Quotes, January 2014

“Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.”
-Alain de Botton

“No one ever got rich checking their email more often.”
-Noah Kagan

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
-George Bernard Shaw

“You gotta challenge all assumptions. If you don’t, what is doctrine on day one becomes dogma forever after.”
-John Boyd

“Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.”
-Alain de Botton

“Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.”
-Alain de Botton

“To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?”
-John Boyd

“Given opposing opinions with equal evidence in their favor, the less popular opinion is more likely to be correct.”
-Nick Szabo

“Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them.”
-Dave Eggers

“A lot of people who say they want depth actually don’t want depth. What they want is to be known as people who want depth.”
-Shane Parrish

“Solve your biggest problem. Sell your solution to people who were just like you. Look, now you have money.”
-Charlie Hoehn

“Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.”
-Alain de Botton

“Communicating to communicate is a bureaucratic marker — ‘We need to communicate more.’ The rest of us communicate for a purpose.”
-Shane Parrish

“It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.”
-Peter Drucker

“The art of listening is not to hear what someone says but to hear how they feel.”
-Bob Chapman

“If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.”
-David Foster Wallace

“I recently realized that you don’t need to be talented, you just need to be completely unaware that you aren’t talented and then go for it!”
-Amber Tozer

“Apparently there is nothing in the news that falls between inhuman acts of horror and kittens.”
-Gary Janetti

“All your life people will tell you things, and most of the time, ~95% of the time, what they’ll tell you will be wrong.”
-Michael Crichton