kyleschen

An expert is a normal man away from home giving advice.

Look, my job is essentially just corralling more and more and more facts and information, and occasionally seeing whether that leads to some action. And Charlie—his children call him a book with legs.

If you really understand something, you can: 1) explain it using a clear metaphor and 2) explain the strongest counter-argument to the idea.

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.

Adaptation is smarter than you are.

I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they’re made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.

This whole act’s immutably decreed. ’Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders.

Ah, this is my sorrow: they have lied reward and punishment into the foundation of things – and now even into the basis of your souls, you virtuous! … You love your virtue as the mother her child; but when did one hear of a mother wanting to be paid for her love? … That your virtue is your self, and not something foreign, a skin, a cloak: that is the truth from the foundation of your souls, you virtuous one! – But indeed there are those to whom virtue means writhing under the lash: and you have listened too much to their shrieks! And there are others who call it virtue when their vices grow lazy; and once their hatred and jealousy stretch themselves to rest, their “justice” becomes lively and rubs its sleepy eyes. And there are others who are drawn downward: their devils draw them. But the more they sink, the more fervently their eye shines and the lust for their God. Ah, their shrieks have also reached your ears, you virtuous: “What I am not, that to me are God and virtue!”

Unselfconscious self-assurance. As Richard Logan found in his study of individuals who survived severe physical ordeals – polar explorers wandering alone in the Arctic, concentration camp inmates – one common attitude shared by such people was the implicit belief that their destiny was in their hands. They did not doubt their own resources would be sufficient to allow them to determine their fate. In that sense one would call them self-assured, yet at the same time, their egos seem curiously absent: they are not self-centered; their energy is typically not bent on dominating their environment as much as on finding a way to function within it harmoniously. This attitude occurs when a person no longer sees himself in opposition to the environment, as an individual who insists that his goals, his intentions take precedence over everything else. Instead, he feels a part of whatever goes on around him, and tries to do his best within the system in which he must operate. Paradoxically, this sense of humility – the recognition that one’s goals may have to be subordinated to a greater entity, and that to succeed one may have to play by a different set of rules from what one would prefer – is a hallmark of strong people.

When you’re starting a business, it’s easy to slide into thinking that customers want what you do. During the Internet Bubble I talked to a woman who, because she liked the outdoors, was starting an “outdoor portal.” You know what kind of business you should start if you like the outdoors? One to recover data from crashed hard disks. What’s the connection? None at all. which is precisely my point. If you want to create wealth (in the narrow technical sense of not starving) then you should be especially skeptical about any plan that centers on things you like doing. That is where your idea of what’s valuable is least likely to coincide with other people’s.

VITALITY VITALIZES (MODERN HERO)

Indeed, feelings don't just matter -- they are what mattering means.

In practice I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something they thought ugly. Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks, *I could do better than that*.

When danger is greatest.-- It is rare to break one's leg when in the course of life one is toiling upwards--it happens much more often when one starts to take things easy and to choose the east paths.

More life may trickle out of men through thought than through a gaping wound.

A hypothesis is... the obligatory starting point of all experimental reasoning. Without it no investigation would be possible, and one would learn nothing: one could only pile up barren observations. To experiment without a preconceived idea is to wonder aimlessly.

Either one does not dream, or one does so interestingly. One should learn to spend one's waking life in the same way: not at all, or interestingly.