Other Books Archives - Page 19 of 26 - Ben Rosenfeld

October 14, 2014

“Ask and It Is Given” Quotes

I recently read “Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires” by Esther and Jerry Hicks. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” (xv)

“I [say your name] see and draw to me, through divine love, those Beings who seek enlightenment through my process. The sharing will elevate us both now.” (xxiv)

“That is the optimal creative vantage point: To stand on the brink of what is coming, feeling eager, optimistic anticipation – with no feelings of impatience, doubt, or unworthiness hindering the receiving of it – that is the Science of Deliberate Creation at its best.” (19)

“If there is something that you desire that you currently do not have, and you put your attention upon your current state of not having it, then Law of Attraction will continue to match that not having it vibration, so you will continue to not have that which you desire. It is Law.” (26)

“The key to bringing something into your experience that you desire is to achieve vibrational harmony with what you desire. And the easiest way for you to achieve vibrational harmony with it is to imagine having it, pretend that it is already in your experience, flow your thoughts toward the enjoyment of the experience, and as you practice those thoughts and begin to consistently offer that vibration, you will then be in the place of allowing that into your experience.” (26)

“If you are predominantly thinking about the things that you desire, your life experience reflects those things. And, in the same way, if you are predominantly thinking about what you do not want, your life experience reflects those things.” (27)

You do not announcing your inability to accomplish your journey. You accept the distance between your starting place and where you desire to be – and you continue to move in the direction of your destination. You understand what is required – and you do it.” (37)

“When you really, really want something, and you are thinking about your desire and feeling pleasure from the thought, your thought vibration is now in alignment with your desire.” (66)

“You will never get there, so enjoy your journey.” (85)

“There is tremendous value when you are able to deliberately cause even the slightest improvement in the way you feel, for even in that small emotional improvement, you may have regained a measure of control.” (117)

“If a severely depressed person could consciously discover the relief of an angry thought, and, more important, could consciously recognize that he has deliberately chosen the angry thought, he would immediately regain a sense of his own power, and his depression would life. now, of course, it is important that he does not remain in his place of anger. But, form that angry place he now has access to the relieving thoughts of frustration.” (117)

“When your desire feels so big that it feels unreachable, it is not on the verge of manifestation. When your desire feels to you like it is the next logical step, then it is on the verge of manifestation.” (122)

“The longer you focus upon things that feel good to you, the easier it is for you to maintain those vibrational frequencies that feel good. And the more you maintain these good feeling frequencies, the more the Law of Attraction will deliver to you other thoughts, experiences, people, and things that match your practiced vibration.” (143)

“Find a nice-looking box… on the lid… write the words: Whatever is contained in this box – IS!” (150)

“At the top of each sheet write on of the following headings, or categories: My Body. My Home. My Relationships. My Work… Focus on the first topic and on your first page, write: This is what I desire regarding my body… Now write the reasons why you want each of those things.” (156)

“The standard of success in life is not the money or the stuff – the standard of success is absolutely the amount of joy you feel.” (276)

“Success is about a happy life, and a happy life is just a string of happy moments. But most people do not allow the happy moments because they are so busy trying to get a happy life.” (276)

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September 11, 2014September 10, 2014

“Where Good Ideas Come From” Quotes

I recently read “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation” by Steven Johnson. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“Good ideas are inevitably constrained by the parts and skills that surround them.” (28)

“The history of cultural progress is, almost without exception, a story of one door leading to another door, exploring the palace one room at a time.” (36)

“The most productive tool for generating good ideas remains a circle of humans at a table, talking shop.” (61)

“Most great ideas come into the world half-baked, more hunch than revelation.” (75)

“Most great ideas first take shape in a partial, incomplete form. They have the seeds of something profound, but they lack a key element that can turn the hunch into something truly powerful. And more often than not, that missing element is somewhere else, living as another hunch in another person’s head. Liquid networks create an environment where those partial ideas can connect; they provide a kind of dating service for promising hunches. They make it easier to disseminate good ideas, of course, but they also do something more sublime: they help complete ideas.” (75)

“The secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and disperse and recombine.” (127)

“The groups that had been deliberately contaminated with erroneous information ended up making more original connections than the groups that had only been given pure information.” (141)

“An important part of Gutenberg’s genius, then, lay not in conceiving an entirely new technology from scratch, but instead from borrowing a mature technology from an entirely different field, and putting it to work to solve an unrelated problem.” (153)

“Lifestyles or interests that deviate from the mainstream need critical mass to survive; they atrophy in smaller communities not because those communities are more repressive, but rather because the odds of finding like-minded people are much lower with a smaller pool of individuals.” (160)

“But encouragement does not necessarily lead to creativity. Collisions do – the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space. That’s where the true sparks fly.” (163)

“Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef’s analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and convention tended to dampen any potential creative sparks.” (166)

“The entrepreneurs who built bridges outside their “islands,” as Ruef called them, were able to borrow or co-opt new ideas from these external environments and put them to use in a new context.” (166)

“Watson and Crick were notorious for taking long, rambling coffee breaks, where they tossed around ideas in a more playful setting outside the lab – a practice that was generally scorned by their more fastidious colleagues.” (169)

“Genres supply a set of implicit rules that have enough coherence that traditionalists can safely play inside them, and more adventurous artists can confound our expectations by playing with them.” (191)

“When you don’t have to ask for permission, innovation thrives.” (209)

“Every twenty-five to thirty years a new batch of genres becomes dominant, as a new generation of readers seeks out new literary conventions.” (224)

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May 29, 2014May 28, 2014

“The Hard Thing About Hard Things” Quotes

I recently read “The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers” by Ben Horowitz. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the full book here.

“Colin Powell says that leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity.” (5)

“The simple existence of an alternate, plausible scenario is often all that’s needed to keep hope alive among a worried workforce.” (5)

“Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship. With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same for him. It works.” (14)

“During the road show, as a way to break tension, Marc would say, ‘Remember, Ben, things are always darkest before they go completely black.’” (28)

“If you are going to eat shit, don’t nibble.” (29)

“As painful as it might be, I knew that we had to get into the broader market in order to understand it well enough to build the right product. paradoxically, the only way to do that was to ship and try to sell the wrong product. We would fall on our faces, but we would learn fast and do what was needed to survive.” (41)

“Markets weren’t ‘efficient’ at finding the truth; they were just very efficient at converging on a conclusion – often the wrong conclusion.” (52)

“Startup CEOs should not play the odds. WHen you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.” (59)

“People always ask me, ‘What’s the secret to being a successful CEO?’ Sadly, there is no secret, but if there is one skill that stands out, it’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves. It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO.” (59)

“Nobody cares. And they are right to not care. A great reason for failing won’t preserve one dollar for your investors, won’t save one employee’s job, or get you one new customer. It especially won’t make you feel one bit better when you shut down your company and declare bankruptcy.” (92)

“All the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares; just run your company.” (92)

“Being a good company doesn’t matter when things go well, but it can be the difference between life and death when things go wrong. Things always go wrong. Being a good company is an end in itself.” (102)

“The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least ten times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter.” (179)

“The first rule of organizational design is that all organizational designs are bad.” (188)

“You want to optimize the organization for the people – for the people doing the work – not for the managers. Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization.” (190)

“Hiring scalable execs too early is a bad mistake. There is no such thing as a great executive. There is only a great executive for a specific company at a specific point in time.” (194)

“Perhaps the most important thing that I learned as an entrepreneur was to focus on what I needed to get right and stop worrying about all the things that I did wrong or might do wrong.” (200)

“Focus on the road, not the wall.” (207)

“Over the last ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.” (213)

“The enemy of competence is sometimes confidence.” (223)

“To be a good CEO, in order to be liked in the long run, you must do many things that will upset people in the short run.” (230)

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May 28, 2014

“The Fighter’s Mind” Quotes

I recently read “The Fighter’s Mind: Inside The Mental Game” by Sam Sheridan. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“Rediscoveries are common among philosophers; the human mind moves in a circle around its eternal problems.” -A.J. Liebling (vii)

“The more you look around, the more you see that everyone is fighting something.” (vii)

“It’s a battle of will, and nothing destroys will like fatigue.” (6)

“There’s always another level. People may not understand it, may not be able to grasp it, but there’s always another level.” (13)

“Dan Gable says, ‘Breaking somebody is the gaol. You get him to quit trying to win, he tries to survive.’” (19)

“Mark DellaGrotte says, ‘At the end of a hard training session, I have them all walk around with their hand up, because they’re all winners and they’re all MY winners.’” (48)

“Take your enemy from where he wants to be, make him fight your fight.” (53)

“Liborio says, ‘Accept you can lose, you can not perform. Take this big bag of rocks out of your backpack, take the pressure off, and you’ll do better. Once you understand that, man, you can do well.’” (70)

“Especially in a bad position you have to become a perpetual motion machine.” (72)

“Marcelo says, ‘Maybe I am not better than my opponent, but I know for sure I love my training more.’” (75)

“I asked Nino, ‘How did you get good at submissions from all these different positions?’ He said he looked at all the bad positions, all the spots where he wasn’t strong, and tried to figure out a submission from there. He doesn’t fight to get into the right position – he learns and practices submissions from positions he’s uncomfortable in.” (75)

“Nino Schembri says, ‘I take what they give me and make a strong position out of a weak one.’” (75)

“The great ones are fanatical students, analyzing positions and all the tiny adjustments that make a position or a sweep work. The difference between a regular student of jiu-jitsu and the great players is the dedication to studying the game.” (75)

“I start to think that maybe it’s the other way around, that you can’t be great without humility. The most humble guys, who are the most open and willing to learn, are the ones who become the best.” (81)

“The defining moment for a fighter isn’t victory, but the way he deals with defeat.” (92)

“There’s no easy way. You gotta take a lot of beatings.” (101)

“Pat said, “It’s the guys who go to the breaking point again and again and don’t give up. It’s up to you. SUre, some guys are in it to be a fighter, or to be part of a team, or get girls and be on TV. But there are guys who honestly know that if they don’t give up they’re going to be world champion. THe real guys know if they keep at it they can win a title. I would always mentally convince myself there’s no other option.” (102)

“Nothing can replace natural self-discipline; nothing can replace time in the gym. Andre loved boxing, and you have to love it to be great. To compete at the highest level requires eight or ten years of groundwork, going to the gym and working to get better every day, day in and day out, with no end in sight. You have to love the journey.” (112)

“Randy says, ‘When I’m done learning I’m done winning.’” (137)

“I tell that to friends or people I meet who want to be writers or artists, anybody who wants to do something different, a job without security. Don’t let it be anxiety; let that uncertainty generate excitement.” (138)

“Kenny Florian says, ‘My goal is to beat the hell out of the last Kenny Florian I fought.’” (158)

“It comes around to an important facet of fighting: acknowledging your identity and working to make it the best version of you.” (158)

“Kenny says, ‘You need to have a brutal honesty with yourself. Did I do everything possible to win that fight? What didn’t I do? And analyze honestly, without bias, from a technical standpoint. And then ask yourself, ‘Did I do everything in my training to prepare?’’” (161)

“Frank said, ‘Imagine if you did that to every person you came in contact with? You put yourself underneath them to learn? I always stay a student.’” (177)

“Sometimes the best way to beat a guy is to go into his strengths, not his weakness, to go where he doesn’t expect you, where he feels so confident he’s vulnerable.” (194)

“Josh wrote in The Art of Learning: ‘In every discipline, the ability to be clearheaded, present, cool under fire is much of what separates the best from the mediocre.’” (194)

“You have to get down and dirty and battle with yourself. I am just like everyone else. My work can be great but I’m nothing special. If you don’t win that one, you’re finished as an artist, a student, a fighter.” (197)

“Greg says, ‘You do brutal workouts to get used to suffering so that suffering doesn’t become a huge defining deal.’” (207)

“There’s always a point at which people will break. That’s why you trian mental toughness. Everyone will break – there’s not a man alive that can’t be broke. Your job, with all that mental training, that suffering, is just to push your own line of mental breaking so far back your opponent can’t find it. Then you take your opponent and get him to cross his line.” (210)

“Greg says, ‘If they lose, I get broken up and emotional, but I recover and go back to the process. The fight is only fifteen minutes, the process is months, years. If it was just about the fight I’d have a miserable life.’” (221)

“John says, ‘Anger can take you away from your goal. You can get caught up in a desire for revenge, which distracts you. Experienced fighters will create this in opponents.’ To John, what sets the top guys apart is the idea of ‘relaxed poise.’ He says, ‘The single definitive feature of the uberathlete is a sense of effortlessness in a world where most men grutn and strive and scream. It comes easy to the best, and what creates that? I think it’s a sense of play. No fear or anxiety about their performance. Like when the first time you ever drove a car, you came out seating and exhausted. Now when you drive a car it’s effortless and smooth. Fear and anger are motor inhibitors.” (237)

“Renzo said, ‘Now, everything is much clearer, you don’t waste time or strength, you just go straight to the point.’” (238)

“Renzo says, ‘The guy outweighed me by thirty kilos, and I thought, I’m gonna be here all night. If I can’t finish him, we’ll be here tomorrow morning. Because I don’t give a fuck, I’m not giving up. I’m going ot see how he’s gonna make me quit. It’s impossible.’” (239)

“Peter said, ‘Some artist said that when you start to work, every artist you ever cared about is in the studio with you. One by one, they leave. Finally, you leave, too. Then the work happens.’” (246)

“Concentration comes with the hidden cost of diminished creativity.”

“It’s a misunderstanding of Musashi, that if you adopt that proper philosophy and ‘be like water’ or ‘fear nothing,’ you don’t need to practice ten hours a day for fifteen years.” (256)

“There are no shortcuts but a lifetime of study. There are no easy ways but obsession.” (257)

“Once you’ve devoted a lifetime to study then the important thing is to get out of your own way and not screw yourself up by thinking.” (259)

“You have to be simple, uncomplicated, pure, just to have a shot at falling into that zone state. And of course you need your ten thousand hours, too. Jordan and Kobe worked harder in the gym than everyone else.” (267)

“We choose things that are against our own best interests because the freedom to make that choice is more important than those interests.” (279)

“Carlo laughed and continued, ‘It helps explain why there is no money, because you get paid in satisfaction.’” (281)

“My first serious art teacher used to say, in his said voice, ‘We draw because we want to be loved.’” (283)

“Fighting is a way for the unwise, the damaged, and the angry men and women to find wisdom. It makes you a better person.” (283)

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May 10, 2014

“The Obstacle Is The Way” Quotes

I recently read “The Obstacle Is The Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials Into Triumph” by Ryan Holiday. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“Through our perception of events, we are complicit in the creation – as well as the destruction – of every one of our obstacles.” (22)

“Real strength lies in the control or, as Nasim Taleb put it, the domestication of one’s emotions, not in pretending they don’t exist.” (30)

“Epictetus told his students, when they’d quote some great thinker, to picture themselves observing the person having sex. It’s funny, you should try it the next time someone intimidates you or makes you feel insecure.” (34)

“Take your situation and pretend it is not happening to you. Pretend it is not important, that it doesn’t matter. How much easier would it be for you to know what to do? How much more quickly and dispassionately could you size up the scenario and its options?” (35)

“When you can break apart something, or look at it form some new angle, it loses its power over you.” (36)

“One meeting is nothing in a lifetime of meetings, one deal is just one deal. In fact, we may have actually dodged a bullet. The next opportunity might be better.” (38)

“Everything changed for George Clooney when he tried a new perspective. He realized that casting is an obstacle for producers, too – they need to find somebody, and they’re all hoping that the next person to walk in the room is the right somebody. Auditions were a chance to solve their problem, not his.

From Clooney’s new perspective, he was that solution. He wasn’t going to be someone groveling for a shot. He was someone with something special to offer. He was the answer to their prayers, not the other way around. That was what he began projecting in his auditions – not exclusively his acting skills but that he was the man for the job. That he understood what the casting director and producers were looking for in a specific role and that he would deliver it in each and every situation, in preproduction, on camera, and during promotion.” (39)

“Most people start from disadvantage (often with no idea they are doing so) and do just fine. It’s not unfair, it’s universal. Those who survive it, survive because they took things day by day – that’s the real secret.” (46)

“One thing is certain. It’s not simply a matter of saying: Oh, I’ll live in the present. You have to work at it. Catch your mind when it wanders – don’t let it get away from you. Discard distracting thoughts.” (48)

“Remember that this moment is not your life, it’s just a moment in your life. Focus on what is in front of you, right now. Ignore what it “represents” or it “means” or “why it happened to you.”” (48)

“Steve Jobs refused to tolerate people who didn’t believe in their own abilities to succeed.” (51)

“Take that longtime rival at work, the one who causes endless headaches? Note the fact that they also:

– keep you alert

– raise the stakes

– motivate you to prove them wrong

– harden you

– help you to appreciate true friends

– provide an instructive antilog – an example of whom you don’t want to become” (56)

“The struggle against an obstacle inevitably propels the fighter to a new level of functioning. The extent of the struggle determines the extent of the growth. The obstacle is an advantage, not adversity. The enemy is any perception that prevents us from seeing this.” (57)

“It’s a huge step forward to realize that the worst thing to happen is never the event, but the event and losing your head. Because then you’ll have two problems.” (60)

“Boldness is acting anyway, even though you understand the negative and the reality of your obstacle.” (60)

“Sure, Demosthenes lost the inheritance he’d been born with, and that was unfortunate. But in the process of dealing with this reality, he created a far better one – one that could never be taken from him.” (67)

“In persistence, he’d not only broken through: In trying it all the wrong ways, Grant discovered a totally new way – the way that would eventually win the war.” (77)

“Knowing that eventually – inevitably – one will work. Welcoming the opportunity to test and test and test, grateful for the priceless knowledge this reveals.” (78)

“We’re usually skilled and knowledgeable and capable enough. But do we have the patience to refine our idea? The energy to beat on enough doors until we find investors or supporters? The persistence to slog through the politics and drama of working with a group?” (79)

“Epictetus: “persist and resist.” Persist in your efforts. Resist giving in to distraction, discouragement, or disorder.” (80)

“Failure shows us the way – by showing us what isn’t the way.” (86)

“Don’t think about the end – think about surviving.” (88)

“But you, you’re so busy thinking about the future, you don’t take any pride in the tasks you’re given right now.” (94)

“Forget the rule book, settle the issue.” (99)

“I you’ve got an important mission, all that matters is that you accomplish it.” (100)

“Think progress, not perfection.” (102)

“In a study of some 30 conflicts comprising more than 280 campaigns from ancient to modern history, the brilliant strategist and historian B. H. Liddell Hart came to a stunning conclusion: In only 6 of the 280 campaigns was the decisive victory a result of a direct attack on the enemy’s main army.” (104)

“When you’re at your wit’s end, straining and straining with all your might, when people tell you you look like you might pop a vein… Take a step back, then go around the problem. Find some leverage. Approach from what is called the “line of least expectation.” (105)

“We wrongly assume that moving forward is the only way to progress, the only way we can win. Sometimes, staying put, going sideways, or moving backward is actually the best way to eliminate what blocks or impedes your path.” (112)

“We act out, instead of act.” (116)

“If you think it’s simply enough to take advantage of the opportunities that rise in your life, you will fall short of greatness. Anyone sentient can do that. What you must do is learn how to press forward precisely when everyone around you sees disaster.” (119)

“Ordinary people shy away form negative situations, just as they do with failure. They do their best to avoid trouble. What great people do is the opposite. They are their best in these situations. They turn personal tragedy or misfortune – really anything, everything – to their advantage.” (120)

“It’s much easier to control our perceptions and emotions than it is to give up our desire to control other people and events.” (132)

“Could you actually handle yourself if things suddenly got worse?” (135)

“About the worst thing that can happen is not something going wrong, but something going wrong and catching you by surprise.” (143)

“It doesn’t feel that way but constraints in life are a good thing. Especially if we can accept them and let them direct us. They push us to places and to develop skills that we’d otherwise never have pursued.” (145)

“If someone we knew took traffic signals personally, we would judge them insane. Yet this is exactly what life is doing to us. It tells us to come to a stop here. Or that some intersection is blocked or that a particular road has been rerouted through an inconvenient detour. We can’t argue or yell this problem away. We simply accept it.” (145)

“Love everything that happens: amor fati.” (150)

“To do great things, we need to be able to endure tragedy and setbacks. We’ve got to love what we do and all that it entails, good and bad. We have to learn to find joy in every single thing that happens.” (151)

“The Germans have a word for it: Sitzfleisch. Staying power. Winning by sticking your ass to the seat and not leaving until after it’s over.” (157)

“There are more failures in the world due to a collapse of will than there will ever be from objectively conclusive external events.” (158)

“Whatever you’re going through, whatever is holding you down or standing in your way, can be turned into a source of strength – by thinking of people other than yourself.” (165)

“Stop pretending that what you’re going through is somehow special or unfair. Whatever trouble you’re having – no matter how difficult – is not some unique misfortune picked out especially for you. It just is what it is.” (165)

“One does not overcome an obstacle to enter the land of no obstacles.” (172)

“On the contrary, the more you accomplish, the more things will stand in your way. There are always more obstacles, bigger challenges. You’re always fighting uphill. Get used to it and train accordingly.” (173)

“Passing one obstacle simply says you’re worthy of more.” (173)

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