Other Books Archives - Page 18 of 23 - Ben Rosenfeld

February 6, 2014

“The Happiness Project” Quotes

I recently read “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“According to current research, in the determination of a person’s level of happiness, genetics accounts for about 50 percent; life circumstances, such as age, gender, ethnicity, marital status, income, health, occupation, and religious affiliation, account for about 10 to 20 percent; and the remainder is a product of how a person thinks and acts.” (6)

“What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.” (11)

“I didn’t want to reject my life. I wanted to change my life without changing my life, by finding more happiness in my own kitchen.” (12)

“Studies show that by acting as if you feel more energetic, you can become more energetic.” (18)

“I benefitted from the “Hawthorne effect,” in which people being studied improve their performance, simply because of the extra attention they’re getting.” (25)

“I started to apply the “one-minute rule”;I didn’t postpone any task that could be done in less than one minute.” (33)

“The philosopher and psychologist William James explained, “Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together, and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”” (36)

“John Gottman calls the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” for their destructive role in relationships: stonewalling, defensiveness, criticism, and contempt.” (39)

“Studies show that the most common sources of conflict among couples are money, work, sex, communication, religion, children, in-laws, appreciation, and leisure activities.” (41)

“A line by G. K. Chesterton echoed in my head: “It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light” (or, as the saying goes, “Dying is easy; comedy is hard”).” (41)

“Studies show that the quality of a couple’s friendship determines, in large part, whether they feel satisfied with their marriage’s romance and passion, and nothing kills the feeling of friendship (and passion) more than nagging. Anyway, nagging doesn’t work.” (42)

“I realized that I enjoyed not feeling like a nag more than I enjoyed watching TV without licking envelopes at the same time.” (43)

“They always said,” Jamie told me, “that you have to do that kind of work for yourself. If you do it for other people, you end up wanting them to acknowledge it and to be grateful and to give you credit. If you do it for yourself, you don’t expect other people to react in a particular way.” (46)

“Gottman’s “love laboratory” research shows that how a couple fights matter more than how much they fight. Couples who fight right tackle only one difficult topic at a time, instead of indulging in arguments that cover every grievance since the first date.” (47)

“In marriage, it’s less important to have many pleasant experiences than it is to have fewer unpleasant experiences, because people have a “negativity bias”; our reactions to bad events are faster, stronger, and stickier than our reactions to good events. In fact, in practically every language, there are more concepts to describe negative emotions than positive emotions.” (48)

“It takes at least five positive marital actions to offset one critical or destructive action, so one way to strengthen a marriage is to make sure that the positive far outweighs the negative.” (48)

“Women’s idea of an intimate moment is a face-to-face conversation, while men feel close when they work or play sitting alongside someone.” (52)

“For both men and women – the most reliable predictor of not being lonely is the amount of contact with women. Time spent with men doesn’t make a difference.” (52)

“Pierre Reverdy wrote: “There is no love; there are only proofs of love.”” (55)

“In one study, people assigned to give five hugs each day for a month, aiming to hug as many different people as they could, became happier.” (56)

“When thinking about happiness in marriage, you may have an almost irresistible impulse to focus on your spouse, to emphasize how he or she should change in order to boost your happiness. But the fact is, you can’t change anyone but yourself.” (68)

“Enthusiasm is more important to mastery than innate ability, it turns out, because the single most important element in developing an expertise is your willingness to practice.” (71)

“I would take care to remind myself to remember how lucky I was to be as eager for Monday mornings as I was for Friday afternoons.” (73)

“If you do new things – visit a museum for the first time, learn a new game, travel to a new place, meet new people – you’re more apt to feel happy than people who stick to more familiar activities.” (74)

“Research shows that the more elements make up your identity, the less threatening it is when any one element is threatened.” (78)

“I wanted to develop in my natural direction. W. H. Auden articulated this tension beautifully: “Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.” (79)

“Tal Ben-Shahar describes the “arrival fallacy,” the belief that when you arrive at a certain destination, you’ll be happy.” (84)

“The challenge, therefore, is to take pleasure in the “atmosphere of growth,” in the gradual progress made toward a goal, in the present.” (85)

“Studies show that the absence of feeling bad isn’t enough to make you happy; you must strive to find sources of feeling good.” (112)

“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” (119)

“Studies show that each common interest between people boosts the chances of a lasting relationship and also brings about a 2 percent increase in life satisfaction.” (119)

“Generous acts strengthen the bonds of friendship, and what’s more, studies show that your happiness is often boosted more by providing support to the other people than from receiving support yourself.” (145)

“Whether rich or poor, people make choices about how they spend money, and those choices can boost happiness or undermine it.” (168)

“Scrimping, saving, imagining, planning, hoping – these stages enlarge the happiness we feel.” (177)

“Pouring out ideas is better for creativity than doling them out by the teaspoon.”

“Some people associate happiness with a lack of intellectual rigor, like the man who said to Samuel Johnson, “you are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” (216)

“It takes energy, generosity, and discipline to be unfailingly lighthearted, yet everyone takes the happy person for granted. No one is careful of his feelings or tires to keep his spirits high.” (217)

“A small child typically laughs more than four hundred times each day, and an adult – seventeen times.” (259)

“Another study showed that people tend to think that someone who criticizes them is smarter than they are.” (268)

“It’s hard to find pleasure in the company of someone who finds nothing pleasing.” (269)

“Studies show that distraction is a powerful mood-altering device, and contrary to what a lot of people believe, persistently focusing on a bad mood aggravates rather than palliates it.” (274)

“The feeling of control is an essential element of happiness – a better predictor of happiness than, say, income.” (289)

Did you like the quotes? Then buy the book here.

January 23, 2014January 23, 2014

“David and Goliath” Quotes

I recently read “David And Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and The Art of Battling Giants” by Malcolm Gladwell. Below are the quotes I found most useful (the page numbers in this case are the large print edition, which I got by accident). As always, if you like the quotes, click here to buy the full book.

“We think of things as helpful that actually aren’t and think of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us stronger and wiser.” (37)

“To play by David’s rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice. Their teams are just good enough that they know it could never work. Their players could never be convinced to play that hard. They were not desperate enough.” (53)

“We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options.” (57-58)

“What matters, in determining the likelihood of getting a science degree, is not just how smart you are. It’s how smart you feel relative to the other people in your classroom.” (140)

“There are such things as “desirable difficulties.”” (171)

“Most people with a serious disability cannot master all those steps. But those who can are better off than they would have been otherwise, because what is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.” (189)

““My upbringing allowed me to be comfortable with failure,” Cohn said. “The one trait in a lot of dyslexic people I know is that by the time we got out of college, our ability to deal with failure was very highly developed. And so we look at most situations and see much more of the upside than the downside. Because we’re so accustomed to the downside. It doesn’t faze us.” (207)

“Dean Simonton says, “Gifted children and child prodigies seem most likely to emerge in highly supportive family conditions. In contrast, geniuses have a perverse tendency of growing up in more adverse conditions.”” (239)

“The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.” (250)

“Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.” (252)

“The right question is whether we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma – and the answer is that we plainly do. This is not a pleasant fact to contemplate.” (275)

“Disobedience can also be a response to authority. If the teacher doesn’t do her job properly, then the child will become disobedient.” (351)

“When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters – first and foremost – how they behave.
This is called the “principle of legitimacy”,” and legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice – that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can’t treat one group differently from another.” (353-354)

“The powerful are not as powerful as they seem – nor the weak as weak.” (458)

Liked the quotes? Buy the book here.

January 5, 2014

“Sex At Dawn” Quotes

I recently read “Sex At Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships” by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha. This is one of the most thought provoking books I read in a while. Below are the quotes that I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“Where paternity is unimportant, men tend to be relatively unconcerned about women’s sexual fidelity.” (15)

“Agriculture, one might say, has involved the domestication of the human being as much as of any plant or other animal.” (83)

“Something may benefit a culture overall, while being disastrous to the majority of the individual members of that society. Individuals suffer and die in wars from which a society may benefit greatly.” (83)

“This disconnect between individual and group interests helps explain why the shift to agriculture is normally spun as a great leap forward, despite the fact that it was actually a disaster for most of the individuals who endured it. Skeletal remains taken from various regions of the world dating to the transition from foraging to farming all tell the same story: increased famine, vitamin deficiency, stunted growth, radical reduction in life span, increased violence… little cause for celebration. For most people, we’ll see that the shift from foraging to farming was less a giant leap forward than a dizzying fall from grace.” (83)

“The sense of being alone – even in a crowded city – is an oddity in human life, included, like so much else, in the agricultural package.” (87)

“Anthropologists Stephen Beckerman and Paul Valentine explain, “Pregnancy is viewed as a matter of degree, not clearly distinguished from gestation… all sexually active women are a little pregnant. Over time… semen accumulates in the womb, a fetus is formed, further acts of intercourse follow, and additional semen causes the fetus to grow more.” Were a woman to stop having sex when her periods stopped, people in these cultures believe the fetus would stop developing.
This understanding of how semen forms a child leads to some mighty interesting conclusions regarding “responsible” sexual behavior. Like mothers everywhere, a woman from these societies is eager to give her child every possible advantage in life. To this end, she’ll typically seek out sex with an assortment of men. She’ll solicit “contributions” from the best hunters, the best storytellers, the funniest, the kindest, the best-looking, the strongest, and so on – in the hopes her child will literally absorb the essence of each.” (91)

“It turns out the Ache distinguish four different kinds of fathers. According to the anthropologist Kim Hill, the four types of fathers are:
Miare: the father who put it in;
Peroare: the fathers who mixed it;
Momboare: those who spilled it out; and
Bykuare: the fathers who provided the child’s essence.” (92)

“Far from being enraged at having his genetic legacy called into question, a man in these societies is likely to feel gratitude to other men for pitching in to help create and then care for a stronger baby. Far from being blinded by jealousy as the standard narrative predicts, men in these societies find themselves bound to one another by shared paternity for the children they’ve fathered together.” (92)

“It has long been clear that the sources of female sexual reticence are more cultural than biological.” (96)

“Primates aside, only 3 percent of mammals and one in ten thousand invertebrate species can be considered sexually monogamous. Adultery has been documented in every ostensibly monogamous human society ever studied, and is a leading cause of divorce all over the world today.” (97)

“No group-living nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been document in every human culture studied – including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death. In light of all this bloody retribution, it’s hard to see how monogamy comes “naturally” to our species.” (98)

“They’ve followed an egalitarian path not because they are particularly noble, but because it offers them the best chance of survival.” (100)

“De Waal’s research has demonstrated that the increased sexual receptivity of the female bonobo dramatically reduces male conflict, when compared with other primates whose females are significantly less sexually available. The abundance of sexual opportunity makes it less worthwhile for males to risk injury by fighting over any particular sexual opportunity.” (101)

“Unconstrained by cultured restrictions, the so-called continual responsiveness of the human female would fulfill the same function: provide plentiful sexual opportunity for males, thereby reducing conflict and allowing larger group sizes, more extensive cooperation, and greater security for all.” (101)

“Paternity certainty, far from being the universal and overriding obsession of all men everywhere and always, as the standard narrative insists, was likely a nonissue to men who lived before agriculture and resulting concerns with passing property through lines of paternal descent.” (104)

“Hobbes took the madness of his age, considered it “normal,” and projected it back into prehistoric epochs of which he knew next to nothing.” (157)

“Basic human reproductive biology in a foraging context made rapid population growth unlikely, if not impossible. Women rarely conceive while breastfeeding, and without milk from domesticated animals, hunter-gatherer women typically breastfeed each child for five or six years.” (159)

“Individuals in species spreading into rich new ecosystems aren’t locked in a struggle to the death against one another. Until the niche is saturated, such intraspecies conflict over food is counterproductive and needless.” (160)

“Most of our ancestors lived in a largely unpopulated world, chockfull of food.” (160)

“The bigger the society is, the less functional shame becomes.” (172)

“Marx’s fatal error was his failure to appreciate the importance of context. Human nature functions one way in the context of intimate, interdependent societies, but set loose in anonymity, we become a different creature. Neither beast is more nor less human.” (172)

“It is a common mistake to assume that evolution is a process of improvement, that evolving organisms are progressing toward some final, perfected state. But they, and we, are not. An evolving society or organism simply adapts over the generations to changing conditions. While these modifications may be immediately beneficial, they are not really improvements because external conditions never stop shifting.” (172)

“Israeli anthropologist Nutrit Bird-David explains, “just as Westerners’ behaviour is understandable in relation to their assumption of shortage, so hunter-gatherers’ behavior is understandable in relation to their assumption of affluence.” (174)

“Throughout the world, the shift to agriculture accompanied a dramatic drop in the quality of most people’s diets and overall health.” (175)

“Difficult as it may be for some to accept, skeletal evidence clearly shows that our ancestors didn’t experience widespread, chronic scarcity until the advent of agriculture.” (180)

“But Goodall’s impression of relative harmony was to change – not coincidentally, argues Power – precisely when she and her students began giving the chimps hundreds of bananas every day, to entice them to hang around the camp so they could be observed more easily.
In the wild, chimps spread out to search for food individually or in small groups. Because the food is scattered throughout the jungle, competition is unusual. But, as Frans de Waal explains, “as soon as humans start providing food, even in the jungle, the peace is quickly disturbed.”” (188)

“Nolan found that above-average population density was the best predictor of war. This finding is problematic for the argument that human war is a “5-million-year habit,” given our ancestors’ low population densities until the post-agricultural population explosion began just a few thousand years ago.” (191)

“Asking whether our species is naturally peaceful or warlike, generous or possessive, free-loving or jealous, is like asking whether H2O is naturally a solid, liquid, or gas. The only meaningful answer to such a question is: It depends. On a nearly empty planet, with food and shelter distributed widely, avoiding conflict would have been an easy, attractive option.” (199)

“Life expectancy at birth, which is the measure generally cited, is far from an accurate measure of the typical life span.” (202)

“The shift to agriculture was accelerated by the seemingly irrefutable belief that it’s better to take strangers’ land (killing them if necessary) than to allow one’s own children to die of starvation.” (204)

“The less an individual slept, the more likely he or she was to come down with a cold. Those who slept less than seven hours per night were three times as likely to get sick.” (208)

“If you hunt or gather just enough low-fat food to forestall serious hunger pangs, and spend the rest of your time in low-stress activities such as telling stories by the fire, taking extended hammock-embraced naps, and playing with children, you’d be engaged in the optimal lifestyle for human longevity.” (209)

“If we really did evolve in a Hobbesian ordeal of constant terror and anxiety, if our ancestors’ lives truly were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, why, then, are we still so vulnerable to stress?” (210)

“If you think about it, the neo-Hobbesian vision is far sunnier than ours. To have concluded, as we have, that our species has an innate capacity for love and generosity at least equal to our taste for destruction, for peaceful cooperation as much as coordinated attack, for an open, relaxed sexuality as much as for jealous, passion-smothering possessiveness… to see that both these worlds were open to us, but that around ten thousand years ago a few of our ancestors wandered off the path they’d been on forever into a garden of toil, disease, and conflict where our species has been trapped ever since… well, this is not exactly a rose-colored view of the overall trajectory of humankind. Who are the naive romantics here, anyway?” (212)

“Their analysis ignores the fact that the cultural conditions necessary for some males to accumulate sufficient political power and wealth to support multiple wives and their children simply did not exist before agriculture.” (217)

“The assertion that the same physical evidence correlates to promiscuity in chimps and bonobos but indicates mild polygyny or monogamy in humans shows just how shaky the standard model really is.” (218)

“In bonobos, since everybody gets some sugar, the competition takes place on the level of the sperm cell, not at the level of the individual male… So the game’s still the same – getting one’s genes into the future – but the field of play is different. With harem-based polygynous systems like the gorilla’s, individual males fight it out before any sex takes place. In sperm competition, the cells fight in there so males don’t have to fight out here. Instead, males can relax around one another, allowing larger group sizes, enhancing cooperation, and avoiding disruption to the social dynamic. This helps explain why no primate living in multimale social groups is monogamous. It just wouldn’t work.” (223)

“Competing sperm from other men seems to be anticipated in the chemistry of men’s semen, both in the early spurts (protective) and in the later spurts (attacking).” (228)

“A team of Australian researchers found that men who had ejaculated more than five times per week between the ages of twenty and fifty were one-third less likely to develop prostate cancer later in life.” (238)

“A different team from Sydney University reported in late 2007 that daily ejaculation dramatically reduced DNA damage to men’s sperm cells, thereby increasing male fertility – quite the opposite of the conventional wisdom. After forty-two men with damaged sperm were instructed to ejaculate daily for a week, almost all showed less chromosomal damage than a control group who had abstained for three days.” (238)

“By 1917, there were more vibrators than toasters in American homes.” (248)

“We aren’t designed to make each other miserable. This view holds evolution responsible for the mismatch between our evolved predispositions and the post-agricultural socioeconomic world we find ourselves in. The assertion that human beings are naturally monogamous is not just a lie; it’s a lie most Western societies insist we keep telling each other.” (270)

“Greater erotic plasticity leads most women to experience more variation in their sexuality than men typically do, and women’s sexual behavior is far more responsive to social pressure.” (272)

“Subsequent research has confirmed, that most of the women were attracted to the scent of men whose major histocompatibility complex (MHC) differed from her own. This preference makes genetic sense in that the MHC indicates the range of immunity to various pathogens. Children born of parents with different immunities are likely to benefit from a broader, more robust immune response themselves.
The problem is that women taking birth control pills don’t seem to show the same responsiveness to these male scent cues. Women who were using birth control pills chose men’s T-shirts randomly or, even worse, showed a preference for men with similar immunity to their own.
Consider the implications. Many couples meet when the woman is on the pill. They go out for a while, like each other a lot, and then decide to get together and have a family. She goes off the pill, gets pregnant, and has a baby. But her response to him changes. There’s something about him she finds irritating – something she hadn’t noticed before. maybe she finds him sexually unattractive, and the distance between them grows. But her libido is fine. She gets flushed every time she gets close enough to smell her tennis coach. Her body, no longer silenced by the effects of the pill, may now be telling her that her husband (still the great guy she married) isn’t a good genetic match for her. But it’s too late. They blame it on the work pressure, the stress of parenthood, each other…
Because this couple inadvertently short-circuited an important test of biological compatibility, their children may face significant health risks ranging from reduced birth weight to impaired immune function. How many couples in this situation blame themselves for having “failed” somehow? How many families are fractured by this common, tragic, undetected sequence of events?” (275-276)

“Cultures that don’t interfere in the physical bonding between mother and child or prohibit the expression of adolescent sexuality show far lower levels of violence – both between individuals and between societies.” (284)

“Monogamy itself seems to drain away a man’s testosterone.” (293)

“Researcher James Roney and his colleagues found that even a brief chat with an attractive woman raised men’s testosterone levels by an average of 14 percent.” (294)

If you liked the quotes, please buy the book here.

October 30, 2013October 30, 2013

“Committed” Quotes

I recently read “Committed” by Elizabeth Gilbert. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

It doesn’t take a great genius to recognize that when you’re pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity. Page 20

The emotional place where marriage begins is not nearly as important as the emotional place where a marriage finds itself toward the end, after many years of partnership. Peach 41

Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Page 48

When we speak today, then, about “holy wedded matrimony,” or the “sanctity of marriage,” we would do well to remember that, for approximately 10 centuries, Christianity itself did not see marriage is even holy or sanctified. Marriage was certainly not modeled as the ideal state of moral being. On the contrary, the early Christian fathers regarded the habit of marriage as a somewhat repugnant worldly affair that had everything to do with sex and females and taxes and property, and nothing whatsoever to do higher concerns of Divinity. Page 58

So when modern-day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are absolutely correct, but in only one respect-only if they happen to be talking about Judaism. Christianity simply does not share that deep and consistent historical reverence toward matrimony. Lately it has, yes-but not originally. For the first thousand or so years of Christian history, the church regarded monogamous marriage as marginally less wicked than flat out whoring-but only very marginally. Page 58

The big romantic white weddings that we now think of as “traditional” didn’t come into being until the 19th century-not until a teenaged Queen Victoria walked down the aisle in a fluffy white gown, thereby setting the fashion trend that has never gone out of style sense. Before that, though your average European wedding day wasn’t all that much different from any other day of the week. Couples exchanged vows in impromptu ceremonies that generally lasted only a few moments. Witnesses became important on wedding days only so that later there would be no argument in the courts as to whether or not this couple had really consented to marriage-a vital question when money, land, or children were at stake. Page 62

The churches strict new prohibitions against divorce turned marriage into a life sentence-something it had never really been before, not even in ancient Hebrew society. Page 64

It wasn’t until the year 1975 that the married women of Connecticut were legally allowed to take out loans or open checking accounts without the written permission of their husbands. Page 66

A love-based marriage does not guarantee the lifelong binding contract of a clan-based marriage or an asset-based marriage; it cannot. Page 81

Maybe divorce is the tax we collectively pay as a culture for daring to believe in love-or at least, for daring to link love to such a vital social contract as matrimony. Page 83

Research shows that the more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely to fall in love. Page 100

When you become infatuated with somebody, you’re not really looking at that person; you’re just captivated by your own reflection, intoxicated by a dream of completion that you’ve projected on a virtual stranger. Page 101

Real, sane, mature love-the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and pick up the kids after school-is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect. Page 102

Most affairs begin, Glass wrote, when a husband or wife makes a new friend, and then an apparently harmless intimacy is born. Page 109

We were just experienced enough to recognize that relationships do sometimes end, and it seemed willfully childish to pretend that such a thing could never happen to us. Page 115

If you think it’s difficult to talk about money when you’re blissfully in love, try talking about it later, when you are disconsolate and angry and your love has died. Page 116

Mutual meekness can make for a successful partnering strategy, if it’s what both people want. Conflict averse couples prefer to let their grievances dissolve rather than fight over every point. Page 118

Noble urges notwithstanding, if you really cannot tolerate living with somebody, not even a terrorist attack can save your marriage. Page 120

The age of the couple at the time of their marriage seems to be the most significant consideration. The younger you are when you get married, the more likely you are to divorce later. Infact, you are astonishingly more likely to get divorced if you marry young. You are, for example 2 to 3 times more likely to get divorced if you marry in your teens or early 20s than if you wait until your 30s or 40s. Page 123

Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But that’s not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this: can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partners faults honestly and say, “I can work around that I can make something out of that.”? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, it’s always going to be pretty and sparkly, the crap underneath can ruin you. Page 130

There is hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody and than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves. I say this because listing our flaws so openly to each other was not some cutesy gimmick, but a real effort to reveal the points of darkness contained in our characters. Page 130

The marital kitchen can become something like a small linoleum temple where we are called up daily to practice forgiveness, as we ourselves would like to be forgiven. Page 132

In the end, it seems to me that forgiveness may be the only realistic antidote we are offered in love, to combat the inescapable disappointments of intimacy. Page 133

We must not automatically assume that matrimonial endurance is always a sign of matrimonial contentment. Page 148

She was so happy because she knew that she was indispensable to somebody else’s life. She was happy because she had a partner, because they were building something together, because she believed deeply in what they were building, because it amazed her to be included in such an undertaking. Page 165

Widespread childlessness is not quite so modern a development as we tend to believe. Page 191

I have written many pages already describing marriage s a repressive tool used against women, but it’s important to remember that marriage is often used as a repressive tool against men, too. Marriage is a harness of civilization, linking a man to set of obligations and thereby containing his restless energy. Page 197

If there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities. Page 205

I do forget sometimes how much it means for certain men-for certain people-to be able to provide their loved ones with material comforts of protection at all times. I forget how dangerously reduced some men can feel when that basic ability has been stripped from them. I forget how much that matters to men, what it represents. Page 210

A surefire indication that flooding is imminent is when you start using the words “always” or “never” in your argument. The Gottmans call this “going universal” as in: “you always let me down like this!” Or “I can never count on you!”. Such language absolutely murders any chance of fair or intelligent discourse. Page 214

Out of respect, we must learn how to release and confine each other with the most exquisite care, but we should never-not even for a moment-pretend that we are not confined. Page 226

Traveling through Cambodia with a Cambodian, I decided, must be something like exploring a house that had recently been the scene of a grizzly family mass murder, guided along on your tour by the only relative who managed to escape death. Page 220

It may have been a messy and botched experience, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have gone. Sometimes life is messy and botched. We do our best. We don’t always know the right move. Page 231

This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark. 239

What my friends and family really wanted was to be able to move on with their lives knowing with certainty where everybody stood in relationship to everybody else. Page 249

Like clockwork, the powers that be will now try to co-opt the notion of matrimony, going so far as to pretend that they invented marriage in the first place. This is what conservative Christian leadership is been doing in the Western world for several centuries now-acting as though they personally created the whole tradition of marriage and family values when in fact their religion began with a quite serious attack on marriage and family values. Page 263

Suddenly, legal matrimony starts to look less like an institution (a strict, immovable, hidebound, and dehumanizing system imposed by powerful authorities on helpless individuals) and starts to look more like a rather desperate concession (a scramble by helpless authorities to monitor the unmanageable behavior of two awfully powerful individuals). Page 264

As always, if you liked the quotes, please buy the book here.

October 28, 2013October 28, 2013

“Billion Dollar Lessons” Quotes

I recently read “Billion Dollar lessons: What you can learn from the most inexcusable business failures of the last 25 years” by Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

If a company followed one of these seven strategies it was far more likely to flop: synergy, financial engineering, roll ups, staying the course, adjacencies, riding technology and consolidation. Page 4 to 5

We found that companies that fail often do so because they overestimate the loyalty of customers. Page 6

Most analysis goes to support a decision that’s already been made, rather than to see whether it’s really a good idea in the first place. Page 8

It’s hard to explore options that attack core assumptions and values, such as those about what customers are actually buying, where profit comes from, the business model, and the very notion of being an independent, growth oriented company. Page 87

In 1986, Kodak produced the first working version of the type of sensor that is at the core of today’s digital cameras. But despite having a solid decade following 1981, Kodak did not take advantage of its early warning and did little to ready itself for the onslaught of digital technology because it consistently tried to hold onto the profits from its old technology and underestimated the speed with which the new would take hold. Page 93

There’s a long history in the technology world of people moving up the learning curve and doing things for themselves that they used to pay others to do for them. Page 95

As Kodak demonstrated ably, companies that face looming threat of makes three mistakes: They tend to see the future as a variant of the present and can’t bring themselves to imagine truly radical threats, the kind that might wipe out their whole market.

They tend to consider whether to adopt a new technology or business practice based on how the economics compare with those of the existing business-not accounting for the possibility that the new technology or approach to business will eventually kill the economics of the existing business and require an entirely new business model.

They tend not to consider all their options. They focus on shoring up the existing business and ignore the possibility that perhaps they should sell that business or at least cut back significantly. Page 100

The worse the current business looks, the more likely a company is to make a bad bet on an adjacent market. Page 123

Look at the differences. Be systematic. How do the sales channels different in the new market? How do the customers differ? How do the products differ? Are the regulatory environments different? Page 139

By the time a company gets to due diligence, it’s hoping to confirm that the strategy is a good one. Page 140

The key mistakes that lead companies to ride the wrong technology into disaster:

They evaluate their offering in isolation or at at a single point in time, rather than in the context of how alternatives will evolve over time.

They confuse market research with marketing, allowing their entrenched interests and hopes to color the analysis of true market potential.

They find false security in competition, incorrectly thinking that the presence of rivals equates to a validation of potential market.

They design the effort as a frontloaded gamble, foreclosing possibilities for adaptation and severely limiting the option stop. Page 153

There’s a saying in Silicon Valley that the worst thing you can do to a start up is to give it too much money. Page 162

Too often, companies fail to realize that, while their technology might be superior at a point in time, an alternative technology is on a clear trajectory to surpass it. Page 164

To get outside of your own biases, look at potential offerings through the eyes of customers. Page 166

The four kinds of issues that can be set a consolidation place:

You may not just be buying the assets you think you’re buying; you may also be buying problems.

While the focus is generally on getting bigger to generate economies of scale, there may also be diseconomies of scale because of increased complexity.

Although companies typically assume that they can hold onto customers of a company they buy, that’s often not the case.

If you’re just thinking about being the industry’s consolidator, you may not be considering all your options. Page 179

A Bain study found 80% of companies thought their products were superior to their competitors’-even though only 8% of customers agreed. Page 213

Even if assumptions have a 95% chance of being right, if you have to make 10 of those assumptions you have a less than 60% chance that all will occur. Page 228

Framing forecasts as personal bets forces those involved to be very clear. Page 248

Surowiecki gives four conditions for wise crowds: diversity of opinion, meaning that each person person should have some private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts; independence, meaning that peoples opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them; decentralization, meaning that people are able to specialize in drawn local knowledge; and aggregation, meaning that some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision. Page 250

Researchers at Intel, which also had success with prediction markets, named three factors that lead to strong performance: anonymity and incentives, which encourage honest, unbiased information; the averaging of multiple opinions, which produces smooth, accurate signals; and feedback, which enables participants to evaluate past performance and learn how to weigh information and produce better results. Patient 250

We often use an exercise we’ve dubbed “being your own worst competitor.” In it, we divide managers into small groups and give them a simple charge: Imagine you know everything you already know about your company and industry. You get a call from an investor with plenty of capital who offers to fund the competitive venture to your current business. Assuming no non-compete restrictions, how could you destroy your current employer and other competition and dominate the industry? We then send them off to develop business plans to do just this. Page 251

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