book quotes Archives - Ben Rosenfeld

July 30, 2024July 24, 2024

“Million Dollar Weekend” Quotes

I recently read “Million Dollar Weekend: The Surprisingly Simple Way To Launch A 7-Figure Business In 48 Hours” by Noah Kagan. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. If you liked them, buy the book here.

“Defining yourself by the things you do each day (the process) will get you to where you want to be quicker and more joyfully than measuring yourself agains others.” (10)

“If you believe your product or service improves the lives of your customers, sales is just education. You’re helping people out.” (30)

“It is deadly to build a business without first verifying that there are paying customers.” (40)

“Customers don’t care about your ideas; they care about whether you can solve their problems. And you should not build your idea into a business if you don’t know with 100 percent certainty that it’s a solution your customers will pay for.” (40)

“Look for something working in one category and bring it to another.” (44)

“You are a surfer. What you’re selling – the product or service – is your surfboard. The market is the wave, and the wave is what matters most.” (67)

“Your job is not to create demand for something that seems exciting, it’s to find existing demand and satisfy it.” (69)

“You don’t want to be convincing people that they need your product.” (69)

“Here are the six Revenue Dials you can use: 

Average order value: Increase the amount someone pur-chases.
Frequency: Increase how often someone will buy your service.
Price point: Increase or decrease your price point to affect total sales.
Customer type: Approach a more lucrative/wealthier customer segment.
Product line: Add additional products to make the business more attractive to start.
Add-on services: If you’re selling a product like cookies, can you offer a service like setting up birthday parties or cooking at the person’s home?” (81)

“Validation is finding three customers in forty-eight hours who will give you money for your idea.” (87)

“Actively reselling your first few customers is the best way for entrepreneurs to launch a business.” (89)

“Every rejection is an opportunity; you can use it to take a deep dive into customer problems…

“Why not?” It’s really easy to get scared from attacking this one head-on, because what happens if their criticism is right? But that’s exactly what you want to know!
“Who is one person you know who would really like this?” Always, always, always ask for a referral! Be specific about what kind of referral and use a number; this makes it highly effective.
“What would make this a no-brainer for you?” If they don’t want your product, maybe they’d want something related to it. If they don’t want to pay for your dog care app, what about dog walking? A dog hotel? Dog dating?
“What would you pay for that?” One of the hardest things in a startup is setting prices. Getting potential customers to say what they’d pay is pure gold!”

“The lifetime value, not to mention the lifelong joy, generated by a community of 100 high-value, attentive fans who know, like, and trust you will dwarf whatever short-term satisfaction you may get from having 10,000 low-value, inattentive followers.” (111)

“A community who already knows you, who follows you, who is rooting for you is one of the most powerful forces in business, and it’s created through generosity. Adding value without expectation. Helping them with their journey without asking for an immediate return.” (111)

“The mechanics come down to figuring out how to embrace and amplify your uniqueness in a way that attracts people to become friends and customers.” (114)

“What’s your unique angle in thirty seconds or less.” (114)

“1. He defines who he is,

Why you should trust him,
What he is passionate about, and
What unique thing this prepares him to do for you.” (114)

“Write out your unique angle:

Who are you?
Why should people listen?
What are you passionate about?
What will you do for people?” (115)

“The challenge with YouTube is that it’s harder to create a video than write a tweet, which discourages most people. However, I see that as an advantage since it means less competition if you’re willing to do it.” (118)

“Rewrite your profile/bio to reflect who you are and how you help your ideal customer.” (120)

“Start with specifics topics for a tiny circle to build raving fans, then slowly expand your circle of content to influence larger groups of people.” (121)

“1. Core Circle: Start with a very narrow audience. Ali started with the medical school exams for British people. Your niche within a niche can be the most obscure thing imagin-able, as long as it makes you and your audience passionate.

Medium Circle: As you move bigger, your content should overlap somewhat with what concerns your Core Circle, but it should appeal to a broader audience. Ali started talking about studying and productivity in general, since that’s required for all students.
Large Circle: Here you go for the largest audience possible that’s still related. Some of Ali’s most watched videos are about his salary-made possible by his medical video fame—or the latest Apple product-which he uses to increase productivity. All the circles should still include your core audience but keep expanding your circle of influence.” (121)

“To come up with your unique viewpoint, ask yourself a few questions:

What is something everyone thinks is true-but you think is wrong?
What is something nobody in your target market is talking about—but should be?
What are the biggest mistakes people in your market are making-but are totally blind to?” (123)

“Be the Guide, Not the Guru… people don’t want to be lectured at by an all-knowing guru-they want to tag along with a guide.

“Ali is an absolute genius at this process. His videos— which are almost always titled “How I..” rather than “How to …”” (124)

“The goal here is to document what YOU do, not what you think everyone else should do.”

(Sales copy example about fonts that works because it’s only for the right people)
“If you get a boner when I whisper the word ‘Garamond’ into your ear… you might be interested.” (128)

“The email was FUN. It wasn’t pure utility. Sales have repeatedly been shown to go UP when the people selling are enjoying themselves.” (131)

“Whatever you put yourself to, do it 100 times before you even THINK of stopping.” (149)

“Lean in and commit to 100 reps. (Think of the sas doing reps and practicing as opposed to failing or succeeding.)” (149)

“1. What is your one goal for this year?

Who exactly is your customer and where can you find them?
What is one marketing activity you can double down on?
How can you delight your first 100 customers?
If you HAD to double your business with no money in thirty days, what would you do?” (154)

“1. Who is your ideal customer?

Where are they?” (166)

“Starting a business all comes back to freedom. That does not mean everything you do is to always maximize profits.” (179)

“In a j-o-b, you must accept the system you are in. As an entrepreneur, you get to design your own system.” (182)

“Great entrepreneurs have great entrepreneurial communities. There’s no such thing as self-made. Everyone is team-made.” (194)

Liked the quotes? Buy the book here.

July 29, 2024July 24, 2024

“Mating in Captivity” Quotes

I recently read “Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence” by Esther Perel. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. If you like them, buy the book.

“I see lovers who hold so tenaciously to the idea that sex must be spontaneous that they never have it at all. I see couples who view seduction as too much work, something they shouldn’t have to do now that they’re committed. I see others who believe that intimacy means knowing everything about each other. They abdicate any sense of separateness, then are left wondering where the mystery has gone.” (xix)

“And what is true for human beings is true for every living thing: all organisms require alternating periods of growth and equilibrium. Any person or system exposed to ceaseless novelty and change risks falling into chaos; but one that is too rigid or static ceases to grow and eventually dies. This never-ending dance between change and stability is like the anchor and the waves.” (5)

“The challenge for modern couples lies in reconciling the need for what’s safe and predictable with the wish to pursue what’s exciting, mysterious, and awe-inspiring.” (5)

“Faced with the irrefutable otherness of our partner, we can respond with fear or with curiosity, We can try to reduce the other to a knowable entity, or we can embrace her persistent mystery.” (18)

“Beginnings are always ripe with possibilities, for they hold the promise of completion. Through love we imagine a new way of being. You see me as I’ve never seen myself. You airbrush my imperfections, and I like what you see. With you, and through you, I will become that which I long to be. I will become whole. Being chosen by the one you chose is one of the glories of falling in love.
It generates a feeling of intense personal importance. I matter. You confirm my significance.” (20)

“Ironically, what makes for good intimacy does not always make for good sex.” (23)

“Love rests on two pillars surender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness, One does not exist without the other. With too much distance, there can be no connection. But too much merging eradicates the separate ness of two distinct individuals.”(25)

“Intimacy comes with a growing concern for the well-being of the other person, which includes a fear of hurting her. But sexual excitement requires the capacity not to worry, and the pursuit of pleasure demands a degree of selfishness.” (29)

“Dynamics in relationships are always complementary – both partners contribute to creating patterns.” (29)

“Instead of always striving for closeness, I argue that couples may be better off cultivating their separate selves.” (37)

“Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery.” (37)

“If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticicm is numbed by repetition.” (37)

“People who live in an extended family, or who are under the yoke of economic duress and forced to live in close quarters, tend not to seek greater closeness. When people live on top of each other, there is no isolation to transcend, and they are far less interested in embracing western, middle-class ideals of intimacy. Their lives are entwined enough as it is.” (40)

“We naively believe that the essence of who we are is most accurately conveyed through words.” (41)

“In our era of communication, intimacy has been redelined, No longer is it the deep knowledge and familiarity that develop oves
time and can be cultivated in silence, Instead, we think of intimacy
primarily as a discursive process, one that involves self disclosure, the trustful sharing of our most personal and private material-ous feelings. Of course, it is as much about listening as it is about telling.” (41)

“The body is our original mother tongue, and for a lot of men it remains the only language for closeness that hasn’t been spoiled. Through sex, men can recapture the pure pleasure of connection without having to compress their hard-to-articulate needs into the prison of words.” (43)

“The adherents of talk intimacy (often, though not always, women have a hard time recognizing these other languages for closeness, hence they feel cheated when their partners are reluctant to confide in them. “Why won’t you talk to me?” they plead. “You should be able to tell me anything. Don’t you trust me? I want to be your best friend.” In this setup, the pressure is always on the non-talker to change, rather than on the talker to be more versatile.” (43)

“I am not convinced that unrestrained disclosure – the ability to speak the truth and not hide anything – necessarily fosters a harmonious and robust intimacy. Any practice ban t taken to a ridiculous extreme.” (44)

“The mandate of intimacy, when taken too far, can resemble coercion.” (45)

“Some couples take this one step farther, confusing intimacy with control. What passes for care is actually covert surveillance— a fact-finding approach to the details of a partner’s life. What did you eat for lunch? Who called? What did you guys talk about? This kind of interrogation feigns closeness and confuses insignificant details with a deeper sense of knowledge. I am often amazed at how couples can be up on the minute details of each other’s lives, but haven’t had a meaningful conversation in years.” (45)

“When the impulse to share becomes obligatory, when personal boundaries are no longer respected, when only the shared space of togetherness is acknowledged and private space is denied, fusion replaces intimacy and possession co-opts love.” (46)

“If one consequence of the supremacy of talk is that it leaves men at a disadvantage, another is that it leaves women trapped in repressed sexuality.” (46)

“When we privilege speech and underplay the body, we collude in keeping women confined.” (46)

“Only in sex does he feel emotionally safe. By limiting him to her own onphysical language, to the exclusion of his sensual language, Laura has stifled his ability o “speak” to her.” (48)

“It is especially during lovemaking that they are able to escape their inner rumblings. For them, sex is a relief that puts a halt to their anxiety; for their more verbal partners, sex turns out to be a source of anxiety.” (49)

“I tried several different approaches, most of which relied on physical interactions rather than verbal ones. I had them lead each other around the room, trying out different arrangements of leaders and followers: cooperation, resistance, and passivity. I had them fall backward into each other’s waiting arms. I had them stand face-to-face and push against each other with their open hands. I had them mirror each other’s movements.” (50)

“When you doubt your own desirability, it is harder to trust Mitch’s desire for you.” I explain. “It’s far easier to locate the fault with him—and, to be fair, he gives you plenty to work with-than it is to face the depth of your own self-doubt.”q (50)

“I no longer look at relationships as being either intimate or not. Instead, I track eachh couple’s ability o engage in a series of intimate bids tendered over time.” (51)

“Some would say that Elizabeth’s desire for submission is nothing more than a reenactment of traditional male domination. They would claim that sexual arrangements in which one partner is dominant and controlling, the other passive and weak, are inherently hierarchical and oppressive, nothing more than a sexist replay of
patriarchy. But prisoners rarely have the desire to pretend they are prisoners. Only the free can choose to make believe.” (60-61)

“being able to play with roles goes some way toward indicating that you’re no longer controlled by them.” (61)

“We do an exercise in which they divide a piece of paper by drawing a line down the middle, then separately write their immediate associations of the word “love” on the left-hand side. I give them prompts: “When I think of love, I think of…” “When I love I feel …” “When I am loved I feel.” “In love, I look for..” As soon as they finish, they write their answers to the next set of prompts on the right-hand side: “When I think of sex I think …” “When I desire, I feel …” “When I am desired, I feel…” “In sex, I look for…” (65)

“Not all inequities are a source of trouble. Sometimes these form a couple’s basis of harmony.” (70)

”Helen Fisher who explains that lust is metabolically expensive. It’s hard to sustain after the evolutionary pay-off: the kids. You become so focused on the incessant demands of daily life that you short-circuit any electric charge between you.” (79)

“I explain to him that his renewed desire came from her reassertion of her separateness and her dreams.” (81)

“Desire is an enigma; it’s insubordinate, and it chafes at impositions.” (81)

“he was choosing her again, and it’s the act of choosing, the freedom involved in choosing, that keeps a relationship alive.” (81)

“She claimed her individuality, and the end result was greater intimacy. Desire emerged from a paradox: mutually recognizing the limitations of married life created a bond between them; acknowledging otherness inspired closeness.” (81)

“What makes sustaining desire over time so difficult is that it requires reconciling two opposing forces: freedom and commitment.” (82)

“You can’t choose between inhaling and exhaling; you have to do both. It’s the same thing with intimacy and passion. The tension between security and adventure is a paradox to manage, not a problem to solve.” (84)

“In lovemaking he feels connection and nurturance that he does not get anywhere else. He is at once vulnerable and masterful, exposed and confident. Ben is a man with an active brain.” (86)

“While Adair likes sex, Ben needs it. Sex is his life support. Unplug it and he thinks he’s dying. No wonder he panics at the thought of sex going downhill.” (86)

“Frank Jude Boccio, author of Mindfulness Yoga, says, “We bitch about our difficulties along the rough surface of our path, we curse every sharp stone underneath, until at some point in our maturation, we finally look down to see that they are diamonds.”” (87)

“This entire culture is profoundly uncomofrtalb with vulnerability and dependency. Good intimate sex requires both.” (95)

“Maria says she wants to be seduced, yet she resists seeing Nico as seductive. “My relationship stands in the way of my attraction to him. Sometimes I’ll look at him, like when he gets out of the shower or comes home from the gym, and P’ll think, ‘God, he’s hot.’ Why is he so attractive until I remember he’s my husband?”” (103)

“I explain to Maria that it’s scary to be both erotically exposed and emotionally intimate with the same person, especially when you hold the belief that sex is somehow shameful. “There’s a whole part of you that hasn’t yet entered your relationship. In fact, the psychic energy involved in keeping it tucked away is enough to make you exhausted. No wonder you’d rather go to sleep than make love to your husband.” (104)

“The body is the purest, most primal tool we have for communicating.” (111)

“James, largely through example, that you can be close to some-one—intimate, caring, secure-without feeling sacrificed in the process. In asserting her independence, Stella has communicated over and over that she’s not fragile, and that her well-being does not depend exclusively on him. The price of love does not have to be personal obliteration.” (114)

“Earlier in our conversation, James made a point of telling me that Stella had a temper. “While that may be so,” I confirmed, “if you had made love to her more often you would have a wife with a very different temper, because the frustration that people can experience when the body is not touched, stroked, held, and pleasured drives people up a wall. What you then get is arousal transformed into rage.”” (118)

“You know he loves you; you’ve never doubted that; and that’s why you’ve stayed all these years. What hurts so much is that you’ve never felt wanted by him. You feel that it’s all on you to make it happen, and indeed it is. You’ve forfeited sensual complicity for emotional security. It’s a cruel bargain.” (119)

“Love and desire are not the same. Cozy is not the same as sexy. Your wife knows you love her. What she wants is to feel desired by you. She wants to know your hunger, to taste the delicate flavors of your craving, and to see it as a match for her own. Your inability to let go, to surrender to your own hedonistic designs, is infuriating to her. Your passivity is irritating, and your considerateness is the opposite of her fantasy of unrestrained rap-ture. Your lustiness would be an open endorsement for her own ardor. It’s hard to let go with someone who doesn’t.” (119)

“She finds herself irresistibly drawn to cleanliness, as if order on the outside can bring peace on the inside. And, to some extent, it does. As odious as her to-do list might be, there is something about getting things done that gives her a sense of control and efficacy.“ (129)

“Stephanie used to be quite a slob. “Before I had a child I never found myself cleaning the egg cups in the refrigerator.
I was messy. Books everywhere, papers everywhere, and I never experienced it as a lack of control. It felt cozy to me. But now I feel this need to exert myself over my environment. It’s me against the mess, my personal battle against the forces of chaos that I know will take over the minute I turn my back to watch TV or, God forbid, to be intimate with my husband.” (130)

“Jesse feels as though he’s running a day car center with someone he used to date.” (131)

“Her life is filled with novelty and adventure, but it all takes place in relation to her kids, leaving Warren longing. The children are the adventure now.
If we think of eroticism not as sex per se, but as a vibrant, creative energy, it’s easy to see that Stephanie’s erotic pulse is alive and well.” (131)

“We no longer get work out of our children; today we get meaning.” (134)

“What Stephanie fails to see is that behind Warren’s nagging insistence is a hearing to be intimate with his wife. For him, sex is a prelude to intimacy, a pathway to emotional vulnerability.” (136)

“The trick is that in order to keep our partner erotically engaged we have to become more seductive, not less.” (139)

“To her I suggest, “Keep in mind that there’s something limiting about an absolute no. What really hurts him is categorical rejection. You might find more freedom in ‘Maybe’ or ‘Let’s kiss’ or even ‘Talk me into it.’ Warren, more than anyone else, can help you to reconnect with the woman inside the mother. Can you imagine recruiting him rather than pushing him away? Invite him to invite you, and see what happens.”” (140)

“When Warren asks, “Want to?” And Stephanie finally answers, “Convince me,” their dynamic begins to shift.” (141)

“Children are indeed a source of nurturance for adults. Their unconditional love and utter devotion infuse our lives with a heightened sense of meaning. The problem arises when we turn to them for what we no longer get from each other: a sense that we’re special, that we matter, that we’re not alone.” (142)

“Thinking of this as but one phase in a lifelong relationship helps them remain patient and hopeful.” (143)

“For him, having a woman meet him as a sexual equal takes away the burden of guesswork and the persistent insecurity of never being sure he’s doing it right. When she is more forthcoming, he doesn’t have to worry about her, and he no longer feels diminished by her placating, lukewarm response. Her exuberance gives him permission to make some demands of his own, and to experience unrestrained abandon with the woman he loves.” (168)

“In a culture where everything is disposable and downsizing confirms just how replaceable we really are, our need to feel secure in our primary relationship is all the greater. The smaller we feel in the world, the more we need to shine in the eyes of our partner. We want to know that we matter, and that, for at least one person, we are irreplaceable.” (180)

“For him, sex is a place of emotional nourishment and a sanctuary. It is love incarnate. Through sex he reaches an egoless oblivion that makes him feel at one with the world.”

“It’s like I’m gone; it washes everything out. That kind of absolute focus, total attention, somehow releases me from myself. I stop thinking, the sensation washes up my spine, through my brain, and out. But there’s no observing of what’s going on.” Lovemaking is all-encompassing.” (184)

“Hiding, dissimulation, and other forms of deception amount to disrespect. You lie only to those beneath you – children, constituents, employees.” (186)

“Marriage is imperfect. We start with a desire for oneness, and then we discover our differences. Our fears are aroused by the prospect of all the things we’re never going to have. We fight. We with-draw. We blame our partners for failing to make us whole.” (187)

“I suggest that they create new email accounts reserved exclusively for erotic exchanges between them – their thoughts, memories, fantasies, and seductions.” (208)

“Quite a few of my patients balk at the idea of deliberateness when it comes to sex. They find these strategies too laborious for the long haul, believing they should no longer be necessary after the initial conquest. “Seducing my partner? Do I still have to do that?” This reluctance is often a covert expression of an infantile wish to be loved just as we are, without any effort whatsoever on our part, because we’re so special. It’s the grandiosity of the baby, and we all carry it inside. “I don’t want to! Why should I? You’re supposed to love me no matter what!”” (215)

“Sex often remains the last arena of play we can permit ourselves, a bridge to our childhood. Long after the mind has been filled with injunctions to be serious, the body remains a free zone, unencumbered by reason and judgment. In lovemaking, we can recapture the utterly uninhibited movement of the child, who has not yet developed self-consciousness before the judging gaze of others.” (218)

Liked the quotes? Then buy the book here

July 27, 2024July 24, 2024

“Red Notice” Quotes

I recently read “Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One Man’s Fight for Justice” by Bill Browder. Below are the quotes I found most interesting:

“Instead of 150 million Russians sharing the spoils of mass privatization, Russia wound up with twenty-two oligarchs owning 39 percent of the economy and everyone else living in poverty.” (87)

“Seventy years of communism had destroyed the work ethic of an entire nation. Millions of Russians had been sent to the gulags for showing the slightest hint of personal initiative. The Soviets severely penalized independent thinkers, so the natural self-preservation reaction was to do as little as possible and hope that nobody would notice you. This had been fed into the psyches of ordinary Russians from the moment they were on their mothers’ breasts.” (97)

“There’s a famous Russian proverb about this type of behavior.
One day, a poor villager happens upon a magic talking fish that is ready to grant him a single wish. Overjoyed, the villager weighs his options: “Maybe a castle? Or even better—a thousand bars of gold?
Why not a ship to sail the world?” As the villager is about to make his decision, the fish interrupts him to say that there is one important caveat: whatever the villager gets, his neighbor will receive two of the same. Without skipping a beat, the villager says, “In that case, please poke one of my eyes out.”” (116)

“This whole exercise was teaching me that Russian business culture is closer to that of a prison yard than anything else. In prison, all you have is your reputation. Your position is hard-earned and.it is not relinquished easily. When someone is crossing the yard coming for you, you cannot stand idly by. You have to kill him before he kills you. If you don’t, and if you manage to survive the attack, you’ll be deemed weak and before you know it, you will have lost your respect and become someone’s bitch. This is the calculus that every oligarch and every Russian politician goes through every day.” (125)

“What I’d completely missed was that the world is one big sea of liquidity. If the tide goes out in one place, then it goes out every-where. When big investors started to lose money in Asia, they began unloading risky securities from their portfolios everywhere else s the world and anything Russian was at the top of that list.” (132)

“Strangely, in the hedge fund business, if you’re down 30 percent or 40 percent your clients will withdraw all their money and you’ll be shut down in no time. However, when you’re down 90 percent, as the Hermitage Fund was in 1999, most clients said to themselves, “What the hell. Might as well hold on and ride it out to see if it recovers.”” (141)

“In Soviet times, the richest person in Russia was about six times richer than the poorest. However, by the year 2000 the richest person had become 250,000 times richer than the poorest person.” (156)

“Both of them had been adults during the Soviet era and had seen firsthand how capricious the government could be. If powerful people wanted you arrested, then you were ar-rested. The law didn’t matter. Sergei, on the other hand, was thirty-six years old and had come of age at a time when things had started to improve. He saw Russia not how it was but how he wanted it to be.
Because of this, he didn’t realize that Russia had no rule of law, it had a rule of men.
And those men were crooks.” (253)

“ I feel fear as much as the next person. But what I’ve discovered about fear is that no matter how scared I am at any particular moment, the feeling doesn’t last. After a time it subsides. As anyone who lives in a war zone or who has a dangerous job will tell you, your body doesn’t have the capacity to feel fear for an extended period. The more incidents you encounter, the more inured you become to them.” (375)

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July 26, 2024July 24, 2024

“Hidden Potential” Quotes

I recently read “Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things” by Adam Grant. Here’s the quotes I found most interesting. If you like them, buy the book.

“If they were singled out by their coaches, it was not for unusual aptitude but unusual motivation. That motivation wasn’t innate; it tended to begin with a coach or teacher who made learning fun.” (5)

“People who make major strides are rarely freaks of nature. They’re usually freaks of nurture.” (6)

“Personality is your predisposition-your basic instincts for how to think, feel, and act. Character is your capacity to prioritize your values over your instincts.
If personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day.
Personality is not your destiny-it’s your tendency. Character skills enable you to transcend that tendency to be true to your principles.” (20)

“*If you’re aiming to improve your social and emotional intelligence, you’re probably better off paying attention to audio than visual cues. Research reveals that if you can hear the voice of a friend or stranger, closing your eyes doesn’t make you any less accurate in reading their emotions, We re con stantly misreading facial expressions and misinterpreting body language. The tone of voice is a more accurate, purer signal of what people are feeling.” (32)

“Surprisingly, we’re better off actively seeking out discomfort. Comfort in learning is a paradox. You can’t become truly comfortable with a skill until you’ve practiced it enough to master it. But practicing it before you master it is uncomfortable, so you often avoid it.” (33)

“Once people saw discomfort as a mark of growth, they were motivated to stretch behind their comfort zones.” (34)

“The best cure to feeling uncomfortable about making mistakes is to make more mistakes.” (40)

“If we wait until we feel ready to take on a new challenge, we might never pursue it all. There may not come a day when we wake up and suddenly feel prepared. We become prepared by taking the leap anyway.” (41)

“Growth is less about how hard you work than how well you learn.” (44)

“Being polite is withholding feedback to make someone feel good today. Being kind is being candid about how they can get better tomorrow.” (54)

“Instead of seeking feedback, you’re better off asking for advice. Feedback tends to focus on how well you did last time. Advice shifts attention to how you can do better next time.” (55)

“Tolerating flaws isn’t just something novices need to do—it’s part of becoming an expert and continuing to gain mastery. The more you grow, the better you know which flaws are acceptable.” (65)

“The real world is far more ambiguous. Once you leave the predictable, controllable cocoon of academic exams, the desire to find the “correct” answer can backfire.” (67)

“In their quest for flawless results, research suggests that perfectionists tend to get three things wrong. One: they obsess about details that don’t matter. They’re so busy finding the right solution to tiny problems – that they lack the discipline to find the right problems to solve. They can’t see the forest for the trees. Two: they avoid unfamiliar situations and difficult tasks that might lead to failure. That leaves them refining a narrow set of existing skills rather than working to develop new ones. Three: they berate themselves for making mistakes, which makes it harder to learn from them. They fail to realize that the purpose of reviewing your mistakes isn’t to shame your past self. It’s to educate your future self.” (67)

“traveling great distances depends on recognizing that perfection is a mirage-and learning to tolerate the right imperfections.” (68)

“Do your best is the wrong cure for perfectionism. It leaves the target too ambiguous to channel effort and gauge momentum. You’re not sure what you’re aiming for or whether you’ve made meaningful progress. The ideal foil for perfectionism is an objective that’s precise and challenging.” (73)

“if I wanted to get closer to right, it had to feel wrong.” (74)

“Eric likes to ask two questions: Did you make yourself better today? Did you make someone else better today? If the answer to either question is yes, it was a good day.” (74)

“It turns out that when people assess your skills, they put more weight on your peaks than on your troughs.” (75)

“People judge your potential from your best moments, not your worst. What if you gave yourself the same grace?” (75)

“My proudest moment, though, was when Eric told me I’d gotten further with less talent than any diver he’d coached.” (75)

“excellence is a higher standard: for me, that means aiming for a minimum lovable product.” (77)

“one of the best ways to gauge the value of other people’s judgments is to look for convergence between them. If one person raises a red flag, it might be idiosyncratic. If a dozen people independently have the same issue, it’s more likely to be an objective problem. You have inter-rater reliability.” (77)

“A great deal of research shows that perfectionists tend to define excellence on other people’s terms. This focus on creating a flawless image in the eyes of others is a risk factor for depression, anxiety, burnout, and other mental health challenges.” (79)

“Before releasing something into the world, it’s worth turning to one final judge: you. If this was the only work people saw of yours, would you be proud of it?” (80)

“One: Scaffolding generally comes from other people. It would never have occurred to me to ward off unwelcome images by playing Tetris-the idea came from people with relevant experience and expertise. When our circumstances threaten to overpower us, instead of only looking inward, we can turn outward to mentors, teachers, coaches, role models, or peers. The scaffolding they provide looks and feels different depending on the type of challenge we’re facing, but it has the same effect: giving us a foothold or a boost.
Two: Scaffolding is tailored to the obstacle in your path. When psychologists suggest Tetris, it’s because it has a specific benefit: it changes how your brain constructs mental imagery. Brain scans suggest that Tetris blocks intrusive images by activating our visual-spatial circuits-we’re too busy processing falling shapes to attend to the threat of unnerving images. Different kinds of games, like trivia, don’t reduce the flashbacks.
Tetris is effective scaffolding because it helps you bypass a particular challenge.
Three: Scaffolding comes at a pivotal point in time. It doesn’t do any good to play Tetris before you watch the movie-there’s no imagery yet to disrupt. The structure becomes useful after the disconcerting scene, and the critical period seems to be the next 24 hours. If you wait longer, the memory has already consolidated, so you need to first reactivate the memory of the scene before you turn to Tetris to block it.
Four: Scaffolding is temporary. It doesn’t take a lifetime of Tetris therapy to recover from a horror movie. Playing for just ten minutes is enough to interfere with memory consolidation and curtail flashbacks.
Once you’ve gotten the support you need, you’re no longer dependent on it—you can move forward without it.” (84-85)

“Continually varying the task and raising the bar made learning a joy.
“There was never a distinction between fun and hard work,” she tells me.
“I was like a sponge.” (89)

“We’re often told that if we want to develop our skills, we need to push ourselves through long hours of monotonous practice. But the best way to unlock hidden potential isn’t to suffer through the daily grind. It’s to transform the daily grind into a source of daily joy.” (89)

“Research demonstrates that people who are obsessed with their work put in longer hours yet fail to perform any better than their peers. They’re more likely to fall victim to both physical and emotional exhaustion. The monotony of deliberate practice puts them at risk for burnout-and for boreout. Yes, boreout is an actual term in psychology. Whereas burnout is the emotional exhaustion that accumulates when you’re overloaded, boreout is the emotional deadening you feel when you’re under-stimulated.” (90)

“Harmonious passion is taking joy in a process rather than feeling pressure to achieve an outcome. You’re no longer practicing under the specter of should. I should be studying. I’m supposed to practice. You’re drawn into a web of want. I feel like studying. I’m excited to practice.” (91)

“Deliberate play has become especially popular in sports. Extensive evidence shows that athletes who specialize early in a single sport tend to peak quickly and then flame out.” (93)

“In a small experiment in Brazil, sports psychologists compared deliberate play and deliberate practice as strategies for teaching basketball to young players. Some of the athletes spent over half their training time in deliberate practice. Their coaches took them through dribbling, passing, and shooting drills with regular feedback, with and without defenders.
The remaining athletes spent nearly three quarters of their training time in deliberate play. To develop their skills, their coaches designed games instead of drills. Sometimes players had a teammate who was allowed to pass but not shoot. Other times they played at a disadvantage—one against two, or three against four. Several months later, the psychologists tested the basketball intelligence and creativity of both groups, measuring their ability to move to open spots on the court and make passes that eluded defenders. It was deliberate play-not deliberate practice-that propelled significant improvement.
By fueling harmonious passion, deliberate play can prevent boreout and burnout. Although it might sound similar to gamification, deliberate play is fundamentally different. Gamification is often a gimmick-an attempt to add bells and whistles to a tedious task. The aim is to offer a dopamine rush that distracts from boredom or staves off exhaustion.
Sure, a leaderboard might motivate you to push through the pain, but it’s not enough to trick you into liking a routine you hate.” In deliberate play, you actually redesign the task itself to make it both motivating and developmental.” (94)

“Passion for one task can lead us to neglect the less exciting ones on our plate.” (96)

“Hundreds of experiments show that people improve faster when they alternate between different skills.” (99)

“It turns out that taking breaks has at least three benefits. First, time away from practice helps to sustain harmonious passion. Research indicates that even micro-breaks of five to ten minutes are enough to reduce fatigue and raise energy. It’s not just about preventing burnout: research reveals that when we work nights and weekends, our interest and enjoyment in our tasks drop.” (102)

“Relaxing is not a waste of time-it’s an investment in well-being.
Breaks are not a distraction-they’re a chance to reset attention and incubate ideas. Play is not a frivolous activity —it’s a source of joy and a path to mastery.” (103)

“A rut is not a sign that you’ve tanked. A plateau is not a cue that you’ve peaked. They’re signals that it may be time to turn around and find a new route. When you’re stuck, it’s usually because you’re heading in the wrong direction, you’re taking the wrong path, or you’re running out of fuel.” (107)

“When our performance stagnates, before it improves again, it declines.” (108)

“But the data showed the opposite: students who took their initial class with an expert ended up with poorer grades in the next class.
The pattern was robust across fields: students learned less from introductory classes taught by experts in every subject.” (115)

“As you get better and better at what you do, your ability to communicate your understanding or to help others learn that skill often gets worse and worse.” (115)

“It’s often said that those who can’t do, teach. It would be more accurate to say that those who can do, can’t teach the basics. A great deal of expert knowledge is tacit-it’s implicit, not explicit. The further you progress toward mastery, the less conscious awareness you often have of the fundamentals.” (116)

“Just as it’s unwise to seek rudimentary instruction from the most eminent experts, it’s a mistake to rely on a single guide. No one else knows your exact journey. But if you collect directions from multiple guides, they can sometimes combine to reveal routes you didn’t see. The more uncertain the path and the higher the peak, the greater the range of guides you’ll need. The challenge is to piece the various tips together into a route that works for you.”

“instead of asking to pick their brain, you ask them to retrace their route.” (118)

“Sometimes you end up stuck, and it’s not because you’re on the wrong path. It’s because your path is taking you in long circles toward the top, and you can’t even tell that you’re gaining ground. You’re not seeing enough progress to maintain your motivation.
There’s a name for that feeling: it’s called languishing. Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. The term was coined by a sociologist (Corey Keyes) and immortalized by a philosopher (Mariah Carey).
Languishing is the emotional experience of stalling. You may not be depressed or burned out, but you definitely feel blah.” (121)

“Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health: the void between depression and flourishing.” (122)

“Of all the factors that have been studied, the strongest known force in daily motivation is a sense of progress. You can’t always find motivation by staring harder at the thing that isn’t working. Sometimes you can build momentum by taking a detour to a new destination.” (123)

“when we view hurdles as threats, we tend to back down and give up. When we treat barriers as challenges to conquer, we rise to the occasion.” (132)

“In one experiment, high schoolers earned higher report-card grades in multiple subjects-including math-after being randomly assigned to give advice to younger students on how to stay motivated and avoid procrastinating. In another, middle schoolers spent more time on homework after they were randomly assigned to give motivational advice to younger students-rather than receive motivational advice from expert teachers. And people who were struggling to save money, lose weight, control their tempers, and find jobs all came away more motivated after giving advice than receiving it.
This is different from the tutor effect, which highlights how we can learn through sharing the very knowledge that we want to acquire. The coach effect captures how we can marshal motivation by offering the encouragement to others that we need for ourselves. By reminding us of the tools we already possess, coaching others raises our expectations of ourselves.” (138)

“In trying times, our first instinct is to pick up the phone and ask for advice. We’re better off pausing to reflect on the advice we’ve provided in the past or calling someone in a similar situation and offering them some suggestions. We should listen to the advice we give to others—it’s usually the advice we need to take for ourselves.” (139)

“Being disrespected presents a particular barrier to growth and requires a particular kind of scaffolding to overcome.” (140)

“It’s more important to be good ancestors than dutiful descendants.
Too many people spend their lives being custodians of the past instead of stewards of the future. We worry about making our parents proud when we should be focused on making our children proud. The responsibility of each generation is not to please our predecessors—it’s to improve conditions for our successors.” (150)

“In the United States, if you ask people what career they respect the most, the most common answer is doctor. In Finland, the most admired profession is often teaching.” (160)

“Putting people in a group doesn’t automatically make them a team.” (183)

“When we select leaders, we don’t usually pick the person with the strongest leadership skills. We frequently choose the person who talks the most. It’s called the babble effect. Research shows that groups promote the people who command the most airtime-regardless of their aptitude and expertise. We mistake confidence for competence, certainty for credibility, and quantity for quality. We get stuck following people who dominate the discussion instead of those who elevate it.” (183)

“Research demonstrates that when organizations have cultures that prize results above relationships, if they have a leader who puts people first, they actually achieve greater performance gains.” (185)

“To unearth the hidden potential in teams, instead of brainstorming, we’re better off shifting to a process called brainwriting. The initial steps are solo. You start by asking everyone to generate ideas separately. Next, you pool them and share them anonymously among the group. To preserve independent judgment, each member evaluates them on their own. Only then does the team come together to select and refine the most promising options. By developing and assessing ideas individually before choosing and elaborating them, teams can surface and advance possibilities that might not get attention otherwise.” (189)

“My research shows that when you bring a suggestion to managers, if you don’t have a reputation for being prosocial and levelheaded, that can be enough to turn the tide against you.” (193)

“Managers know that if they bet on a bad idea, it might be a career-limiting move, but if they pass on a good idea, it’s unlikely anyone will ever find out. And even if managers are supportive of an idea, if they perceive leaders above them as opposed to it, they tend to see it as a losing proposition. All it takes is one gatekeeper to close off a new frontier.” (194)

“Weak leaders silence voice and shoot the messenger. Strong leaders welcome voice and thank the messenger. Great leaders build systems to amplify voice and elevate the messenger.” (196)

“It’s often said that talent sets the floor, but character sets the ceiling.” (206)

“Yet when we judge potential, we often focus on execution and ignore degree of difficulty. We inadvertently favor candidates who aced easy tasks and dismiss those who passed taxing trials. We don’t see the skills they’ve developed to overcome obstacles-especially the skills that don’t show up on a resume.” (209)

“Young people with grander dreams went further in school and climbed higher at work.” (225)

“In the spring, as I met my future classmates at events and online, I saw a pattern. Harvard seemed to attract two extremes of students: those who were sure they were a gift to the world, and those who feared they were the one mistake.” (227)

“Impostor syndrome says, “I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s only a matter of time until everyone finds out.”
Growth mindset says, “I don’t know what I’m doing yet. It’s only a matter of time until I figure it out.”” (230)

“Writing like I teach has been my compass ever since.” (232)

“Not long ago, it dawned on me that impostor syndrome is a paradox:

* Others believe in you

* You don’t believe in yourself

* Yet you believe yourself instead of them

If you doubt yourself, shouldn’t you also doubt your low opinion of yourself?” (232)

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July 25, 2024July 24, 2024

“Going Infinite” Quotes

I recently read “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon” by Michael Lewis. Here’s the quotes I found most interesting:

“The interactions between the cards were too complicated to fully understand—at some point Garfield realized even he could not predict what might happen in his own game, which he liked. “The game is shallow if you know when you create it what the best play is,” he said. “There should exist within the game a scenario where it is impossible to determine a winning strategy.”” (31)

“The more Sam saw of academic life, the more it felt like one long canned talk, created mainly for narrow career purposes.” (39)

“Sam said, “There was very little evidence that they were doing much of anything to change the world. Or even thinking about how to have the most impact on the world.”” (39)

“He thought of himself as a thinking machine rather than a feeling one. He thought of himself as a person who thought his way to action.” (73)

“In their financial dealings with each other, the effective altruists were more ruthless than Russian oligarchs.” (98)

“Ramnik said, “The smartest minds of our generation are either buying or selling stocks or predicting if you’ll click on an add. This is the tragedy of our generation.” (122)

“Jump Trading-not a conventional venture capitalist-offered to buy a stake in FTX at a company valuation of $4 billion. “Sam said no, the fundraise is at twenty billion,” recalled Ramnik. Jump responded by saying that they’d be interested at that price if Sam could find others who were too—which told you that the value people assigned to new businesses was arbitrary.” (127)

“Selling a new business to a VC was apparently less like selling a sofa than it was like pitching a movie idea. The VCs’ eagerness to buy turned less on your hard numbers than on how excited they became about the story you told. It was as if they spent their day listening to stories and picking the ones they liked best. There was no rhyme or reason to their evaluations: English class all over again.” (127)

“In a single four-year term, a president, working with Congress, directed roughly $15 trillion in spending. And yet in 2016, the sum total of spending by all candidates on races for the presidency and Congress came to a mere $6.5 billion. “It just seems like there isn’t enough money in politics,” said Sam. “People are underdoing it. The weird thing is that Warren Buffett isn’t giving two billion dollars a year.”” (178)

“One day some historian of effective altruism will marvel at how easily it transformed itself. It turned its back on living people without bloodshed or even, really, much shouting. You might think that people who had sacrificed fame and fortune to save poor children in Africa would rebel at the idea of moving on from poor children in Africa to future children in another galaxy. They didn’t, not really— which tells you something about the role of ordinary human feeling in the movement. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the math. Effective altruism never got its emotional charge from the places that charged ordinary philanthropy. It was always fueled by a cool lust for the most logical way to lead a good life.” (189)

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