The problem with the idea of "learning from one's mistakes" is that most of what people call mistakes aren't mistakes. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

An economist is a mixture of 1) a businessman without common sense, 2) a physicist without brain, and 3) a speculator without balls.

Crying in public because you saw atrocities and feel sorry for someone else is fine; crying in public because you feel sorry for yourself (& implore others to feel sorry for you) is the greatest marker of weakeness.

The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom….Soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error from children's lives and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. They are good students, but nerds — that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are totally untrained to handle ambiguity….Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all those things that make life worth living.