If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.
Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac. 1960 (via ingridrichter)
A great quote.
(via parislemon)
(via parislemon)
Source: ingridrichter
Get that beach a whale, beaches love whales.
“One day, somebody will catch us napping…”
“One day, somebody will catch us napping,” writes Bill Gates in his book Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999). “One day, an eager upstart will put Microsoft out of business.”
He almost got it right. The guy who caught them napping was certainly very eager and was an upstart in his time, but not that young.
Source: diljaaa
Today knowledge is ubiquitous, constantly changing, growing exponentially… Today knowledge is free. It’s like air, it’s like water. It’s become a commodity… There’s no competitive advantage today in knowing more than the person next to you. The world doesn’t care what you know. What the world cares about is what you can do with what you know.
Source: giothegreat
This is the “Welcome” message at Apple.
Powerful. Very, very powerful.
Source: asimpleguyblog.blogspot.in
Seinfeld on Productivity
As told by software developer Brad Isaac when he asked Jerry for career advice:
He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.
He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”
“Don’t break the chain,” he said again for emphasis.
Source: Lifehacker
A woman tries to get all she can out of a man, and a man tries to get all he can into a woman.
For the Aristotle fans…
“Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society
No one’s perfect, not even Aristotle.
Source: helpmehelpus
Don’t trust too much. Don’t love too much. Don’t hope too much, because that too much can hurt you so much.
Source: lonelinesseasytobear
Never forget the big picture, that’s what makes you a genius
Max Cho’s blog is a must-read for any budding intellectual and one of the links he shared was this insightful illustration by Matt Might emphasizing how we increasingly lose focus of the big picture called “The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D”. It applies to all of us, not just Ph.Ds as we all work on specializing in our interest areas and we keep losing focus of the big picture. This is the hallmark of a “Genius” - the ability to focus on something and then instantly, and at will, zoom back out and look at how the tiny little detail he was focussing on fits into the big picture, zoom back in, make adjustments and zoom back out again until everything is just right.
The insight that “Genius” is the ability to switch between the detail view and the big picture at will, is actually not that new. Steve Jobs shared this same insight way back in 1983 when he was merely 26 years old while addressing the Academy of Achievement at Stanford. This is what he said:
“Have you ever thought about what it is to be intelligent? ‘Cause you meet your friend and he’s pretty dumb and you think you’re smarter and you wonder what the difference is [audience laughs]… I’ve thought about this a little bit myself and one of the things is… it seems to me… a lot of it’s memory, but a lot of it’s the ability to, sort of, zoom out like you’re in a city and you can look at the whole thing from about the 80th floor down at the city and while other people are trying to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B reading these stupid little maps, you can just see it all out in front of you, you can see the whole thing, and you can make connections that… just seem obvious, ‘cause you can see the whole thing… that’s why bright people feel guilty a lot ‘cause they come up with stuff that they just say ‘hey, look at this!’ and other people give him these dumb awards, and they feel… funny. [audience laughter and applause]”.
Steve nailed it decades ago, but Matt’s illustration is another powerful, visual reminder of the importance of never losing sight of the big picture.
From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.
I’ve found that it is the humble who are the most stubborn of all.
- Me (@vjk2005).
Most famous examples would be Gandhi and MLK, but I first realized this from interactions with everyday people as well as from introspection/self-reflection and later found parallels among famous people.
Note: ‘Stubborn’ and ‘humble’ are used here without any slants to either negative or positive. Humble means ‘modest’ and stubborn means ‘will not yield easily’.
