Other Books Archives - Page 20 of 26 - Ben Rosenfeld

April 14, 2014

“Titan” Quotes

I recently read “Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.” by Ron Chernow. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“Rockefeller came across as a gifted automaton at best, a malevolent machine at worst.” (xiv)

“Rockefeller drew strength by simplifying reality and strongly believed that excessive reflection upon unpleasant but unalterable events only weakened one’s resolve in the face of enemies.” (29)

“Mark Twain singled out the California gold rush as the watershed event that sanctified a new money worship and ebased the country’s founding ideals.” (33)

“As part of Rockefeller’s silent craft and habit of extended premeditation, he never tipped off his adversaries to his plans for revenge, preferring to spring his reprisals on them.” (84)

“This parting was vintage Rockefeller: He slowly and secretly laid the groundwork, then moved with electrifying speed to throw his adversaries off balance.” (86)

“Even as a young man, Rockefeller was extremely composed in a crisis. In this respect, he was a natural leader: The more agitated others became, the calmer he grew.” (87)

“Having emerged as his own boss, he would never again feel his advancement blocked by shortsighted, mediocre men.” (88)

“As a self-made man in a new industry, Rockefeller wasn’t stultified by precedent or tradition, which made it easier for him to innovate.” (100)

“As Rockefeller said, “I trained myself in the school of self-control and self-denial. It was hard on me, but I would rather be my own tyrant than have someone else tyrannize me.”” (109)

“One of Rockefeller’s strengths in bargaining situations was that he figured out what he wanted and what the other party wanted and then crafted mutually advantageous terms. Instead of ruining the railroads, Rockefeller tried to help them prosper, albeit in a way that fortified his own position.” (137)

“Rockefeller said, “You can abuse me, you can strike me, so long as you let me have my own way.”” (140)

“Another businessman might have started with small, vulnerable firms, building on easy victories, but Rockefeller started at the top, believing that if he could crack his strongest competitor first, it would have a tremendous psychological impact.” (143)

“Early on, Rockefeller realized that in the capital-intensive refining business, sheer size mattered greatly because it translated into economies of scale.” (150)

“Rockefeller said, “Often the best way to develop workers – when you are sure they have character and think they have ability – is to take them to a deep place, throw them in and make them sink or swim.”” (178)

“In dueling with Scott, Rockefeller didn’t try to demolish him – as Scott might have done to him – but called a truce to strengthen their alliance. His constant aim was to be conciliatory whenever possible and extend his range of influence.” (203)

“Rockefeller was quick to delegate authority and presided lightly, genially, over his empire, exerting his will in unseen ways.” (223)

“He liked to canvass everyone’s opinion before expressing his own and then often crafted a compromise to maintain cohesion. He was always careful to couch his decision as suggestions or questions.” (224)

“As the organization grew, he continued to operate by consensus, taking no major initiative opposed by board members. Because all ideas had to meet the supreme test of unanimous approval among strong-minded men, Standard Oil made few major missteps.” (224)

“A top-down hierarchical structure might have hampered local owners whom Rockefeller had promised a measure of autonomy in running their plants. The committee system galvanized their energies while providing them with general guidance. The committees encouraged rivalry among local units by circulating performance figures and encouraging them to compete for records and prizes. The point is vitally important, for monopolies, spared the rod of competition, can easily lapse into sluggish giants.” (229)

“He believed there was a time to think and then a time to act. He brooded over problems and quietly matured plans over extended periods. Once he had made up his mind, however, he was no longer troubled by doubts and pursued his vision with undeviating faith. Unfortunately, once in that state of mind, he was all but deaf to criticism. He was like a projectile that, once launched, could never be stopped, never recalled, never diverted.” (230)

“In a delicate balancing act, Rockefeller gave enough to get projects under way, yet not so much as to obviate future fund-raising.” (241)

“He preferred to remain slightly detached and subtly enigmatic, never telegraphing his plans too far in advance.” (241)

“To cool off a tense situation with a bland note was vintage Rockefeller, and there is no evidence that he ever again communicated with Warden on the subject.” (269)

“Standard Oil had taught the American public an important but paradoxical lesson: Free markets, if left completely to their own devices, can wind up terribly unfree.” (297)

“In religion and education no less than in business, Rockefeller thought it a mistake to prop up weak entities that might otherwise perish in the evolutionary race.” (309)

“Rockefeller said, “Instead of giving alms to beggars, if anything can be done to remove the causes which lead to the existence of beggars, then something deeper and broader and more worthwhile will have been accomplished.” (314)

“As the country grew more polarized, many people wondered whether America had paid too dear a price for the industrialization that had so quickly propelled it from an agrarian society to a world economic power.” (334)

“Lloyd’s political message: ‘Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty.’” (341)

Gates candidly stated, “There is no essential difference between religion and morality except that the one is more intense and passionate than the other.” (499)

Liked the quotes? Click here to buy the book.

February 22, 2014

“The Everything Store” Quotes

I recently read “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos And The Age of Amazon” by Brad Stone. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. If you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“Computer scientist Alan Kay observed that “point of view is worth 80 IQ points.” (20)

“Gelfond says, ‘It’s one thing to have a good idea, but it’s another to have confidence in a person to execute it.’” (42)

“Miller says, ‘Toys are so fad driven, it’s a little like betting on Oscar winners only by looking at movie trailers.’” (85)

“‘There’s only one way out of this predicament,’ Bezos said repeatedly to employees during this time, ‘and that is to invent our way out.’” (196)

“Bezos believed that high margins justified rivals’ investments in research and development and attracted more competition, while low margins attracted customers and were more defensible.” (221)

“‘It’s far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it,’ said Diego Piacentini.” (231)

“Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements.” (234)

“Some of the retailers who sell via the Amazon Marketplace seem to have a schizophrenic relationship with the company, particularly if they have no unique and sustainable selling point, such as an exclusive on a particular product. Amazon closely monitors what they sell, notices any briskly selling items, and often starts selling those products itself. By paying Amazon commissions and helping it source hot products, retailers on the Amazon Marketplace are in effect aiding their most ferocious competitor.” (303)

“‘In a world where consumers had limited choice, you needed to compete for locations,’ says Ross. ‘But in a world where consumers have unlimited choice, you need to compete for attention. And this requires something more than selling other people’s products.’” (304)

“‘We don’t have a single big advantage,’ Bezos once told an old adversary, publisher Tim O’Reilly, back when they were arguing over Amazon protecting its patented 1-Click ordering method from rivals like Barnes & Noble. ‘So we have to weave a rope of many small advantages.’” (341)

Liked the book? Buy it here.

February 16, 2014

“Average is Over” Quotes

I recently read “Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond The Age Of The Great Stagnation” by Tyler Cowen. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“Technological progress slows down when there are too many people who have the right to say no.” (17)

“The ability to mix technical knowledge with solving real-world problems is the key, not sheer number-crunching or programming for its own sake.” (21)

“At some point it is hard to sell more physical stuff to high earners, yet there is usually just a bit more room to make them feel better. Better about the world. Better about themselves. Better about what they have achieved.” (23)

“For the high earners, life will feel better than ever before, but at the same time life will feel more harried and more overloaded with information than ever before. These phenomena are in fact two sides of the same coin, and this tends to get overlooked.” (24)

“Workers are most likely to apply for disability following a job loss.” (52)

“Ask just about anyone in a human resources department, “What percent of the labor force do you simply not wish to hire, no matter what, no matter how low the wage?” (57)

“Players do their absolute best when they are faced with a slight disadvantage in their position. When players are decisively up or down, they don’t seem to think or concentrate with the same facility. Again, this is a sign of human rationality, at least if there is some need for a conservation of effort.” (103)

“Uniquely creative acts often scare us or intimidate us or make us feel uncomfortable. It means that someone out there is able to act without facing much accountability.” (129)

“it seems that we care more about drama than about perfection.” (157)

“Just as labor market outcomes will move toward the poles of either “very good” or “very bad,” so will the same be true for a lot of cities, states, geographic regions, and countries.” (171)

“When humans and computers work together and cooperate, the rewards flow more readily to top talent, not to the socially well connected. Machine intelligence is the friend of the educational parvenu, albeit the disciplined, gusty parvenu with high IQ.” (190)

“…in ways that make the job harder to outsource. The instructor who teaches human qualities like conscientiousness and who motivates his student needs to be there.” (195)

“In the longer run, professors will need to become more like motivational coaches and missionaries.” (196)

“The professor, to survive, will have to become a motivator and coach in essence and not just accidentally or in his or her spare time.” (196)

“It will become increasingly apparent how much of current education is driven by human weakness, namely the inability of most students to simply sit down and try to learn something on their own.” (197)

“It’s open to debate how much education can boost innate aptitude or IQ, but the trait of “conscientiousness” does consistently predict educational and job success and also subjective happiness.” (201)

“Economics is becoming less like Einstein or Euclid, and more like studying the digestive system of a starfish.” (222)

Liked the quotes? Buy the book here.

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.