harder, just to stay in the same relative position.

Asymmetry is different. Even people who understand asymmetry consistently underestimate its power.

Positive asymmetry happens when you have a lot of upside and little downside. Negative asymmetry is when you have little upside … [ Read more ]

Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Success / Failure, Trust