“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.” -Voltaire
“Daryl Morey suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.” (31)
“Danny said, “I’ve always felt ideas were a dime a dozen. If you had one that didn’t work out, you should not fight too hard to save it, just go find another.”” (73)
“Later when he was a university professor, Danny would tell students, “When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.” That was his intellectual instinct, his natural first step to the mental hoop: to take whatever someone had just said to him and try not to tear it down but to make sense of it.” (82)
“At some point it didn’t matter: He compelled himself to be brave until bravery became a habit.” (94)
“Amos liked to say that stinginess was contagious and so was generosity, and since behaving generously made you happier than behaving stingily, you should avoid stingy people and spend your time only with generous ones.” (109)
“A banana and an apple seem more similar than they otherwise would because we’ve agreed to call them both fruit. Things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping causes them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. That is, the mere act of classification reinforces stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification.” (115)
“The only way to understand a mechanism such as the eye, Danny thought, was studying the mistakes that it made. Error wasn’t merely instructive; it was the key that might unlock the deep nature of the mechanism. “How do you understand memory?” he asked. “You don’t study memory. You study forgetting.”” (129)
“Danny explained, “Reforms always create winners and losers, and the losers will always fight harder than the winners.” How did you get the losers to accept change? The prevailing strategy on the Israeli farms – which wasn’t working very well – was to bully or argue with the people who needed to change. The psychologist Kurt Lewin had suggested persuasively that, rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those. Imagine a plank held in place by a spring on either side of it, Danny told the students. How do you move it? Well, you can increase the force on one side of the plank. Or you can reduce the force on the other side. “In one case the overall tension is reduced,” he said, “and in the other it is increased.” And that was a sort of proof that there was an advantage in reducing the tensions. “It’s a key idea,” said Danny. “Making it easy to change.”” (138-39)
“Someone once said that education was knowing what to do when you don’t know.” (140)
“This is what happens when people become attached to a theory. They fit the evidence to the theory rather than the theory to the evidence. They cease to see what’s right under their nose.” (149)
“Amos liked to say, “When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.” (155)
“People’s “intuitive expectations are governed by a consistent misperception of the world,” Danny and Amos had written in their final paragraph.” (164)
“Amos had a gift for avoiding what he called “overcomplicated” people.” (179)
“Work, for Amos, had always been play: If it wasn’t fun, he simply didn’t see the point in doing it.” (181)
“He refused to start a paper until he had decided what it would be called. He believed the title forced you to come to grips with what your paper was about.” (182)
“The world’s not just a stage. It’s a casino, and our lives are games of chance. And when people calculate the odds in any life situation, they are often making judgments about similarity – or representativeness. You have some notion of a parent population: “storm clouds” or “gastric ulcers” or “genocidal dictators” or “NBA players.” You compare the specific case to the parent population.” (183)
“The stories people told themselves, when the odds were either unknown or unknowable, were naturally too simple.” (195)
“Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic Universe.” (197)
“Man’s inability to see the power of regression to the mean leaves him blind to the nature of the world around him.” (203)
“He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.” (208)
“The problem was not what they (the doctors) knew, or didn’t know. It was their need for certainty or, at least, the appearance of certainty.” (220)
“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” (230)
“It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.” (230)
“That number represented the best estimate of the odds. Apparently the foreign minister didn’t want to rely on the best estimates. He preferred his own internal probability calculator: his gut. “That was the moment I gave up on decision analysis,” said Danny. “No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.” (250)
“Happy people did not dwell on some imagined unhappiness the way unhappy people imagined what they might have done differently so that they might be happy. People did not seek to avoid other emotions with the same energy they sought to avoid regret.” (261)
“Danny wrote, “the general point is that the same state of affairs (objectively) can be experienced with very different degrees of misery,” depending on how easy it is to imagine that things might have turned out differently.” (263)
“People did not choose between things. They chose between descriptions of things.” (278)
“After all, what is a marriage if not an agreement to distort one’s perception of another, in relation to everyone else?” (334)
“”The brain appears to be programmed, loosely speaking, to provide as much certainty as it can,” Amos once said, in a talk to a group of Wall Street executives. “It is apparently designed to make the best possible case for a given interpretation rather than to represent all the uncertainty about a given situation.”” (336)
“There was a kind of stoic distance that was astonishing. Amos said, ‘Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good book. It was a very good book.’”
“Danny made a rule about his fantasy life: He never fantasized about something that might happen. He established this private rule for his imagination once he realized that, after he had fantasized about something that might actually happen, he lost his drive to make it happen.” (352)
Tim Ferriss: “You create yourself, instead of seeking to discover yourself. There is value in the latter, but it’s mostly past-tense. It’s a rearview mirror. Looking out the windshield is how you get where you want to go.” (xxii)
“The superheroes you have in your mind are nearly all walking flaws who’ve maximized 1 or 2 strengths. Humans are imperfect creatures. You don’t “succeed” because you have no weaknesses; you succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them.” (xxiii)
“It’s how I frame the importance of the first 60 to 90 minutes of the day. They facilitate or handicap the next 12+ hours. I’ve deliberately set a low bar for “win.”” (143)
(Morning rituals) “Do 5 to 10 Reps of something (
(Morning rituals) “Add one of the following to your drinking mug: 1 to 2 tablespoons of coconut oil or 1 scoop of Quest MCT Oil Powder.” (146)
(5 minutes) “To be answered in the morning: I am grateful for… 1. ____ 2. ____ 3.____ What would make today great? 1. ____ 2. ___ 3.___ Daily affirmations. I am… 1. ___ 2. ___ 3. ___
To be filled in at night: 3 amazing things that happened today… 1. ___ 2. ___ 3. ___ How could I have made today better? 1. ___ 2. ___ 3. ___” (146-147)
“Most of our waking hours, we feel as though we’re in a trench on the front lines with bullets whizzing past our heads. Through 20 minutes of consistent meditation, I can become the commander, looking out at the battlefield from a hilltop. I’m able to look at a map of the territory and make high-level decisions.” (150)
“Meditation simply helps you channel drive toward the few things that matter, rather than every moving target and imaginary opponent that pops up.” (151)
“If you want to try mantra-based meditation without a course, you can sit and silently repeat on two-syllable word (I’ve used “na-ture” before) for 10 to 20 minutes first thing in the morning.” (151)
“If you spend even a second noticing this wandering and bringing your attention back to your mantra, that is a “successful” session. As Tara Brach pointed out to me, the muscle you’re working is bringing your attention back to something. My sessions are 99% monkey mind, but it’s the other 1% that matters. If you’re getting frustrated, your standards are too high or your sessions are too long.” (152)
“Here’s my 8-step process for maximizing efficacy (doing the right things): Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen. Email is the mind-killer. Make a cup of tea and sit down with a pen/pencil and paper. Write down the 3 to 5 things – and no more – that are making you the most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted form one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually equal most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict. For each item, ask yourself: “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?” “Will moving this forward make all the other to-dos unimportant or easier to knock off later?” Put another way: “What, if done, will make all of the rest easier or irrelevant?” Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions. Block out at 2 to 3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow. TO BE CLEAR: Block out at 2 to 3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work. No phone calls or social media allowed. If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward-spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do.” (200)
“If I have10 important things to do in a day, it’s 100% certain nothing important will get done that day. On the other hand, i can usually handle one must-do item and block out my lesser behaviors for 2 to 3 hours a day.” (201)
“Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.” (201)
“If you didn’t get into the prospect’s mind first, don’t give up hope. Find a new category you can be first in. It’s not as difficult as you might think… if you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.” (277)
“When you launch a new product, the first question to ask yourself is not ‘How is this new product better than the competition?’ but ‘First what?’ In other words, what category is this new product first in?” (277)
“This is counter to classic marketing thinking, which is brand oriented: How do I get people to prefer my brand? Forget the brand. Think categories. Prospects are on the defensive when it comes to brands. Everyone talks about why their brand is better. But prospects have an open mind when it come sto categories. Everyone is interested in what’s new. Few people are interested in what’s better.” (278)
“If you understand principles, you can create tactics. If you are dependent on perishable tactics, you are always at a disadvantage.” (289)
“If you ad a + to the end of any bit.ly URL, you can see stats related to that link.” (300)
“Go to any Kickstarter project, click on Share, and pick a social network, like Twitter. A pre-populated tweet will appear with a shortlink. Copy and paste the link alone into a new tab, add + to the end, and hit Return.” (300)
“If you drag and drop any image file into the search bar at images.google.com, you’ll be shown every website that has ever posted that image.” (301)
“The question I ask whenever I’m straining for extended periods is, “What would this look like if it were easy?”” (357)
“Schedule things in advance to prevent yourself from backing out… Make commitments in a high-energy state so that you can’t back out when you’re in a low-energy state.” (380)
“To develop your edge initially, you learn to set priorities; to maintain your edge, you need to defend against the priorities of others. Once you reach a decent level of professional success, lack of opportunity won’t kill you. It’s drowning in “kinda cool” commitments that will skin the ship.” (387)
“A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.” (468)
“Write down a precise sequence of curse words that takes 7 to 10 seconds to read. Then, before a creative work session of some type, read it quickly and loudly like you’re casting a spell or about to go postal.” (529)
“8 Tactics for dealing with haters: It doesn’t matter how many people don’t get it. What matters is how many people do. 10% of people will find a way to take anything personally. Expect it and treat it as math. When in doubt, starve it of oxygen. If you respond, don’t over-apologize. You can’t reason someone out of something they didn’t reason themselves into. “Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity. You’ll avoid the tough decisions, and you’ll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted.” -Colin Powell “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” -Epictetus “Living well is the best revenge.” -George Herbert” (534-537)
“There is a mason jar on my kitchen counter with JAR OF AWESOME in glitter letters on the side. Anytime something really cool happens in a day, something that made me excited or joyful, doctor’s orders are to write it down on a slip of paper and put it in this mason jar. When something great happens, you think you’ll remember it 3 months later, but you won’t.” (570)
“What if I did the opposite for 48 hours?” (594)
“If I could only work 2 hours per week on my business, what would I do?” (596)
“1) To get huge, good things done, you need to be okay with letting the small, bad things happen. 2) People’s IQs seem to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.” (597)
“What if I couldn’t pitch my product directly? What if I had to sell around the product?” (598)
“People don’t like being sold products, but we all like being told stories.” (599)
“Instead of answering, “what should we do?” I tried first to hone in on answering, “What should we simplify?” (600)
“What should I put on my not-to-do list?” (600)
“A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can’t live on field mice. A lion needs antelope. Antelope are big animals. They take more speed and strength to capture and kill, and once killed, they provide a feast for the lion and her pride… So ask yourself at the end of the day, “Did I spend today chasing mice or hunting antelope?” (601)
“Killing yourself is like taking your pain, multiplying it by 10, and giving it to the ones who love you.” (624)
“If you can’t make yourself happy, do little things to make other people happy. This is a very effective magic trick. Focus on others instead of yourself. Buy coffee for the person behind you in line.” (627)
Dr. Peter Attia: “Success is: Do your kids remember you for being the best dad? Not the add who gave them everything, but will they be able to tell you anything one day? Will they be able to call you out of the blue, any day, no matter what? Are you the first person they want to ask for advice? And at the same time, can you hit it out of the park in whatever it is you decide to do, as a lawyer, as a doctor, as a stockbroker, as a whatever?” (71)
Gabby Reece: “I always say that I’ll go first… That means if I’m checking out at the store, I’ll say hello first. If I’m coming across somebody and make eye contact, I’ll smile first. [I wish] people would experiment with that in their life a little bit: Be first, because – not all times, but most times – it comes in your favor.” (94)
“If the woman can refrain from trying to change or mother her partner, she has a greater opportunity of putting herself in a position where the guy will respect her. A man needs support. I mean, I love you guys and you’re all strong, but you’re very fragile, and you need to e supported and [for us to] help you fully realize your voice, whatever that is.” (97)
Lao Tzu: “If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.” (104)
Jane McGonigal: “If you play Tetris after witnessing a traumatic event [ideally within 6 hours, but it’s been demonstrated at 24 hours], it prevent flashbacks and lowers symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.” (133)
Archilochus: “We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.” (149)
Chade-Meng Tan “With “Just Note Gone” we train the mind to notice that something previously experienced is no more. For example, at the end of a breath, notice that the breath is over. Gone. As a sound fades away, notice when it is over. Gone. At the end of a thought, notice that the thought is over. Gone. At the end of an experience of emotion – joy, anger, sadness, or anything else – notice it is over. Gone.” (156)
“A kind thought is rewarding in and of itself… All other things being equal, to increase your happiness, all you have to do is randomly wish for somebody else to be happy. That is all. It basically takes no time and no effort.” (158)
Coach Sommer: “Dealing with the temporary frustration of not making progress is an integral part of the path towards excellence. In fact, it is essential and something that every single elite athlete has had to learn to deal with. If the pursuit of excellence was easy, everyone would do it. In fact, this impatience in dealing with frustration is the primary reason that most people fail to achieve their goals. Unreasonable expectations timewise, resulting in unnecessary frustration, due to a perceived feeling of failure. Achieving the extraordinary is not a linear process. The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home. A blue collar work ethic married to indomitable will. It is literally that simple. Nothing interferes. Nothing can sway you from your purpose. Once the decision is made, simply refuse to budge. Refuse to compromise. And accept that quality long-term results require quality long-term focus. No emotion. No drama. No beating yourself up over small bumps in the roads. Learn to enjoy and appreciate the process. This is especially important because you are going to spend far more time on the actual journey than with those all too brief moments of triumph at the end. Certainly celebrate the moments of triumph when they occur. More importantly, learn from defeats when they happen. In fact, if you are into encountering defeat on a fairly regular basis, you are not trying hard enough. ANd absolutely refuse to accept less than your best. Throw out a timeline. It will take what it takes. If the commitment is to a long-term goal and not to a series of smaller intermediate goals, then only one decision needs to be made and adhered to. Clear, simple, straightforward. Much easier to maintain than having to make small decision after small decision to stay the course when dealing with each step along the way. This provides far too many opportunities to inadvertently drift from your chosen goal. The single decision is one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.” (161)
Chris Sacca: “It may be lucky, but it’s not an accident.” (164)
“A shirt (wearing the same crazy shirt every day) might seem like a small thing, but Chris realized early on that being a successful investor isn’t simply knowing which companies to invest in. part of the process is ensuring founders know who you are.” (167)
“Never forget that underneath all the math and the MBA bullshit talk, we are all still emotionally driven human beings. We want to attach ourselves to narratives. We don’t act because of equations. We follow our beliefs. We get behind leaders who stir our feelings. IN the early days of your venture, if you find someone diving too deep into the numbers, that means they are struggling to find a reason to deeply care about you.” (168)
“Weirdness is why we adore our friends… Weirdness is what bonds us to our colleagues. Weirdness is what sets us apart, gets us hired. Be your unapologetically weird self. In fact, being weird may even find you the ultimate happiness.” (169)
Marc Andreessen: “Each of our general partners has the ability to pull the trigger on a deal without a vote or without consensus. If the person closest to the deal has a very strong degree of positive commitment and enthusiasm about it, then we should do that investment, even if everybody else in the room thinks it’s the stupidest thing they’ve ever heard… however, you don’t get to do that completely on your own without stress-testing. If necessary, we create a ‘red team.’ We’ll formally create the countervailing force to argue the other side… Whenever Ben brings in a deal, I just beat the shit out of it. I might think it’s the best idea I’ve ever heard of, but I’ll just trash the crap out of it and try to get everybody else to pile on. And then, at the end of it, if he’s still pounding the table saying, “no, no, this is the thing…’ then we say we’re all in. We’re all behind you… It’s a ‘disagree and commit’ kind of culture. By the way, he does the same thing to me. It’s the torture test.” (172)
“Everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” (174)
“My goal is not to fail fast. My goal is to succeed over the long run. They are not the same thing.” (175)
“Show me an incumbent bigco failing to adapt to change, I’ll show you top execs paid huge cash compensation for quarterly and annual goals.” (175)
Arnold Schwarzenegger: “I am a big believer that if you have a very clear vision of where you want to go, then the rest of it is much easier. Because you always know why you are training 5 hours a day, you always know why you are pushing and going through the pain barrier, and why you have to eat more, and why you have to struggle more, and why you have to be more disciplined… I felt that I could win it, and that was what I was there for. I wasn’t there to compete. I was there to win.” (177)
Derek Sivers: “If more information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.” (185)
“When you’re earlier in your career, I think the best strategy is to just say ‘yes’ to everything. Every little gig. You just never know what are the lottery tickets.” (187)
“When you’re thinking of how to make your business bigger, it’s tempting to try to think all the big thoughts, the world-changing, massive-action plans. But please know that it’s often the tiny details that really thrill someone enough to make them tell all their friends about you.” (193)
“”Don’t be a donkey” rule. (Donkey can’t decide between food and water, and dies of starvation in the middle.) In a world of distraction, single-tasking is a superpower.” (471)
Alexis Ohanian: “Improve a notification email from your business (e.g., subscription confirmation, order confirmation, whatever): Invest that little bit of time to make it a little bit more human.” (195)
Neil Gaiman: “The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.” (197)
Tony Robbins: “Life is always happening for us, not to us. It’s our job to find out where the benefit is. If we do, life is magnificent.” (211)
Casey Neistat: “What is the ultimate quantification of success? For me, it’s not how much time you spend doing what you love. It’s how little time you spend doing what you hate.” (220)
Morgan Spurlock: “The crew shirts from the first Avatar production said: HOPE IS NOT A STRATEGY. LUCK IS NOT A FACTOR. FEAR IS NOT AN OPTION.” (223)
Thomas Edison: “Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” (231)
Seth Godin: “We need to teach kids two things: 1) how to lead, and 2) how to solve interesting problems. Because the fact is, there are plenty of countries on Earth where there are people who are willing to be obedient and work harder for less money than us. So we cannot out-obedience the competition. Therefore, we have to out-lead or out-solve the other people.” (242)
Scott Adams: “There are six elements of humor: naughty, clever, cute, bizarre, mean, and recognizable. You have to have at least two dimension to succeed.” (262)
Chase Jarvis: “If I look across and everyone else is doing X, how do you zig when everyone else is zagging?” (283)
Dan Carlin: “I’ve heard said, ‘Amateurs built the Ark, professionals built the Titanic.’” (285)
“Copyright your faults.” (286)
Alex Blumberg: “Prompt to Elicit Stories (Most Interviewers Are Weak at This) “Tell me about a time when…” “Tell me about the day [or moment or time] when…” “Tell me the story of… [how you came to major in X, how you met so-and-so, etc.]” “Tell me about the day you realized ___…” “What were the steps that got you to ___?” “Describe the conversation when…” (304)
Stephen Hawking: “When you complain, nobody wants to help you.” (314)
Phil Libin: “Every single thing in your company breaks every time you roughly triple in size.” (317)
Jerry Colonna: “How are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don’t want?” (317)
Kaskade: “The minutiae fit around the big things, but the big things don’t fit around the minutiae.” (330)
Ryan Holiday: “Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means you’re the least important person in the room – until you change that with results.” (338)
“Imagine if for every person you met, you thought of some way to help them, something You could do for them? And you looked at it in a way that entirely benefited them and not you? The cumulative effect this would have over time would be profound: You’d learn a great deal by solving diverse problems. You’d develop a reputation for being indispensable. You’d have countless new relationships. You’d have an enormous bank of favors to call upon down the road.” (338)
Neil Strauss: “First, I edit for me. (What do I like?) Second, I edit for my fans. (What would be most enjoyable and helpful to my fans?) Third, I edit for my haters. (What would my detractors try and pick apart, discredit, or make fun of?)” (349)
“Open up and be vulnerable with the person you’re going to interview before you start.” (350)
Chuck Close: “Inspiration is for amateurs – the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will – through work – bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea.’” (357)
Scott Belsky: “The dirty little secret is that every success was almost a failure. Timing and uncontrollable circumstances lay more of a role than any of us care to admit.” (361)
Rolf Potts: “Work is how you settle your financial and emotions debts – so that your travels are not an escape from your real life, but a discovery of your real life.” (367)
“The simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, than research.” (636)
Peter Diamandis: “I think of problems as gold mines. The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.” (370)
“When you’re going 10% bigger, you’re competing against everybody. Everybody’s trying to go 10% bigger. When you’re trying to go 10 times bigger, you’re there by yourself.” (374)
“When you are trying to go 10 times bigger, you have to start with a clean sheet of paper, and you approach the problem completely differently.” (374)
“When you try to go 10 times bigger versus 10% bigger, it’s typically not 100 times harder, but the reward is 100 times more.” (374)
Sophia Amoruso: “I like to make promises that I’m not sure I can keep and then figure out how to keep them. I think you can will things into happening by just committing to them sometimes.” (377)
B.J. Novak: “Any time I’m telling myself, ‘But I’m making so much money,’ that’s a warning sign that I’m doing the wrong thing.” (379)
“Money can always be regenerated. Time and reputation cannot.” (379)
“When possible, always give the money to charity, as it allows you to interact with people well above your pay grade.” (379)
“B.J. once brought a bunch of jokes to Steve Carell, who said, “These just feel like jokes to me.” For Steve, comedy was a by-product of authenticity. This is the difference between a kid who knows he’s cute and one who doesn’t (the one who knows he’s cut isn’t cute).” (380)
“If you separate idea and execution, you don’t put too much pressure on either of them.” (381)
Greg McKeown: “Make your peace with the fact that saying ‘no’ often requires trading popularity for respect.” (396)
Maria Popova: “If you’re looking for a formula for greatness, the closest we’ll ever get, I think, is this: Consistency driven by a deep love of the work.” (406)
“The second you start doing it for an audience, you’ve lost the long game because creating something that is rewarding and sustainable over the long run requires, most of all, keeping yourself excited about it.” (410)
Jocko Willink: “Stay humble or get humbled.” (416)
Marc Goodman: “Back in 2008 [in Mumbai], terrorists were using search engines like Google to determine who shall live and who shall die… When you’re sharing on Facebook, it’s not just the media and marketing companies that you need to be concerned about.” (425)
“By using a made-up name for your car reservation, if you see a placard with your real name on it, you know it’s a set-up. If you become successful – or simply appear successful on the Internet – and travel a lot overseas, this is not paranoia.” (425)
Chris Fussell: “You should have a running list of three people that you’re always watching: someone senior to you that you want to emulate, a peer who you think is better at the job than you are and who you respect, and someone subordinate who’s doing the job you did – one, two, or three years ago – better than you did it.” (437)
Kevin Kelly: “To me, success is you make your own slot. You have a new slot that didn’t exist before.” (473)
Whitney Cummings: “As a writer, you have to be vulnerable.” (478)
“In order for art to imitate life, you have to have a life.” (478)
“My trauma therapist said every time you meet someone, just in your head say, ‘I love you’ before you have a conversation with them, and that conversation is going to go a lot better.” (479)
“When you tell the truth about your embarrassing moments and show your shadow, a catharsis happens, which is what laughter is. I promise, if you just tell the truth and get your heart broken as a comedian, you will have a house.” (480)
“My definition of ‘love’ is being willing to die for someone who you yourself want to kill. That, in my experience, is kind of the deal.” (481)
Bryan Callen: “There are three things you can’t really fake: one is fighting, the second is sex, and the third is comedy. It doesn’t matter who your publicist is or how famous you are, man – if you don’t bring the money, it gets quiet in that room fast.” (484)
“I ask myself what I’m afraid of, what I’m ashamed of, who I’m pretending to be, who I really am, where I am versus where I thought I’d be… If you watched yourself from afar, if you met yourself, what would you say to yourself? What would you tell you?” (484)
Joseph Campbell: “There is great security in insecurity.” (485)
Tim Kreider: “I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.” (491)
“This busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness: Obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.” (491)
“It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what that might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.” (492)
“I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since you can always make more money.” (494)
“Aim for the heart, not the head… Once you get the heart, you can go to the head. Once you get the heart and the head, then you’ll have a pathway to the soul.”
Rick Rubin: “I think people want things that are really passionate, and often, the best version they could be is not for everybody… The best art divides the audience. If you put out a record, and half the people who hear it absolutely love it, and half the people who hear it absolutely hate it, you’ve done well, because it’s pushing the boundary.” (504)
“If you listen to the greatest songs ever made, that would be a better way to work through finding your own voice today, rather than listening to what’s on the radio now and thinking, ‘I want to compete with this.’” (505)
Paulo Coelho: “There are only four stories: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power, and the journey. Every single book that is in the bookstore deals with these four archetypes, these four themes.” (511)
“Books are not here to show how intelligent and cultivated you are. Books are out there to show your heart, to show your soul, and to tell your fans, readers: You are not alone.” (514)
Amanda Palmer: “‘Honor those who seek the truth, beware of those who’ve found it’ [adapted from Voltaire]. A reminder that the path never ends and that absolutely nobody has this shit figured out.” (522)
Eric Weinstein: “We don’t talk about teaching disabilities. We only talk about learning disabilities.” (529)
“It was Julian Schwinger, the great Harvard physicist, I think, who was asked if he would teach the 9:00 a.m. quantum mechanics course, and he stopped for a second. The person asking said, ‘Well, what’s the problem, Professor Schwinger?’ and he answered, ‘I don’t know if I can stay up that late.’” (530)
“Even though I wanted to do science rather than technology, it’s better to be in an expanding world and not quite in exactly the right field, than to be in a contracting world where people’s worst behavior comes out. In the latter, your mind is grooved in defensive and rent-seeking types of ways. Life is too short to be petty and defensive and cruel to other people who are seeking to innovate alongside you.” (530)
Naval Ravikant: “If you want to be successful, surround yourself with people who are more successful than you are, but if you want to be happy, surround yourself with people who are less successful than you are.” (547)
“All of the value in life, including in relationships, comes from compound interest. People who regularly fight with others will eventually fight with you. I’m not interested in anything that’s unsustainable or even hard to sustain, including difficult relationships.” (547)
“In any situation in life, you only have three options. You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. It’s that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery.” (548)
“Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.” (550)
“I try not to have more than one big desire in my life at any given time, and I also recognize that as the axis of my suffering. I realize that that’s where I’ve chosen to be unhappy.” (550)
“If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.” (551)
“What you choose to work on, and who you choose to work with, are far more important than how hard you work.” (551)
“My one repeated learning in life: ‘There are no adults.’ Everyone’s making it up as they go along. Figure it out yourself, and do it.” (552)
Glenn Beck: “People are starving for something authentic. They’ll accept you, warts and all, if that’s who you really are.” (554)
“Be willing to fail or succeed on who you really are. Don’t ever try to be anything else. What you are is good enough for whatever it is you’re doing.” (554)
Thomas Jefferson: “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.” (554)
Sam Kass: “When you think it’s ready, add another lemon. Pros bump up the acidity level… it makes everything taste better.” (559)
Richard Betts: “If you work for the awards, you don’t do good work. But if you do good work, the awards will come.” (565)
Mike Birbiglia: “Don’t waste your time on marketing, just try to get better. And also, it’s not about being good; it’s about being great.” (569)
“Because what I find, the older I get, is that a lot of people are good, and a lot of people are smart, and a lot of people are clever. But not a lot of people give you their soul when they perform.” (569)
Stephen J. Dubner: “Our brainstorming was: Let’s come up with as many ideas as possible, and then put them under scrutiny, and basically try to kill them off, and if they were unkillable, then we’d keep going with them.” (576)
Josh Waitzkin: “Ending the work day with very high quality, which for one thing means you’re internalizing quality overnight.” (579)
Glenn Close: “Don’t go for funny. Go for the truth, and you’ll hit funny along the way.” (593)
Dan Sullivan: “If you’ve got enough money to solve the problem, you don’t have the problem.” (602)
Jamie Foxx: “When you raise your kids, you’re the bow, they’re the arrow, and you just try to aim them in the best direction that you can, and hopefully your aim isn’t too off.” (606)
“You are either great or you don’t exist.” (606)
“It’s never been easier to be a “creator,” and it’s never been harder to stand out. Good isn’t good enough.” (607)
Bryan Johnson: “What can you do that will be remembered in 200 to 400 years?” (609)
“I would say, ‘Tim, if you give me 3 minutes of your time, I will give you $100 if you do not say ‘yes’ to using my service.’ usually they would say something like, ‘That is interesting…’ and I would open my pitch book and walk them through the industry. Here are the providers, here is what they do, here is how they do it, here is what I do. I am the same as everyone else, except with me, you get honesty and transparency and great customer support. So, I became this company’s number-one sales person. I broke all their sales records following this really simple formula of just selling honest and transparency in a broken industry.” (610)
Vivian Greene: “Life is not waiting for the storm to pass, it’s learning how to dance in the rain.” (611)
Lao Tzu: “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” (623)
Robert Rodriguez: “I wrote everything around what we had, so you never had to go search, and you never had to spend anything on the movie. The movie cost, really, nothing.” (629)
“I didn’t think anyone was going to see El Mariachi. It was really just a test… had I thought I would ever even show it to anybody. Had I thought it would go to a festival and I would submit it, I would have spent ten times as much.” (630)
“There’s freedom in limitations. It’s almost more freeing to know I’ve got to use only these items: turtle, bar, ranch. You’re almost completely free within that.” (630)
“Sometimes I hear new filmmakers talk down about their film, and ‘Oh, nothing worked and it was a disappointment.’ They don’t realize yet that that’s the job. The job is that nothing is going to work at all. So you go: ‘How can I turn it into a positive and get something much better than if I had all the time and money in the world?’” (631)
“I want all of my movies to not have enough money, not enough time, so that we’re forced to be more creative. Because that’s going to give it some spark that you can’t manufacture. People will tap into it or they’ll go: ‘I don’t know why I like this movie. It’s kind of a weird movie, but there’s something about it that makes me want to watch it again and again because it’s got a life to it.’ Sometimes art should be imperfect in a way.’” (631)
“That was the idea – I’m there to learn. I’m not there to win; I’m there to learn, because then I’ll win, eventually.” (632)
“Failure isn’t always durable. You go back and you can look at it and go, ‘Oh, that wasn’t a failure. That was a key moment of my development that I needed to take, and I can trust my instinct. I really can.” (633)
“They key is to do it early. Do it while you’re still shooting. First impressions is everything. I’ll cut a trailer while I’m still shooting and send it to a studio. They’ll try to make their own, over and over, and they can’t get that first thing they saw out of their heads, ‘It’s still not as good as the one we saw.’” (634)
“You get it in your own way – thinking that you needed to know something, a trick or a process, before it would flow. If you got out of the way, it would just flow.” (635)
“You’re just opening up the pipe and the creativity flows through. And as soon as your ego gets in the way, and you go, ‘I don’t know if I know what to do next’ you’ve already put ‘I’ in front of it and you’ve already blocked it a little bit. ‘I did it once, but I don’t know if I can do it again.’ It was never you. THe best you can do is just to get out of the way so it comes through.” (636)
“Even if I didn’t know what to do, I just had to begin. For a lot of people, that’s the part that keeps them back the most. They think, ‘Well, I don’t have an idea, so I can’t start.’ I know you’ll only get the idea once you start. It’s this totally reverse thing. You have to act first before inspiration will hit. You don’t wait for inspiration and then act, or you’re never going to act, because you’re never going to have the inspiration, not consistently.” (636)
“That’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to know. You just have to keep moving forward.” (637)
Francis Ford Coppola: “Failure is not necessarily durable. Remember that the things that they fire you for when you are young are the same things they give lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.” (632)
I recently read “Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging” by Sebastian Junger. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. If you like the quotes, click here to buy the book.
“Surely this was new in the human experience, I thought. How do you become an adult in a society that doesn’t ask for sacrifice? How do you become a man in a world that doesn’t require courage?” (xiv)
“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.” (xvii)
“As societies become more affluent they tend to require more, rather than less, (work) time and commitment by the individual, and it’s possible that many people feel that affluence and safety simply aren’t a good trade for freedom.” (16)
“The relatively relaxed pace of !Kung life – even during times of adversity – challenged long-standing ideas that modern society created a surplus of leisure time. It created exactly the opposite: a desperate cycle of work, financial obligation, and more work. The !Kung had far fewer belongings than Westerners, but their lives were under much greater personal control.” (17)
“First agriculture, and then industry, changed two fundamental things about the human experience. The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good. And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day – or an entire life – mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.” (18)
“As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down.” (19)
“People in wealthy countries suffer depression at as much as eight times the rate they do in poor countries.” (20)
“The mechanism seems simple: poor people are forced to share their time and resources more than wealthy people are, and as a result they live in closer communities.” (21)
“Self-determination theory holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others.” (22)
“Communities that have been devastated by natural or man-made disasters almost never lapse into chaos and disorder; if anything, they become more just, more egalitarian, and more deliberately fair to individuals.” (44)
“Charles Fritz’s theory was that modern society has gravely disrupted the social bonds that have always characterized the human experience, and that disasters thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating. Disasters, he proposed, create a “community of sufferers” that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others. As people come together to face an existential threat, Fritz found, class differences are temporarily erased, income disparities become irrelevant, race is overlooked, and individuals are assessed simply by what they are willing to do for the group. It is a kind of fleeting social utopia that, Fritz felt, is enormously gratifying to the average person and downright therapeutic to people suffering from mental illness.” (53-54)
“Women tend to act heroically within their own moral universe, regardless of whether anyone else knows about it – donating more kidneys to non-relatives than men do, for example. Men, on the other hand, are far more likely to risk their lives at a moment’s notice, and that reaction is particularly strong when others are watching, or when they are part of a group.” (58)
“What would you risk dying for – and for whom – is perhaps the most profound question a person can ask themselves.” (59)
“The Iroquois Nation presumably understood the transformative power of war when they developed parallel systems of government that protected civilians from warriors and vice versa. Peacetime leaders, called sachems, were often chosen by women and had complete authority over the civil affairs of the tribe until war broke out. At that point war leaders took over, and their sole concern was the physical survival of the tribe.” (78)
“Whatever the technological advances of modern society – and they’re nearly miraculous – the individualized lifestyles that those technologies spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.” (93)
“According to Shalev, the closer the public is to the actual combat, the better the war will be understood and the less difficulty soldiers will have when they come home.” (96)
“Because modern society has almost completely eliminated trauma and violence from everyday life, anyone who does suffer those things is deemed to be extraordinarily unfortunate. This gives people access to sympathy and resources but also creates an identity of victimhood that can delay recovery.” (98)
“The definition of community – of tribe – would be the group of people that you would both help feed and help defend. A society that doesn’t offer its members the chance to act selflessly in these ways isn’t a society in any tribal sense of the word; it’s just a political entity that, lacking enemies, will probably fall apart on its own.” (110)
“Soldiers experience this tribal way of thinking at war, but when they come home they realize that the tribe they were actually fighting for wasn’t their country, it was their unit. It makes absolutely no sense to make sacrifices for a group that, itself, isn’t willing to make sacrifices for you. That is the position American soldiers have been in for the past decade and a half.” (110)
“The last time the United States experienced that kind of unity was – briefly – after the terrorist attacks of September 11. There was no rampage shootings for the next two years. The effect was particularly pronounced in New York City, where rates of violent crime, suicide, and psychiatric disturbances dropped immediately. In many countries, antisocial behavior is known to decline during wartime.” (116)
“We live in a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about – depending on their views – the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign born, the president, or the entire US government. It’s a level of contempt that is usually reserved for enemies in wartime, except that now it’s applied to our fellow citizens.” (125)
“The leaders of my department understood that to create a fertile laboratory, they had to assemble different kinds of thinkers and then encourage their autonomy. They had to offer feedback when needed but also had to be willing to stand back and give us room.” (19)
“Always take a chance on (hiring someone) better (than you), even if it seems threatening.” (23)
“For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if you are getting the story right.” (37)
“You don’t have to ask permission to take responsibility.” (51)
“When we disagreed, I would state my case, but since Steve could think much faster than I could, he would often shoot down my arguments. So I’d wait a week, marshal my thoughts, and then come back and explain it again. He might dismiss my points again, but I would keep coming back until one of three things happened: (1) He would say “Oh, okay, I get it” and give me what I needed; (2) I’d see that he was right and stop lobbying; or (3) our debate would be inconclusive, in which case I’d just go ahead and do what I had proposed in the first place. Each outcome was equally likely, but when this third option occurred, Steve never questioned me. For all his insistence, he respected passion. If I believed in something that strongly, he seemed to feel, it couldn’t be all wrong.” (54-55)
“When downsides coexist with upsides, as they often do, people are reluctant to explore what’ bugging them, for fear of being labeled complainers. I also realized that this kind of thing, if left unaddressed, could fester and destroy Pixar.” (63)
“The first principle was “Story Is King,” by which we meant that we would let nothing – not the technology, not the merchandising possibilities – get in the way of our story.” (66)
“The other principle we depended on was “Trust the Process.” We liked this one because it was so reassuring: While there are inevitably difficulties and missteps in any complex creative endeavor, you can trust that “the process” will carry you through.” (66)
“If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.” (74)
“Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. It is easy to say you want talented people, and you do, but the way those people interact with one another is the real key. Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team if they are mismatched.” (74)
“Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.” (74)
“Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas.” (75)
“John coined a new phrase: “Quality is the best business plan.” What he meant was that quality is not a consequence of following some set of behaviors. Rather, it is a prerequisite and a mindset you must have before you decide what you are setting out to do.” (82)
“Early on, all of our movies suck. That’s a blunt assessment, I know, but I make a point of repeating it often, and I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions of our films really are.” (90)
“Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process – reworking, reworking, and reworking again, until a flawed story finds it throughline or a hollow character finds its soul.” (90)
“There are two key differences between the Braintrust and any other feedback mechanism. The first is that the Braintrust is made up of people with a deep understanding of storytelling and, usually, people who have been through the process themselves. While the directors welcome critiques from many sources along the way (and in fact, when our films are screened in house, all Pixar employees are asked to send notes), they particularly prize feedback from fellow directors and storytellers. The second difference is that the Braintrust has no authority. This is crucial: The director does not have to follow any of the specific suggestions given. After a Braintrust meeting, it is up to him or her to figure out how to address the feedback. Braintrust meetings are not top-down, do-this-or-else affairs. By removing from the Braintrust the power to mandate solutions, we affect the dynamics of the group in ways I believe are essential.” (93)
“You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged. To set up a healthy feedback system, you must remove power dynamics from the equation – you must enable yourself, in other words, to focus on the problem, not the person.” (94)
“Michael Arndt, who wrote Toy Story 3, says he thinks to make a great film, its makers must pivot, at some point, from creating the story for themselves to creating it for others.” (94)
“For most of us, failure comes with baggage – a lot of baggage – that I believe is traced directly back to our days in school. Form a very early age, the message is drilled into our heads: Failure is bad; failure means you didn’t study or prepare; failure means you slacked off or – worse! – aren’t smart enough to begin with. Thus, failure is something to be ashamed of. This perception lives on long into adulthood, even in people who have learned to parrot the oft repeated arguments about the upside of failure. How many articles have you read on that topic alone? And yet, even as they nod their heads in agreement, many readers of those articles still have the emotional reaction that they had as children. They just can’t help it: That early experience of shame is too deep-seated to erase. All the time in my work, I see people resist and reject failure and try mightily to avoid it, because regardless of what we say, mistakes feel embarrassing. There is a visceral reaction to failure: It hurts. We need to think about failure differently. I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality). And yet, even as I say that embracing failure is an important part of learning, i also acknowledge that acknowledging this truth is not enough. That’s because failure is painful, and our feelings about this pain tend to screw up our understanding of its worth. To disentangle the good and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.” (108-109)
“Failure is a manifestation of learning and exploration. If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it. And, for leaders especially, this strategy – trying to avoid failure by outthinking it – dooms you to fail.” (109)
“What I want to do is loosen its grip on us. While we don’t want too many failures, we must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future.” (111)
“They saw that each idea led them a bit closer to finding the better option. And that allowed them to come to work each day engaged and excited, even while in the midst of confusion. This is key: When experimentation is seen as necessary and productive, not as a frustrating waste of time, people will enjoy their work – even when it is confounding them.” (113)
“If you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes it will spare you failure down the line – well, you’re deluding yourself. For one thing, it’s easier to plan derivative work – things that copy or repeat something already out there. So if your primary goal is to have a full worked out, set-in-stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal. Moreover, you cannot plan your way out of problems. While planning is very important, and we do a lot of it, there is only so much you can control in a creative environment.” (114)
“When it comes to creative endeavors, the concept of zero failures is worse than useless. It is counterproductive.” (115)
“The goal, then, is to uncouple fear and failure – to create an environment in which making mistakes doesn’t strike terror into your employees’ hearts.” (123)
“When we are new to the position, we imagine what the job is in order to get our arms around it, then we compare ourselves against our made-up model. But the job is never what we think it is. The trick is to forget our models about what we “should” be. A better measure of our success is to look at the people on our team and see how they are working together. Can they rally to solve key problems? If the answer is yes, you are managing well.” (127)
“Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.” (128)
“Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on – but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal.” (134)
“When it comes to feeding the Beast, success only creates more pressure to hurry up and succeed again. Which is why at too many companies, the schedule (that is, the need for product) drives the output, not the strength of the ideas at the front end.” (136)
“The key is to view conflict as essential, because that’s how we know the best ideas will be tested and survive. You know, it can’t only be sunlight.” (139)
“I often say that managers of creative enterprises must hold lightly to goals and firmly to intentions. What does that mean? It means that we must be open to having our goals change as we learn new information or are surprised by things we thought we knew but didn’t. As long as our intentions – our values – remain constant, our goals can shift as needed.” (140)
“Negative feedback may be fun, but it is far less brave than endorsing something unproven and providing room for it to grow.” (141)
“It’s folly to think you can avoid change, no matter how much you might want to. But also, to my mind, you shouldn’t want to. There is no growth or success without change.” (146)
“When this happens, it’s usually because I feel like the world is crashing down and all is lost. One trick I’ve learned is to force myself to make a list of what’s actually wrong. Usually, soon into making the list, I find I can group most of the issues into two or three larger all-encompassing problems. So it’s really not all that bad. Having a finite list of problems is much better than having an illogical feeling that everything is wrong.” (151)
“His mission was to drill down to the emotional core of his characters and then build the story around that.” (151)
Pete says, “sometimes in meetings, I sense people seizing up, not wanting to even talk about changes. So I try to trick them. I’ll say, ‘This would be a big change if we were really going to do it, but just as a thought exercise, what if…’ Or, ‘I’m not actually suggesting this, but go with me for a minute…’ If people anticipate the production pressures, they’ll close the door to new ideas – so you have to pretend you’re not actually going to do anything, we’re just talking, just playing around. Then if you hit upon some new idea that clearly works, people are excited about it and are happier to act on the change.” (152)
“When we put setbacks into two buckets – the “business as usual” bucket and the “holy cow” bucket – and use a different mindset for each, we are signing up for trouble. We become so caught up in our big problems that we ignore the little ones, failing to realize that some of our small problems will have long-term consequences – and are, therefore, big problems in the making.” (160)
“If we allow more people to solve problems without permission, and if we tolerate (and don’t vilify) their mistakes, then we enable a much larger set of problems to be addressed.” (164)
“When people in other creative professions merely cut up and reassemble what has come before, it gives the illusion of creativity, but it is craft without art. Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.” (196)
“There’s something about knowing your subject and your setting inside and out – a confidence – that seeps into every frame of your film.” (198)
“The oversight group had been put in place without anyone asking a fundamental question: How do we enable our people to solve problems? Instead, they asked: How do we prevent our people from screwing up. That approach never encourages a creative response.” (203)
“Once you’ve hit on something that works, don’t expect it to work again, because attendees will know how to manipulate it the second time around.” (218)
“The attempt to avoid failure, in other words, makes failure more likely.” (222)
“Creative people discover and realize their visions over time and through dedicated, protracted struggle. In that way, creativity is more like a marathon than a spring.” (223)
“There is a sweet spot between the known and the unknown where originality happens; the key is to be able to linger there without panicking.” (224)
“Brad says, “I tell myself that I have time, even when I don’t. As in, ‘Okay, I’m going to proceed as if I have time – I’m going to sit back and muse rather than looking at the cock – because if I sit back and muse, I’m more likely to solve the problem.’” (226)
“Include people in your problems, not just your solutions.” (228)
“Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track.” (235)
“We had learned long ago that while everyone appreciates cash bonuses, they value something else almost as much: being looked in the eye by someone they respect and told, “Thank you.” At Pixar… when a movie makes enough money to trigger bonuses, John and I join with the directors and producers and personally distribute checks to every person who worked on the film.” (273)
“When talking about making a movie, easy isn’t the goal. Quality is the goal.” (273)
“Creative people must accept that challenges never cease, failure can’t be avoided, and “vision” is often an illusion. But they must also feel safe – always – to speak their minds.” (277)
“”To Whom it May Inspire,” Austin wrote. “I, like many of you artists out there, constantly shift between two states. The first (and far more preferable of the two) is white-hot, ‘in the zone’ seat-of-the-pants, firing on all cylinders creative mode. This is when you lay your pen down and the ideas pour out like wine from a royal chalice! This happens about 3% of the time. The other 97% of the time I am in the frustrated, struggling, office-cerner-full-of-crumpled-up-paper mode. The important thing is to slog diligently through this quagmire of discouragement and despair. Put on some audio commentary and listen to the stories of professionals who have been making films for decades going through the same slings and arrows of outrageous production problems. In a word: PERSIST. PERSIST on telling your story. PERSIST on reaching your audience. PERSIST on staying true to your vision.”” (294)
“Doing all these things won’t necessarily make the job of managing a creative culture easier. But ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.” (295)
“It wasn’t that passion trumped logic in Steve’s mind. He was well aware that decisions must never be based on emotions alone. But he also saw that creativity wasn’t linear, that art was not commerce, and that to insist upon applying dollars-and-cents logic was to risk disrupting the thing that set us apart. Steve put a premium on both sides of this equation, logic and emotion, and the way he maintained that balance was key to understanding him.” (301)
“In order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness.” (319)
“It seems as though happiness in America has become the overachiever’s ultimate trophy. A modern trump card, it outranks professional achievement and social success, family, friendship, and even love. Its invocation deftly minimizes others’ achievements (“Well, I suppose she has the perfect job and a gorgeous husband, but is she really happy?”) and takes the shine off our own.” (3)
“But the more conversations I have about happiness, and the more I absorb the idea that there’s a glittering happy-ever-after out there for the taking, the more I start to overthink the whole thing, compulsively monitoring how I am feeling and hyper-parenting my emotions. Am I happy? Right at this moment? What about now? And now? Am I happy enough? As happy as everyone else? What about Meghan? Is she happier than me? She looks happier. What is she doing that I’m not doing? Maybe I should take up yoga. The whole process starts to become painfully, comically neurotic. Workaday contentment starts to give way to a low-grade sense of inadequacy when pitched against capital-H Happiness. THe goal is so elusive and hard to define, it’s impossible to pinpoint when it’s even been reached, a recipe for anxiety.” (8)
“It appears that somewhere along the line, the joy has been sucked out of American happiness.” (8)
“Happiness should be serendipitous, the by-product of a life well lived, and chasing it in a vacuum just doesn’t really work.” (9)
“Surprisingly, the higher the respondents rated happiness as a distinct personal ambition, the less happy they were in their lives generally and the more likely they were to experience symptoms of dissatisfaction and even depression.” (9)
“These studies concluded that paradoxically, the more people valued and were encouraged to value happiness as a separate life goal, the less happy they were.” (9)
“Increasingly, Americans are chasing happiness by looking inward into their own souls, rather than outward toward their friends and communities.” (18)
“”It was very striking,” Dr. Iris Mauss says. “It’s like a standard – you are supposed to be happy and it’s seen as being under your individual control. Happiness is not seen as something that comes out of living a good life, but an achievement you aim for, like it’s the individual’s responsibility to be happy. It got to the point that if I was in a bad mood, I would feel almost guilty, as though I was falling short of the ideal. It was making me anxious.”” (29)
“”It all comes back to this idea of self-focus,” Mauss says. “People monitor themselves. Am I happy yet? Am I happy enough? They are so focused on their own self and their own happiness that it comes at the expense of social connection. You can spend so much time focusing on what you are feeling that you just don’t have time to focus on others. And when you are with other people you find you don’t enjoy social activities as much because you are constantly worrying about your own emotions and not getting as engaged.” (32)
“The systemic packaging and selling of happiness in the form of books, DVDs, webinars, and courses was last estimated to be worth around ten billion dollars, roughly the same size as Hollywood, the other great purveyors of the happy-ever-after.” (36)
“Therapist Kimberly Knoll says, “Thinking that you have complete control over your emotions and if you don’t feel happy it’s your fault, that can make people feel shame. It’s anxiety inducing.”” (91)
“As soon as an American baby is born, its parents apparently enter into an implicit contractual obligation to answer all questions about their hopes for their tiny offspring’s future with the words: “I don’t care, as long as he’s happy” (the mental suffix “at Harvard” must remain unspoken).” (104)
“A group of German academics found that the average drop in happiness in the two years following the birth of a first child is greater than that after divorce, unemployment, and even the death of a partner.” (119)
“Recent research suggests that the more intensely we approach the job of parenting, and the more strongly we believe that our child’s development and happiness is dependent on our own actions as parents, the more unhappy we become.” (123)
“A growing body of research demonstrates that the stronger a country’s welfare system and social safety nets, the happier the parents of that country are in comparison with nonparents.” (125)
“Religious people are significantly more likely to report being “very happy” than nonbelievers. A wide range of other studies has shown repeatedly that identifying as part of a religious community is a predictor of greater life satisfaction, higher self-esteem, more social ties, and an ability to cope better with difficult life events.” (129)
“It isn’t the inner journey of private religious belief that is making religious people so happy but the community and social connectedness that comes with a religious lifestyle.” (140)
“Almost all the studies that show that religious people are happier than the nonreligious also show that they tend to have a greater number of social ties and stronger and more supportive communities. When the studies control for these increased levels of social connection, the link between religion and happiness almost always disappears.” (140)
“Perhaps having a strict blueprint for how to live actually removes the anxiety from the search for happiness.” (149)
“The more religious states tend to have higher-than-average rates of antidepressant use.” (156)
“People who reported feeling the strongest societal pressure to be happy also reported feeling negative emotions most frequently and strongly.” (165)
“Dr. Brock Bastian commented, “In short, when people perceive that others think they should feel happy and not sad, this leads them to feel sad more frequently and intensely.” (165)
“Happiness is the currency of social media and the loophole in the generally accepted no-bragging rule.” (167)
“In a culture that both insists that we have complete control over our happiness and too often equates unhappiness with inadequacy, social media gives us an unprecedented ability to craft and present a happy front. This shifts the business of bliss away from how happy we feel, to the perhaps more culturally urgent matter of how happy we look.” (167)
“It’s a strange mix of oversharing and undersharing. Because although we increasingly share every aspect of the minutiae of our lives for public appraisal and critique, none of it paints a remotely representative picture.” (169)
“We all post our carefully edited best moments and, although at a rational level we know that other people are doing the same, we somehow believe that everyone else’s life is Really Like That.” (171)
“Although their data showed that people would click on and read both positive and negative stories in roughly equal numbers, people would share far greater numbers of positive stories, and it was almost exclusively positive stories that would go viral. Broadly speaking, the more heartwarming positivity that can be packed into a story, the more likely we are to want to be associated with it and to click the share button.” (181)
“Research carried out in the late eighties on sets of twins showed that around half our happiness can be attributed to our genes. Each of us has a genetic set point to which, like a high-achieving homing pigeon, we tend to return.” (194)
“The idea that our circumstances are trivial to our happiness, that what we really need to do in order to be happy is to think positive, and that keeping a gratitude journal or counting our blessings can potentially have quadruple the impact on our happiness than the love of our parents, whether we live in affluence or poverty, or whether or not we suffer from a debilitating chronic illness seems like a stretch at best.” (196)
“According to Diener, a later analysis of the same data concluded that when it comes to long-term happiness, the figure was actually more like 80 percent, a finding which prompted Diener to write the following sentence, “based on the later heritability estimate, it could be said it is as hard to change one’s happiness as it is to change one’s height,” an observation that is hard to square with the idea that we can transform our happiness by 40 percent by thinking positive and counting our blessings.” (198)
“The more I look into it, the more it seems that the claim that circumstance matters little to happiness might be based on some serious cherry-picking of the evidence.” (199)
“The CDC estimates that rates of depression among poor Americans are roughly three times that in the general population. White people in America consistently report as significantly happier than African Americans, irrespective of income, with the percentage of African Americans reporting that they are “not too happy” roughly double that of white Americans saying the same. Men are significantly happier than women, and the women who do the most “women-y” type things, stay-at-home mothers, are the least happy of all.” (199)
“Above $75,000, money still makes a significant difference to what most people would consider the most important measure of happiness – a person’s satisfaction with is or her life when taken as a whole – and this trend never levels off in the data, no matter how high up the income scale you go. Above an income of $75,000 what does level off is any improvement in the kind of mood that the person was in the day before.” (200)
“Linda Tirado says, “I wouldn’t even mind the degradations of my work life so much if the privileged and powerful were honest about it. Instead, we’re told to keep smiling, and to be grateful for the chance to barely survive while being blamed for not succeeding.”” (203)
“Coyne believes that positive psychology is a closed field, in which everyone is highly invested in showing the interventions in the best possible light and people are reluctant to criticize one another’s claims.” (209)
“Drug trials sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, for example, more often show favorable results for the drug in question than independent research.” (210)
“I ask the guy in the cafe, whether he would feel the same if, in theory, it could be absolutely definitively scientifically proven that things couldn’t change. He tells me that it wouldn’t matter to him. That he would still read, still try. Then I realize. The product isn’t happiness. It’s hope.” (214)
“I’ve realized over the last year or so of obsessing over this topic, that if we want to be happy, what we really need to do is to stop thinking about happiness.” (219)
