Bill Cosby on people pleasing

vutran | May 24, 2020, 2:25 p.m.

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

— Bill Cosby

Seth Godin on saying yes and no

vutran | May 24, 2020, 2:25 p.m.

“You can say no with respect, you can say no promptly, and you can say no with a lead to someone who might say yes. But just saying yes because you can’t bear the short-term pain of saying no is not going to help you do the work.”

— Seth Godin

John Carmack on Focus

vutran | May 24, 2020, 2:24 p.m.

“Focus is a matter of deciding what things you’re not going to do.”

— John Carmack

Michael Lewis on the stories we tell ourselves:

vutran | May 24, 2020, 2:21 p.m.

"As I’ve gotten older—I would say starting in my mid-to-late 20s—I could not help but notice the effect on people of the stories they told about themselves. If you listen to people, if you just sit and listen, you’ll find that there are patterns in the way they talk about themselves.

There’s the kind of person who is always the victim in any story that they tell. Always on the receiving end of some injustice. There's the person who’s always kind of the hero of every story they tell. There's the smart person; they delivered the clever put down there.

There are lots of versions of this, and you’ve got to be very careful about how you tell these stories because it starts to become you. You are—in the way you craft your narrative—kind of crafting your character. And so I did at some point decide, “I am going to adopt self-consciously as my narrative, that I’m the happiest person anybody knows.” And it is amazing how happy-inducing it is."

— Michael Lewis

James Clear on Opportunity Cost for Greatness

vutran | May 24, 2020, 2:17 p.m.

"A practical definition of opportunity cost:

If you spend too much time working on good things, then you don’t have much time left to work on great things.

Understanding opportunity cost means eliminating good uses of time. And that's what makes it hard." 

— James Clear

James Clear on Curiosity

vutran | May 24, 2020, 2:16 p.m.

"Knowledge is the compound interest of curiosity." 

— James Clear

Ralph Waldo Emerson on foolish consistency

vutran | May 22, 2020, 10:52 a.m.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson