One of the most important things I didn’t understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear.
Teachers and coaches implicitly told us the returns were linear. “You get out,” I heard a thousand times, “what you put in.” They meant well, but this is rarely true. If your product is only half as good … [ Read more ]
Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Importantly, writing is also the process by which you figure it out.
Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Reading | Writing
It is both a terror and a mercy that we know ourselves only incompletely and each other hardly at all — because, somewhere in that lacuna of mystery, in that opaque space beyond absolute knowledge and absolute empathy (which assumes knowledge of another’s experience), some of the most magical things in life come abloom. Those are the places we grow, and grow into — the … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.
Author: Victor Hugo | Subject: Life & Society
As Aristotle observed all those many years ago, tyranny is all about arbitrariness. When a tyrant has power, there is no rule of law, there is no governing order. There is only the whim of the tyrant. There is only his inordinate desire to have more than his fair share of everything. Under political tyranny external laws become arbitrary… Under cultural tyranny internal values become … [ Read more ]
Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
Life is not just about peaks and valleys, about wins and losses. Life is about the journey. You hear that all the time. You’ve got to absorb that. You’ve got to know that. The journey has to become the destination because there is no true destination. There is no endpoint. There is no goal. All rivers run to the sea and yet the sea is … [ Read more ]
Author: Paul Assaiante | Subject: Life & Society
It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.
Author: Charlie Munger | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time.
Author: Charlie Munger | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Learning, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
Every problem is an opportunity in disguise.
Author: Shane Parrish | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
From my feeble attempts at simplifying my own life I’ve learned enough to know that should we have to, or choose to, live more simply, it won’t be an impoverished life but one richer in all the ways that really matter.
Author: Yvon Chouinard | Subjects: Life & Society, Material Possessions, Personal Improvement
Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than how you think it should be.
Author: Wayne Dyer | Subject: Personal Improvement
Whoever controls the rules can control the result.
Author: Jeff Blum | Subject: Life & Society
So many of life’s problems or difficulties are a result of a mismatch between what we really want and what we think we should want.
Author: Jeff Blum | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
The most powerful productivity tool ever invented is simply the word no.
Author: Shane Parrish | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management
Mother nature is smarter than human nature.
Author: Jeff Blum | Subjects: Nature, Perception | Observation, Psychology | Behavior
Luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. Opportunities parade past all of us all the time. The key is that you must be paying attention to see them, you must be willing to take risks, you must expose yourself to the possibility of massive failure and you must believe in what you are doing so much that you do it anyway.
Author: Richard Garriott | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
Writing is like walking; you just put one word after another. And like walking, it helps immensely if you have a destination in mind.
Author: Jeff Blum | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Reading | Writing
Avoidance is one of the commonest ways of hedging against our fear of rejection and hurt — a coping mechanism for disappointment that we developed when the people first tasked with caring for us let us down.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
Instead of requesting reassurance endearingly and laying out our longing with charm, we have tendencies to mask our needs beneath some tricky behaviors guaranteed to frustrate our ultimate aims.
Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
Living alone can be deeply rewarding and deeply challenging. It is not for everyone. It is not for those who romanticize its offerings of freedom and focus, but excise its menacing visitations of loneliness and alienation. It is not for those who find silence shattering. It is especially not for those who hunger for another consciousness to validate their experience and redeem their reality. It … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Life & Society