We tend to think that knowledge, once acquired, is something permanent. Instead, even holding on to it requires constant, careful effort.
Maciej Ceglowski
Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.
George Carlin
How did the Watch get so much better so quickly? What happened in the two years between the first and third editions of the Watch? I asked Ive this question during a November interview at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. “Mostly, we spend all our time looking at what we can do better,” Ive responded. “Sometimes we are very aware that there are technologies that aren’t ready. We’re very aware of where the product is going. Then there are things that you don’t truly know until you’ve made them in large volumes, and a really diverse group of people use them.”
Jony Ive
The government of today has no right to tell us how to live our lives. Because the government of 200 years ago already did.
Jack Kelly
Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.
Jeff Goldblum (Jurassic Park)
Believe in your fucking self.
Stay up all fucking night.
Work outside of your fucking habits.
Know when to fucking speak up.
Fucking collaborate.
Don't fucking procrastinate.
Get over your fucking self.
Keep fucking learning.
Form follows fucking function.
A computer is a Lite-Brite for bad fucking ideas.
Find fucking inspiration everywhere.
Fucking network.
Educate your fucking client.
Trust your fucking gut.
Ask for fucking help.
Jason Bacher
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Robert Heinlein
Genetic "gifting" is so seldom the limiting factor in extended linear progress that I cannot answer the question. Patience, determination, and good judgement are the limiting factors.
Mark Rippetoe
Make it fucking sustainable.
Question fucking everything.
Have a fucking concept.
Learn to take some fucking criticism.
Make me fucking care.
Use fucking spell check.
Do your fucking research.
Sketch more fucking ideas.
The problem contains the fucking solution.
Think about all the fucking possibilities.
Jason Bacher
They fail to understand that they are beginners. Novices, as we call them. They pick a routine out of a magazine based on what the guy doing it looks like, with no regard for the fact that they are not the same piece of physiology as the guy in the magazine. Training is physical activity designed to produce a specific response it is stress, recovery from that stress, and adaptation. People respond to a training program based on their own personal training history. The weaker you are, the more room you have to get strong, and the stronger you are through training, the harder it is to get stronger. Novices get strong faster than advanced lifters, so an advanced program is not the best for making the rapid gains possible for a novice. Time is wasted, potential is wasted.
Mark Rippetoe
And in fact the customer is usually a moron and an asshole.
Larry David
Making things blew my mind; materials, shapes, colors and mechanics. Back then I had this recurring fantasy of wanting to make everything in my life that I used or needed. I mean everything… from toothpaste, to furniture and clothing, to plates and record players. As an adult, I became a painter and sculptor and then eventually a furniture designer and builder, founding BDDW in the late 90's. Along the way, I dabbled in music, fashion, metal-smithing, ceramics, carpentry and architecture – along with dozens of side interests like bee-keeping and micro-brewing. M. Crow is an awkward collision of all my hobbies and interests and an outlet for fulfilling that childhood fantasy. I am basically making from scratch the things I want or need and making extras and trying to sell them.
Tyler Hays
The problem with a permanent revolution is that it paralyses us from working on the hard incremental improvements that we need to make and we don't address the actual problems that we have because we are waiting for this Hail Mary pass of technology.
Maciej Cegłowski
There’s all these little niche areas in bookmarking that I want to see be occupied by people like me, who are just kind of living from it. There are a lot of ways you can earn a living but there’s not a lot of ways you can make millions. Unfortunately what ends up happening is that people start with a niche, but then they decide they want to grow the business to be like Pinterest and that never seems to work, maybe once in a decade. I find that people are really understanding about it being just my solo project. So even if I can’t get stuff happening that they want, they’re pretty patient. Hopefully there’s some credibility at this point. They know I’m going to keep the site going without changing it majorly. I’m going to respect the way that people use it now and not try to go for millions of dollars or anything like that.
Maciej Cegłowski
"It's really inconsistent to not be the way you want the world to be," he says flatly, "and then through some means of trickery, operate according to one moral code while the rest of the world operates according to a different one. This is obviously not something that works. If everyone's trying to trick everyone all the time, it's a lot of noise and confusion. It's better just to be straightforward and try to do useful things." "I think being precise about the truth works. Truthful and precise. I try to tell people, 'You don't have to read between the lines with me. I'm saying the lines!’"
Elon Musk
Well, we're all for progress. It's easy to say the most dangerous idea is evil or racism or genocide or murder, but those ideas tend to persist only when they're packaged with some notion of progress. Progress, for all of its good, brings us new technologies and threats against which we can't deter, environmental problems, biodiversity loss, and so on. That we cannot avoid believing in progress may also prove to be our undoing.
Tyler Cowen
“You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.”
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
A big budget film is spending millions of dollars a day. You can’t quit on that. I know people look at the factors in the film industry and what some people are paid, and they think, “What do they really do that’s so hard?” But most people can’t understand what it’s like to have a $200 million film resting on the fact that you had better show up to work. When it comes to training for one of those roles, it doesn’t dawn on the actor that they might quit along the way or come up short. They’re going to get it done no matter what. By the way, the ones that do quit, you don’t see them anymore.
Duffy Gaver
“Larry Scott won the first Mr. Olympia in 1965. There was no Bulletproof Coffee. There was no Nike. There was no Hammer Strength. There was no Ripped Fuel. So if all of these things didn’t exist, but he could still achieve that… wow. What did he do to come up with that? He had his will, his discipline, and his desire. The three things they cannot market to you. They play on those things to market their products. But they can’t market those things to you, because those are yours. They are either in your wheel house or they are not. And you either get your handle on them, or you’re doomed. I don’t care how much product you take, I don’t care how much equipment you own, if you can’t get a handle on those three things, go home. It goes back to this whole list of firsts: first four-minute mile, first iron man triathlon, and first world’s strongest man. All of these events took place before 99% of the companies today even existed. So what does that tell you? That none of those things are necessary
Duffy Gaver
Normally, when you have a business and you produce something industrial, you have the plant somewhere and it makes a lot of dirt, and poison, and noise, and destroys the environment. You are working there all day, and then in the evening you drive home and you have your pleasant place to stay, with clean air, while poor people have to live with the dirt you are producing. I control my noise, because I am sleeping there, with an open window, every night.
Gerald Stein
Pick battles big enough to matter and small enough to win. Peter Navarro In a world where the big fish eat small fish and the small fish eat shrimps, Singapore must become a poisonous shrimp
Lee Kuan Yew
I didn’t really have a detailed long-term plan for Daring Fireball. I still don’t. It started very simple, and I’ve changed and added things slowly over time. The plan was just to keep improving it steadily over time. That plan remains in effect today. When I make elaborate, detailed plans, I get too attached to the plans, too reluctant to break with them. Plans aren’t a product. I’m only effective when I’m working directly on a product.
John Gruber
My muse for the session was this quote from Walt Disney: “We don’t make movies to make money; we make money to make more movies.” To me, that’s it. That’s the thing. There’s one obvious way to make money publishing a web site, and that’s with CPM advertising, wherein you charge advertisers a penny or two for every page view. And if that’s your game and what drives you is the dough — if, when your web server gets a hit you think not “Cool, another reader” but instead “Ooh, another shiny penny” — it will lead you down what the good Dr. Thompson called a “cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.” No one gets into something like this without an obsession, but if your obsession is with the money, and your revenue is directly correlated to page views, then rather than write or produce anything with any actual merit or integrity, you’ll dance like a monkey and split your articles across multiple “pages” and spend more time ginning up sensational Digg-bait headlines than writing the articles themselves. It’s thievery — not of money, but of readers’ attention. What’s so great, so amazing, about this racket is that it doesn’t have to be that way. You can obsess over your work, build an audience based on deep mutual respect, and eventually opportunities to earn money from it will present themselves. I don’t know how it works, I only know that it does.
John Gruber
What hurts far more than the loss in revenue is the principle of the damn thing. The Deck did it right, and it worked for over a decade. I’m sure I would’ve gone full-time writing Daring Fireball sooner or later, but I couldn’t have done it when I did, in 2006, without The Deck. I was chatting with Jim earlier this evening. Someone wrote to him to ask, “Why didn’t you sell the network instead of shutting it down?” Jim’s answer: “The Deck was built exclusively on close, personal relationships. I don’t think those are mine to sell.” In 11 years, Jim and I never had anything more than a virtual handshake through Messages (née iChat) as a “contract”. They say don’t do business with friends. My experience says otherwise — if you have the right friends.
John Gruber
Never do anything in life if you would be ashamed of seeing it printed on the front page of your hometown newspaper for your family and friends to see.
Warren Buffett
Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.
Warren Buffett
In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time – none, zero.
Charlie Munger
You must know the big ideas in the big disciplines, and use them routinely — all of them, not just a few. Most people are trained in one model — economics, for example — and try to solve all problems in one way. You know the old saying: to the man with a hammer, the world looks like a nail. This is a dumb way of handling problems.” Munger believes that thinking clearly is a trained response. He points out that “if you want to become a golfer, you can’t use the natural swing that broad evolution gave you. You have to learn to have a certain grip and swing in a different way to realize your full potential as a golfer.
Charlie Munger
We read a lot. I don’t know anyone who’s wise who doesn’t read a lot. But that’s not enough: You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.
Charlie Munger
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
Richard Feynman
Warren and I do more reading and thinking and less doing than most people in business. We do that because we like that kind of a life. But we’ve turned that quirk into a positive outcome for ourselves. We both insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think.
Charlie Munger
I met the towering intellectuals in books, not in the classroom, which is natural. I can’t remember when I first read Ben Franklin. I had Thomas Jefferson over my bed at seven or eight. My family was into all that stuff, getting ahead through discipline, knowledge, and self-control.
Charlie Munger
You only get one mind and one body. And it’s got to last a lifetime. Now, it’s very easy to let them ride for many years. But if you don’t take care of that mind and that body, they’ll be a wreck forty years later, just like the car would be.
Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett has become one hell of a lot better investor since the day I met him, and so have I. If we had been frozen at any given stage, with the knowledge we had, the record would have been much worse than it is. So the game is to keep learning, and I don’t think people are going to keep learning who don’t like the learning process.
Charlie Munger
I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. so I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.
Warren Buffett
There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job that you love. You will jump out of bed in the morning. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don’t like because you think it will look good on your resume. Isn’t that a little like saving up sex for your old age?
Warren Buffett
Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.
Warren Buffett
I’m always focussed on the actual work, and I think that’s a much more succinct way to describe what you care about than any speech I could ever make. Jonathan Ive So much of our manufactured environment testifies to carelessness,” “At the risk of sounding terribly sentimental, I do think one of the things that just compel us is that we have this sense that, in some way, by caring, we’re actually serving humanity,” he said. “People might think it’s a stupid belief, but it’s a goal—it’s a contribution that we can hope we can make, in some small way, to culture.
Jonathan Ive
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.
Warren Buffett
A few years ago I tossed out the second monitor and have been a single computer, single screen person since then. I go full screen on nearly every app. I also hide my dock. I don’t want anything pulling my attention away. When I’m curious I’ll look. Otherwise, I’m looking at what I want, not what someone else might want me to see. I can’t stress this enough—protect your attention like you protect your friends, family, money, etc. It’s among the most valuable things you have. What’s your best time-saving shortcut or life hack? Saying no. Techniques and hacks are all about managing what happens when you say yes to too many things. All the techniques and hacks in the world never add up to the power of no. Having fewer things to do is the best way to get things done. I’m very careful with my time and attention—it’s my most precious resource. If you don’t have that, you can’t do what you want to do. And if you can’t do what you want to do, what’s the point?
What’s your favorite to-do list manager? I don’t track to-dos. I have a small handful of things I know I need to do every day. If I can’t keep them in my head, I have too many things to do. Every day is a blank slate for what I need to do. If something I was supposed to get done yesterday didn’t get done yesterday, it’s not automatically on my mind for today. Today’s mind is a clear mind, not yesterday’s remnants.
Jason Fried
1 Good design is innovative The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.
2 Good design makes a product useful A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasises the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
3 Good design is aesthetic The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
4 Good design makes a product understandable It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.
5 Good design is unobtrusive Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.
6 Good design is honest It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
7 Good design is long-lasting It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.
8 Good design is thorough down to the last detail Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user.
9 Good design is environmentally-friendly Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimises physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.
10 Good design is as little design as possible Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.
Dieter Rams
You should know that I have always taken the path that is most right. The result is never in question for me. Just what path do you take to get there, and there is always one that is most right. And that is what this is.
Abel Morales
Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others Are Fearful
Warren Buffett
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
Steve Jobs
I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you. Another thing I think should be avoided is extremely intense ideology because it cabbages up one’s mind. ... When you’re young it’s easy to drift into loyalties and when you announce that you’re a loyal member and you start shouting the orthodox ideology out, what you’re doing is pounding it in, pounding it in, and you’re gradually ruining your mind.
Charlie Munger
But to make money they didn’t have and didn’t need, they risked what they did have and did need, and that’s foolish. That is just plain foolish. Doesn’t make any difference what your IQ is. If you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you, it just does not make any sense. I don’t care whether the odds are 100 to one that you succeed or 1,000 to one that you succeed. If you hand me a gun with a thousand chambers – a million chambers in it – and there’s a bullet in one chamber, and you said, “put it up to your temple, how much do you want to be paid to pull it once?” I’m not going to pull it. You can name any sum you want but it doesn’t do anything for me on the upside and I think the downside is fairly clear. So I’m not interested in that kind of a game. And yet people do it financially without thinking about it very much. There was a great book…the title was, “You Only Have to Get Rich Once.” Now that seems pretty fundamental, doesn’t it? …If you’ve got $100 million at the start of the year, and…you’re going to make 10% if you’re unleveraged, and 20% if you’re leveraged, 99 times out of 100. What difference does it make at the end of the year whether you’ve got $110 million or $120 million? It makes no difference at all…It makes absolutely no difference. It makes no difference to your family. It makes no difference to anything. And yet the downside, particularly in managing other people’s money, is not only losing all your money, but it’s disgrace and humiliation, and facing friends whose money you’ve lost and everything. I just can’t imagine an equation that that makes sense for. And yet 16 guys with very high IQs who are very decent people, entered into that game…I think it’s madness.
Warren Buffett
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.
Donald Rumsfeld
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
George Santayana
The great, big thing is to try to devote most of one's brain-processing power to the seeing. Studies of cell phones and driving automobiles demonstrate that people don't do very well in seeing where they're going when they're talking. Intense seeing, intense focus requires a self-serenity and also serene environment. And in that way, all the brain's processing power can be into seeing. I had this experience, almost a magical experience. Out walking on our farm by a long stone wall, I said to my friend, let's not talk. And after about five minutes, you first hear the internal sounds produced by the inner ear. And then, after a while, you hear things, just the slightly rustle of leaves. But what happened to seeing after 10 to 12 minutes of just seeing - not talking, not doing anything else - was the ambient light became nearly perfect. That perfect light for photography, filtered light from the sun, and shadows under the trees now didn't blow out to dark, and the brights from the snow don't blow out to white. "The ambient light hadn't changed, but rather the seeing had changed. Because all brain power was devoted to seeing, it was if you were creating your own improved light.
Edward Tufte
Knowledge alone will not move nations: astonishing and unforeseen events will be required for humanity's education.
Garrett Hardin
The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.
Garrett Hardin
We summarize the situation by saying: 'There is a shortage of food.' Why don't we say, 'There is a longage of people’?
Garrett Hardin
With the coinage of 'sustainable development,' the defenders of the unsteady state have won a few more years' moratorium from the painful process of thinking.
Garrett Hardin
Why is it so difficult for politicians to take the long view? ...the electoral time horizon of most politicians is no more than five years away. Proximite goals drive out distant goals.
Garrett Hardin
Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
Garrett Hardin
You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
Nature builds things that are antifragile. In the case of evolution, nature uses disorder to grow stronger. Occasional starvation or going to the gym also makes you stronger, because you subject your body to stressors and gain from them.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
Corporations take the humanity out of trade - they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
The Human Species could have been great but instead we became satisfied with lights on our tennis shoes.
George Carlin
There wasn't, though. All of that is just perceived. People forget how many people are in this country. There's 400 million people in this country, and I swear to God if 30 people don't like something, mainstream media, for whatever reason, starts saying, "Everybody's saying this; you've gotten a ton of flak." It's Chicken Little stuff. They act like the sky is falling. It's fine. Ninety-nine percent of people are adults, and they understand that they're watching an animated show. They get it. You'll do a show in front of 1,500 people, night after night after night after night, and nobody has a problem. Then one night you do the show and one person has a problem. Now, at that point, you've done the show in front of over 10,000 people, and one person has a problem and all of a sudden the media picks up on it, and they try to say it's a controversy. I've never had that problem in my… I've had people in the media try to create one, taking a clip of what I said out of context and then reading it to somebody that they know it's going to strike a chord with because it happened to them. Just hoping to get a quote. They basically manufacture a controversy. I'm in comedy clubs every night… That whole angle and that whole story is so completely blown out of proportion. It's like McCarthyism, when they thought there was a Communist behind every tree. They're making it seem like you're a comedian now and you're looking over your shoulder after every joke. I'm having more fun now as a comedian than I ever have. I go onstage, I still say what I want to say. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of people leave the show and they had a great time. Occasionally do I get a stick in the mud that didn't like the show? I mean, yeah, shit. There are musicians that can sell out giant stadiums and I'm not a fan of them. I think they stink. Does that mean they stink? It just means I don't like them. Do they owe me an apology for their music? To be honest, this whole angle is so completely ridiculous and overplayed. For the life of me I don't understand it, and I don't understand why people respond to it like you offended a country, like you went in and defaced their embassy. You told a joke at a comedy club. You did what you're supposed to do. You're guilty of telling a joke, and then for some reason you have to apologize. It'd be like a plumber apologizing for fixing a sink.
Bill Burr
Atheism Is a Religion Like Abstinence Is a Sex Position
Bill Maher
THINGS THE WORLD’S MOST AND LEAST PRIVILEGED PEOPLE SAY
“I don’t have a TV!”
“I never eat meat!”
“I walk ten miles a day!”
“My diet is making me lose a lot of weight!”
“I use my own waste to grow food!”
“My children aren’t vaccinated!”
“I have a very small carbon footprint!”
“I don’t vote — the system is too corrupt!”
John Clark Levin
Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.
Walt Disney
Details matter, it's worth waiting to get it right .
Steve Jobs
Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,'' says Steve Jobs, Apple's C.E.O. ''People think it's this veneer that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.'' 'Steve'' that would be Steve Jobs ''made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content,'' Ive says. ''It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren't obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff.'' Later he said: ''What's interesting is that out of that simplicity, and almost that unashamed sense of simplicity, and expressing it, came a very different product. But difference wasn't the goal. It's actually very easy to create a different thing. What was exciting is starting to realize that its difference was really a consequence of this quest to make it a very simple thing.’'
Steve Jobs
I feel like I’m on my back, and there’s the Sistine Chapel, and I’m painting away. I like it when people say, ‘Gee, that’s a pretty good-looking painting.’ But it’s my painting, and when somebody says, ‘Why don’t you use more red instead of blue?’ Good-bye. It’s my painting. And I don’t care what they sell it for. The painting itself will never be finished. That’s one of the great things about it. “The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard. I always pose it this way. I say: ‘Lookit. Would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst lover? Or would you rather be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover?’ Now, that’s an interesting question.
Warren Buffett
The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself... All progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Bernard Shaw
Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.
John Maynard Keynes
It is not necessary to remind you that the fact that your voice is amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other does not confer upon you greater wisdom or understanding than you possessed when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other.
Edward Murrow
It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern. Daniel Kahneman To lead a society, the MM says in his precise Victorian English, "one must understand human nature. I have always thought that humanity was animal-like. The Confucian theory was man could be improved, but I'm not sure he can be. He can be trained, he can be disciplined." In Singapore that has meant lots of rules—prohibiting littering, spitting on sidewalks, failing to flush public toilets—with fines and occasional outing in the newspaper for those who break them. It also meant educating his people—industrious by nature—and converting them from shopkeepers to high-tech workers in a few decades. Lee Kuan Yew The Japanese Military Administration governed by spreading fear. It put up no pretence of civilised behaviour. Punishment was so severe that crime was very rare. In the midst of deprivation after the second half of 1944, when the people half-starved, it was amazing how low the crime rate remained. . . . As a result I have never believed those who advocate a soft approach to crime and punishment, claiming that punishment does not reduce crime. That was not my experience in Singapore before the war, during the Japanese occupation or subsequently. I had not yet read Mao's dictum that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun", but I knew that Japanese brutality, Japanese guns, Japanese bayonets and swords, and Japanese terror and torture . . . could make people change their behaviour, even their loyalties. The Japanese not only demanded and got their obedience; they forced them to adjust to a long-term prospect of Japanese rule, so that they had their children educated to fit the new system, its language, its habits and its values, in order to be useful and make a living.
Lee Kuan Yew
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
Bruce Lee
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
Arthur Conan Doyle
The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.
Warren Buffett
Another interesting phenomenon of the iPhone and iPad era is that we are being transformed from producers of content into consumers. With my BlackBerry, I probably created as much data as I consumed. It was easy to thumb-type long explanations, directions, and even jokes and observations. With my iPhone, I try to avoid creating any message that are over one sentence long. But I use the iPhone browser to consume information a hundred times more than I did with the BlackBerry. I wonder if this will change people over time, in some subtle way that isn't predictable. What happens when people become trained to think of information and entertainment as something they receive and not something they create?
Scott Adams
The world does not need more design; it needs less. As designers we must wake up to this challenge every day if we wish to truly create objects worth creating. Honesty, experimentation, and a commitment to learning from history are our best tools. One well considered object can take the place of many cheaply made ones. We think the traditional fashion system is flawed and that it is possible to create higher quality garments at better prices by rethinking traditional cycles of development, production and distribution. Profit should never be the reason a company exists. Businesses need money the same way humans need water. It is essential to function, but the less we need to think about it the better off we are. A healthy organization creates value that extends far beyond money and into all points of its operation; from suppliers to employees and from customers into communities.
Outlier.nyc
We don’t have investors to impress, so we don’t need a “mission statement.” We enjoy writing and shipping great products that address the needs of ourselves and our customers.
Barebones software
In matters of style, swim with the current; In matters of principle, stand like a rock.
Thomas Jefferson
One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. And I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I got the scar tissue to prove it.
Steve Jobs
Our customers are loyal to us right up until the second somebody offers them a better service, And I love that. It’s super-motivating for us.
Jezz Bezos
A designer ... it's the way you look at the world ... you're constantly looking at something and thinking, "Why is it like that? Why is it like that, and not like this?" Physically, how do you connect to the product ... the iPhone, everything defers to the display ... a lot of what we're doing is getting design out of the way ... when forms develop with that reason, and they're not just arbitrary shapes, it feels inevitable, it feels un-designed ... of course it's that way, why would it be any other way?
It's really important in a product to have a sense of the hierarchy of what's important, and what's not important, and removing those things that are all vying for your attention. At some level, I think you're aware of a calm and considered solution, that ... therefore speaks about how you're going to use it, and not the terrible struggles that we as designers and engineers had in trying to solve the problems.
Jony Ive
We're an overnight success, thirty years in the making.
Dick Mcdonald
I feel like I’m on my back, and there’s the Sistine Chapel, and I’m painting away. I like it when people say, ‘Gee, that’s a pretty good-looking painting.’ But it’s my painting, and when somebody says, ‘Why don’t you use more red instead of blue?’ Good-bye. It’s my painting. And I don’t care what they sell it for. The painting itself will never be finished. That’s one of the great things about it. “The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard. I always pose it this way. I say: ‘Lookit. Would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst lover? Or would you rather be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover?’ Now, that’s an interesting question.
Warren Buffett