A foolish trope of modernity is that experience leads to disenchantment and ennui. Boredom with life does not result from exhausting life’s riches, but from skimming them. Nothing is boring, except people who are bored.
Everything is Interesting. Read the whole thing
Heard while listening to the book tape “outliers” and working on the big prop today:
“Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.
Malcolm Gladwell
“We need to see our criteria for achievement and success as something we create ourselves rather than having them foisted upon us by others.”
Thoughts on underemployment. I consider myself lucky that we have managed to carve out a very satisfying definition of what success means to us and feel like we’ve achieved that spectacularly in our lives. We’re not very tempted by more money if that means we’ll have to permanently give up what we’ve decided matters the most to us (time together, time to pursue other interests besides work, freedom and space to grow as a couple and as individuals).
Our society is very geared toward a very narrow definition of success: how much do you make? I’m glad to see different definitions gaining in acceptance.
“The advice to make the most of your talents applies to everyone. If anything, people who are constantly being told in school and elsewhere that they are ‘too dumb’ are MORE likely to miss their hidden talents and abilities than those who are constantly being told how special they are. Not everybody is going to win a Nobel Prize, or quit their day job to write great novels, but almost all of us are capable of more success and happiness than we now enjoy.
As I read the advice, it is not limited to the super geniuses or even the ‘nerds’. A person with a passion for cooking or gardening may be able to find better ways to make a living than a routine factory job in an industry that is shrinking by the day. Someone with a gift for empathy and understanding may do more good and have a richer life by going into health care or education rather than working as a clerk in a local store. Figuring out your real strengths and passions and having the courage to base career decisions on them does not just make sense for the budding Einsteins and investment bankers among us. It is about living your best life and honoring your Creator by placing the sum of your talents, be they great or small, in the common service as best you can.”
“If “market failure” is an excuse for taking power away from markets, shouldn’t “government failure” be a reason to take power away from government?”
Glenn Reynolds
“Life in school is life in bureaucracy. You follow the rules, do what you are told, and rewards follow. The real world was never very much like that, but the parts of the real world that look most like school (like for example law firms, universities and government and private sector bureaucracies) have their heads on the chopping block.”
The times, they are a changin’
“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. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
Steve Jobs
Inspirational, and something I need right now. Thanks Katherine.
The real essence of writing is moving past fear and that success comes when you get to that place where you push past the demons and go ahead with what you ought to be doing.
Katherine Coble
“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness: kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile.”
— Mother Teresa
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
John Adams
“Everyone thinks himself the master pattern of human nature; and by this, as on a touchstone, he tests all others. Behavior that does not square with his is false and artificial. What brutish stupidity!”
Montaigne
“Gold is the money of kings; silver is the money of gentlemen; barter is the money of peasants; but debt is the money of slaves.”
Norm Franz
“Our number-one value isn’t in any of the skills we have. It’s that we’re essentially curious.”
Jim Coudal
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder in your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewer of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it.”
Merlyn, The Book of Merlyn (prelude to The Once and Future King). T.H. White
If this is true then my friend Stephanie is the happiest person I know.
“nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations. The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
This is more difficult, because there is no zeitgeist to read, no template to follow, no mask to wear. Set aside what your friends expect, what your parents demand, what your acquaintances require. Set aside the messages this culture sends, through its advertising, its entertainment, its disdain and its disapproval, about how you should behave.”
Great words from an inspiring commencement speech.
“For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.”
The ailing Hitchins has an beautifully well written essay that’s worth reading here.
“You don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.”
Zombie Marie Curie (Randall Monroe)
I love this:
The United States has no purpose. That is perhaps its greatest achievement. America’s founding document, its Declaration of Independence, allows that a state exists only to secure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That’s it. There’s a curious lack of ambition in those words. The United States was not founded for the greater glory of anything, or as the necessary outcome of history, but for the freedom to collect figurines, to join a clogging troupe, to take a road trip. Yet these words, which carry no ideology whatsoever, are the ones that keep winning.
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