“If you leave a Pelham Blue Gibson Trini Lopez guitar in the case for fifty years, it will look like it was just delivered from the factory. But if you take it in your hands, show it to the sun, let it breathe, sweat on it, and fucking PLAy it, over time the finish will turn a unique shade. And each instrument ages entirely differently. To me, that is beauty. Not the gleam of prefabricated perfection, but the road-worn beauty of individuality, time, and wisdom.” (2)
“I have watched many producers try to explain and manufacture “feel,” but I am convinced that overintellectualizing it is futile. It is something divine that only the universe can create, like a heartbeat or a star. A solitary design within every musician that is only their own.” (67)
“My mom would often say, “It’s not always the kid that fails the school. Sometimes it’s the school that fails the kid.”” (84)
“Kurt Cobain found this crossroads deeply troubling. The same guy who had exclaimed, “We want to be the biggest band in the world,” to a record company executive in a New York City high-rise office was now faced with the horrifying prospect of its coming true. Of course, we never actually expected the world to change for us (because we surely weren’t going to change for it), but each day it seemed more and more like it was. And that was overwhelming. Even the most stable can crumble under pressure like that.” (151)
“I have always been a firm believer in the idea that the environment in which you record dictates the outcome of the music, and every time I hear one of these songs, I am convinced it’s true.” (173)
“I was too young to fade away but too old to start again.” (193)
“The old drummer joke, ‘What was the last thing the drummer said before getting kicked out of the band? ‘Hey, guys, I wrote a song I think we should play!!’” (196)
“The Foo Fighters were releasing a greatest hits collection and were asked to write and record a new song to include in the track list to help promote it (otherwise known as ‘the song on the greatest hits record that is neither great nor a hit.’)” (282)
“Courage is a defining factor in the life of any artist. The courage to bare your innermost feelings, to reveal your true voice, or to stand in front of an audience and lay it out there for the world to see. The emotional vulnerability that is often necessary to summon a great song can also work against you when sharing your song for the world to hear. This is the paralyzing conflict of any sensitive artist. A feeling I’ve experienced with every lyric I’ve sing to someone other than myself. Will they like it? Am I good enough? It is the courage to e yourself that bridges those opposing emotions, and when it does, magic can happen.” (355)
“In 1935, Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, said “if we look at the modern American university we have some difficulty seeing that it is uniformly either one. It sometimes seems to approximate kindergarten at one end and a clutter of specialists at the other.”” (43)
“The fall from grace of American universities, declared ralph C. Hutchinson, president of Washington and Jefferson College, was “evidenced by the shocking number of graduates who have been discovered in… corrupt professional practices, in the concealment of corporation assets or liabilities, in the watering of stock, the peddling of questionable securities, the evasion of income and other taxes, the distribution and acceptance of bribes, and the predatory exploitation of public resources.” (43)
“As an ace public relations man, Cohane understood that his mission was to make people remember his team and its players, and that the most effective way to accomplish this was through the imagery of metaphor and nickname, the semiotics of myth.” (58)
“There was no master plan, just a call from Handy Andy, the Luteran quarterback, looking for someone ot help him out at a little Catholic school in New Jersey – that is how Vince Lombardi became a football coach.” (69)
Ignatius Loyola said, “there is the perception of ‘an intolerable disparity between the hugeness of their desire and the smallness of reality.’” (69)
“Lombardi said, “there were limitations to the game due to mentality and physical ability and that the amount that can be consumed and executed is controlled by the weakest man on your team.” (79)
“Blaik made a distinction between losing and sportsmanship. “There never was a champion, who, to himself, was a good loser.” In Blaik’s opinion the “purpose of the game is to win. To dilute the will to win is to destroy the purpose of the game.”” (102)
“History has a way of mocking attempts to render it retroactively pure.” (120)
“Unfortunately, too much experience in losing [gracefully] often lowers the resistance to defeat.” Blaik wrote.” (144)
“Vincent (son of Vince) had conflicting feelings baout his father’s long work hours. His friends were envious of him for having a dad who worked for the Giants. Vincent would rather have had a father who was around every day.” (178)
“The Packers compiled the worst record in team history, 1-10-1, a mark that New York sportswriter Red Smith later immortalized with the phrase: “The Packers underwhelmed ten opponents, overwhelmed one, and whelmed one.” (191)
“Yes, he had freedom, but that meant freedom to fail.” (212)
“Controlled violence is what Lombardi called football, and he did not consider the phrase an oxymoron. The violence was as importnat to him as the control. He distinguished controlled violence from brutality, which is said “ultimately defeats itself,” but he did not try to minimize the role of violence. To approach football any other way, he said, “would be idotic.”” (219)
“It was a variation of the Jesuit concept of freedom within discipline.” (224)
“Lombardi waited until the precise moment when it would mean the most, when Wood was doubting himself, and then assured him that what had happened to him was no big deal, that there would be hundreds of other days of redemption, and that the coach believed in him.” (248)
“Style rather than substance, Blaik said, allowed coaches of inferior character and talent to rise more quickly than Lombardi.” (261)
“Character is the will in action, his Fordham tutors used to say, and here it is, embodied, magnetism of the will, asserting that life is not merely fleeting luck or chance, that discipline and persistence can prevail, even if it takes twenty years, and as he presses forward the crowd seems certain that he knows the way, the right way, that even if he has not won everything, he will.” (271)
“Myth becomes myth not in the living but in the retelling.” (295)
“The thing that hit me with Lombardi and that we agreed on right away is that if you are gifted you hav ea moral responsibility to fulfill that gift as best you can,” Heinz reflected later.” (318)
“Dick Schaap had once written of him: “Jimmy Taylor, the great fullback of the Green Bay Packers, spent four years in college and emerged unscarred by education.”” (331)
“Lombardi said, “Success is like a habit-forming drug that in victory saps your elation and in defeat deepens your despair. Once you have sampled it, you are hooked.” When you are successful, he thought, everyone else is jealous and every game becomes a grudge match.” (348)
“What’s charisma?” Lombardi once asked W.C. Heinz. “What?” “You’re the writer. I keep reading that I have charisma. What the hell is that?” “Relax,” Heinz said. “It’s not a disease.” (373)
“Lombardi once began a speech to us by asking ‘What is the meaning of love?’ recalled Bob Skoronski. “And this is what he said. He said, ‘Anybody can love something that is beautiful or smart or agile. You will never know love until you can love something that isn’t beautiful, isn’t bright, isn’t glamorous. It takes a special person to love something unattractive, someone unknown. That is the test of love. Everybody can love someone’s strengths and somebody’s good looks. But can you accept someone for his inabilities?”” (374)
“His concern was that the nature of his job had changed. Once, it was hard for him to distinguish between work and play; thye fit together like the tattoos etched into his father’s knuckles. Now it was WORK on one hand and more WORK on the other.” (390)
“Lombardi characterized it as “a violent game and to play it any other way but violently would be imbecilic.” (401)
“Lombardi’s son, Vincent said, “Anybody who motivates and gets people going sooner or later runs out of things to say. You’ve got to take your act to a new venue.” (435)
“The cost to acquire a new customer is much larger than the cost of satisfying a repeat customer. We organize our processes and pricing around creating customers for life.” (7)
“If you can’t gather enough people with the inclination and ability to do what you ask them to do, then you run a daycare facility instead of a business.” (17)
“You can teach people to drive but you can’t teach them to have drive. You can coach skills but not character.” (21)
“Conduct three interviews before hiring candidates. Multiple interviews provide more opportunities for unprofessional people to reveal their bad habits.” (24)
“Ask candidates to follow up with you. Throughout the process, ask them to call you to set up the next step rather than volunteering to call them. We end each interview with the same request: “After you’ve had an opportunity overnight to consider what we’ve discussed today, please call tomorrow to set up the next interview.” This creates additional opportunities to observe how well they follow instructions, and you’ll save time by not pursuing candidates who have lost interest.” (25)
“You can coach your team, but let them solve problems on their own. If you still have to make all the decisions, you’re holding them and your company back.” (45)
“The more authority given to a position, the more harm outside hires can do to your culture because they have more power to screw things up. We believe in growing and promoting our own team members so we know exactly what kind of people are making the important decisions for the company.” (48)
“Don Beyer, Jr., told me that a key to growing older is not learning how to do more with less, but rather less with less. In other words, choose fewer ambitions, more carefully.” (100)
“William James counseled, “The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.” (104)
“Don’t postpone joy or suffer too much in the vain hope that someday you can rest on your achievements, a situation Warren Buffett compared to “saving up sex for old age.” (104)
I recently read The Night of the Gun by David Carr. Below are the quotes I found interesting. If you like the quotes, buy the book.
The historical self is created to keep dissonance at bay and render the subject palatable in the present. (8)
Tucked in safe suburban redoubts, kids who had it soft like me manufactured peril. When there is no edge, we make our own. (18)
The pub theory of life, that we are all of a common fabric once we have a pint in our hands. (55)
When I got in jams, got divorced, got fired, slipped after treatment, my mother said the same thing: “You are mine. We choose you no matter what.” (75)
By my reckoning, you are issued about a dozen friends in life, and if one of mine happens to be in a prison jumpsuit, well, better him than me, but that doesn’t erase the bond. (87)
As Daniel L. Schacter wrote in The Seven Sins of Memory, “We often edit or entirely rewrite our previous experiences—unknowingly or unconsciously—in light of what we now know or believe.” (115)
The chronicity of addiction is really a kind of fatalism writ large.
Call on God, but row away from the rocks. —HUNTER S. THOMPSON (171)
Fate and circumstance, along with a willingness to punch in, is often all that separates the lucky from the luckless. (176)
I had no idea what I was doing, but children teach you how to parent them. (184)
Like most single parents, I was constantly impaled on a fence between making money to meet my kids’ physical needs and being present to meet their emotional ones. (200)
All the theological debate seemed at one remove, and a higher power was in our midst simply because we needed one to be there. (200)
Having been in rooms with people I owed money to—people who had guns and unknown intent—working in an office where people gossiped about what an idiot I was did not make a strong impression. (258)
Memories may be based on what happened to begin with, but they are reconstituted each time they are recalled—with the most-remembered events frequently the least accurate. What one is remembering is the memory, not the event. (266)
Remembering is an act of assertion as much as recollection. (266)
Los Angeles, where people rise and fall based on some secret chart, New York is a place where the wiring diagram is very visible and fundamentally, oddly, just. If you are good at what you do, work hard, and don’t back down, you can make a place to stand on the island. (269)
We all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn’t end any time soon. When I started trying to remember who I was, I bought an external hard drive, a piece of technology that is designed to preserve the past. (309)
The risk of mockery changes behavior. I would go so far as to say it is one of history’s most powerful forces. Location 104-105
If all you know is how many times someone hit a target, it is loserthink to judge how accurate they are. You also need to know how many times they missed. Location 219-221
it is a bad idea to trust the majority of experts in any domain in which both complexity and large amounts of money are involved. Location 224-224
When lots of money and lots of complexity are in play, fraud is nearly guaranteed. Location 231-232
it is nearly impossible to mock a good idea unless you also lie about its nature or leave out important context. Mockery only succeeds in persuading against absurd beliefs. Location 290-291
The technological change that broke the news business was our ability to measure audience reaction to every headline and every variation of every story. Once you can reliably measure the income potential of different approaches to the news, the people who manage the news have to do what works best for profitability or else they are abandoning their responsibilities to shareholders. On top of that, executive compensation is determined by profit performance. From the moment technology allowed us to know which kinds of content influenced viewership the most, the old business model of the news industry was dead media walking. Location 328-332
Being absolutely right and being spectacularly wrong feel exactly the same. Location 357-358
You and I are often penalized for what other people think we are thinking. Location 379-379
If you are certain you know the inner thoughts of a stranger, that’s a sign you might have too much confidence in your opinion. Location 413-414
If you are dismissing your critics with labels they would not assign to themselves, you might be engaged in loserthink. Location 462-462
People who have good arguments use them. People who do not have good arguments try to win by labeling. Location 464-464
No matter the topic, all sides typically believe they have the right facts and the other side is delusional. Location 491-492
The productive way to think of your ego is to consider it a tool, as opposed to a reflection of who you are on some core level. Location 501-502
If you think your ego is a tool, you can choose to dial it up when needed and dial it down when it would be an obstacle. Location 502-503
The sweet spot for self-confidence involves operating with a belief that you can do more than the available evidence suggests, but not so much more that it would be crazy. Location 505-506
The world is not a fair place, and there is a good chance the people you are dealing with did not get to where they are because of their intelligence, hard work, and character. Location 514-515
Learn how to breathe properly, inhaling through your nose, exhaling through your mouth, and lowering your diaphragm when you inhale, as opposed to shallow breathing in your chest. Location 523-524
Effectiveness is more important than ego. Location 610-610
Note how other people’s embarrassments mean little to you when you are an observer. That’s how much your embarrassments mean to them: nothing. Location 654-655
When you combine a human brain that is wired to notice problems with a press that is incentivized to present stories involving huge problems, you can easily start imagining that the world is falling apart in a variety of fatal ways. And that worldview might limit your ability to appreciate all the things going right. Location 687-688
It is helpful to think of your mind as having limited shelf space. If you fill that space with negative thoughts, it will set your mental filters to negativity and poor health, and there will be no space left for healthy, productive, and uplifting thoughts. Location 703-705
The thoughts you allow into your head are the code that programs your mind and body. Location 708-709
If you are having trouble keeping negative thoughts from your mind, don’t try to “not think” about them. That just makes you think about them more. Instead, find the most positive and “sticky” thoughts you can imagine, and focus on them until your mental shelf space is filled. Location 717-719
As a rule, we can’t always tell the difference between the people who are far smarter than us and the people who are dumber. Both groups make choices we can’t understand. Location 738-739
One of the most normal situations in the world is that people like the same thing (in this case Las Vegas) for wildly different reasons. In politics too, people can support the same candidate for wildly different reasons. Location 784-785
The first way history is not real is that whoever is in charge gets to write history any way they like. And the way they like it is whatever way keeps them in power and looking awesome. Location 816-818
Every government invents its own version of history to brainwash their population. Location 827-828
We are raised to assume we are the lucky ones who learn accurate history while evil leaders elsewhere are duping their citizens. I hope you can see how unlikely it is that any country is presenting history to its children in an objective way. Location 828-830
The trouble happens when people try to manage events in the present to fix the past. Location 850-851
From a persuasion perspective, history can be a useful tool. If I can make you feel guilty for something your demographic group did to mine, I might be able to influence you in a way that is good for me. Location 852-853
In the long run, nothing persuades like success. Location 872-872
Our tiny brains don’t have the capacity to grasp the complexities of life and then process that knowledge to make smart decisions. We only think we can. Location 893-894
What we do instead of rational decision-making is employ a sloppy form of pattern recognition to make sense of our world. Location 894-895
We can’t tell the difference between valid patterns that might predict something useful and something that simply reminds us of something else but means nothing. Location 899-900
We humans are not good at knowing which history is the one that will repeat. Location 928-929
Life is messy and complicated, and the situations we encounter often remind us of multiple histories. But which of those histories is the one that is predictive? Location 929-930
History repeats until it doesn’t. And you never know when the “doesn’t” phase starts. Location 946-946
Belief in slippery slopes is loserthink. It is more useful to look at forces and counterforces to see where things are likely to end up. Location 1001-1002
Whoever is hired to work on the new version of the software will call the person who worked on the last version an idiot. Location 1063-1063
Whenever you are talking to an expert in any realm, be aware that the next expert is likely to tell you the work done by the last expert looked like a monkey pounding a keyboard with a banana. And the expert after that will be just as rough on the prior expert, all the way to infinity. If experts are routinely skeptical of other experts, shouldn’t you be skeptical of experts too? Location 1070-1072
The best solution to a problem is often unrelated to who is at fault. Location 1103-1103
You can often know you are heading in the right direction, which matters a lot, while the precision of your estimates is secondary. Location 1164-1165
Both sides are right about the other being irrational, but wrong about themselves being rational. Location 1183-1183
The more you care about a topic, the more susceptible you are to assigning meaning to coincidences. Location 1298-1298
If you are genuinely trying to understand the world, please avoid judging entire groups by their worst members. Location 1340-1341
The business model of the free press depends on reinforcing the ideas that each side of the political divide in the United States is as bad as the worst 5 percent. Location 1342-1343
If I had to pick one defining characteristic that separates the successful from the unsuccessful, it would be luck. But if I had to pick two defining characteristics, the other one would be a sense of control. Successful people, and people who will someday be successful, seem to believe they can steer their fate by their actions. Whether they are right about that or not, it’s a winning mindset. People who think they control their situations will put more effort into doing so. Location 1456-1459
If you take full responsibility for your outcomes, even while knowing much of it depends on luck, that’s how rich people think. Location 1472-1473
Certainty isn’t a good indication of rightness for any complicated situation. Location 1504-1504
Capitalism is similar to both science and fishing in that it is largely a failure machine. Most startups fail, for example, and most companies eventually go out of business, one way or another. But while all that failing is happening, employees are getting paid, vendors are selling products and services to the doomed business while it lasts, and the economy chugs along. You only need a small percentage of companies to succeed in order to have a strong economy. Location 1512-1515
The reality is that entrepreneurs are making educated guesses and talking themselves into a degree of certainty that the facts do not support. Location 1517-1518
Being wrong and yet confident is a good description of the human condition. Location 1520-1520
Our irrational confidence makes sense if you assume humans evolved to have traits that help us survive. Our world rewards action over inaction, Location 1525-1526
Real experts are likely to give you advice that is similar or at least compatible. Location 1597-1597
When people ask you if the ends justify the means, they are trying to frame themselves as the moral player in the conversation while framing you as the unethical weasel. Don’t answer the trick question. Instead, restate the question in this form before answering: I think you mean: Are the benefits greater than the costs? Location 1607-1609
The best response to a bad analogy is to say you don’t address analogies because those are different situations by definition, but you would be happy to address the costs and benefits around your topic. Location 1622-1624
In the business world, a project that doesn’t pay for itself in two to three years is generally a bad idea. Location 1736-1737
We humans are not good at predicting. And any notion that we have developed that superpower, in light of all observations to the contrary, is pure loserthink. Location 1800-1801
In general, when you see a lot of energy in a particular area, spread across multiple companies, the technology or industry is likely to stay around even if the players change. Location 1811-1813
Don’t assume you can tell the difference between actual knowledge and your own confirmation bias. Location 2025-2025
A more productive way of thinking about your experience in this life is that you are what you do. Location 2030-2031
Dwelling on the negative is expensive in terms of your social life, your mental health, and even your career success. People like to be around positive people, for all the right reasons. Location 2036-2037
if I need to talk about something negative, I pair it with at least one positive thought. Location 2040-2040
Never be yourself if you can make yourself into something better through your conscious actions. You are what you do. Location 2046-2047
Every culture has its own feelings about success. I call that cultural gravity. If your culture celebrates success, you have low cultural gravity, and you can rise according to your talents and efforts. But if your culture disapproves of success, you’ll feel it dragging you back to earth every time you try to succeed. Location 2444-2446
If you allow the opinions of unsuccessful people in your culture to hold you back, you’re engaged in loserthink. Location 2467-2468
Waiting until you know how to do something exactly right is a poor strategy. You could be waiting forever. Better to jump in, make your mistakes, and see what kind of free assistance that attracts. Location 2476-2478
We are a species that makes one irrational decision after another and then we cover our tracks by concocting “reasons” after the fact. In other words, we are not so much a rational species as a species that experiences the illusion of being rational. Location 2623-2625
Your persistent belief in your own rationality is the primary illusion that controls your life. Location 2626-2627
One big problem with judging people by their mistakes is that what you are actually doing is judging people by the mistakes you are aware of. The people you have judged to be angels might simply be better, or luckier, at getting away with their transgressions against humanity. That would result in an inaccurate ranking of human beings on your personal judgment scale. There’s no point in being a judgmental person if you can’t accurately rank people. That’s just guessing. Location 2668-2671
The Twenty-Year Rule Let’s stop blaming each other for things that happened more than twenty years ago. Humans change a lot in two decades. Location 2762-2763
Once you learn to embrace the realization that being right and being wrong feel exactly the same, you’re halfway out of your mental prison. Location 2812-2813
State ONE thing you believe on this topic that you think I do NOT believe. Location 2854-2854
When people are experiencing cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias (which is our normal human state), they tend to use what I call laundry list persuasion. That happens when none of the evidence is persuasive on its own, so there is an attempt to make up for the shortfall with quantity. The idea here is that if one piece of evidence has zero credibility, ten pieces of evidence with zero credibility add up to something real. Location 2869-2871
Always talk first about the points on which you agree, to set the tone and establish yourself as a reasonable voice. Location 2888-2889
You, rather than pointing out the omission, ask your critic to describe what the future would look like under their preferred plan. Location 2911-2911
