Born on June 23 — Quotes

When you skip a meal, telling your rumbling stomach that food is coming later in the day, and therefore it has no reason to fear starvation, doesn’t alleviate the powerful sensation of hunger. Similarly, explaining to your brain that the neglected interactions in your overfilled inbox have little to do with your survival doesn’t seem to prevent a corresponding sense of background anxiety. To your entrenched social circuitry, evolved over millennia of food shortages mitigated through strategic alliances, these unanswered messages become the psychological equivalent of ignoring a tribe member who might later prove key to surviving the next drought. From this perspective, the crowded email inbox is not just frustrating — it’s a matter of life or death.

I asked an indifferent copywriter what books he had read about advertising. He told me that he had not read any; he preferred to rely on his own intuition. ‘Suppose,’ I asked, ‘your gall-bladder has to be removed this evening. Will you choose a surgeon who has read some books on anatomy and knows where to find your gall-bladder, or a surgeon who relies on his intuition? Why should our clients be expected to bet millions of dollars on your intuition?

"What matters most:
"What he had yearned to embrace was not the flesh but a downy spirit, a spark, the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh."
Wind, Sand and Stars."

I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?

Perspective— Use It or Lose It. If you turned to this page, you're forgetting that what is going on around you is not reality. Think about that.

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. Deep

We like to believe that Man is in some subtle way superior to the rest of creation. It is best if he can be shown to be necessarily superior, for then there is no danger of him losing his commanding position.

Put another way, trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown.

We are each given a block of marble when we begin a lifetime, and the tools to shape it into sculpture. We can drag it behind us untouched, we can pound it to gravel, we can shape it into glory. Examples from every other life are left for us to see, lifeworks finished and unfinished, guiding and warning. Near the end our sculpture is nearly finished, and we can smooth and polish what we started years before. We can make our progress then, but to do it we must see past the appearances of age.

Only a few people are interested in what you have to say, but that's all right. You don't tell the quality of a master by the size of his crowds, remember.

An education is meaningless unless it equips students to have a better life.

Don't bunt. Aim out of the ballpark. Aim for the company of immortals.

Il y aura toujours un chien perdu quelque part qui m'empêchera d'être heureux.

True missions, it turns out, require two things. First you need career capital, which requires patience. Second, you need to be ceaselessly scanning your always-changing view of the adjacent possible in your field, looking for the next big idea. This requires a dedication to brainstorming and exposure to new ideas. Combined, these two commitments describe a lifestyle, not a series of steps that automatically spit out a mission when completed.

The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people.