Some people will tell you that slow is good – but I’m here to tell you that fast is better. I’ve always believed this, in spite of the trouble it’s caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube.
Quotes
Predict the Future
“Even better, anything that follows a Gaussian distribution will have an average and a standard deviation, and you can use those to predict the future.”
Lazlo Bock, from WORK RULES.
Something about the powerful simplicity of applied mathematics gave me pause. To predict the future; a pursuit of all mankind.
Conrad on Work
It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to my influential friend, the battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. I clambered on board. She rang under my feet like an empty Huntley & Palmer biscuit-tin kicked along a gutter; she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape, but I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better.
She had given me a chance to come out a bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Rick Steves’ Travel Philosophy
“Be fanatically positive and militantly optimistic. If something’s not to your liking, change your liking. Travel is addicting. It can make you a happier American, as well as a citizen of the world. Our Earth is home to nearly 6 billion equally important people. It’s humbling to travel and find that people don’t envy Americans.”
What a Way to Start a Book!
“The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means – crucially – a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Anti fragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them – and do them well. let me be more aggressive; we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.”
From Antifragile
Simon Ouderkirk 