Tag: Other Books

I recently read “Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think” by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. If you like the quotes, click here to buy the book.

“Many of today’s dangers are probabilistic – the economy might nose-dive, there could be a terrorist attack – and the amygdala can’t tell the difference. Worse, the system is also designed not to shut off until the potential danger has vanished completely, but probabilistic dangers never vanish completely. Add in an impossible-to-avoid media continuously scaring us in an attempt to capture market share, and you have a brain convinced that it’s living in a stage of siege.” (33)

“A week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information than the average seventeenth-century citizen encountered in a lifetime.” (34)

“Exponential growth is just a simple doubling: 1 becomes 2, 2 becomes 4, 4 becomes 8, but, because most exponential curves start out well below 1, early growth is almost always imperceptible. When you double .0001 to .0002 to .0004 to .0008, on a graph all these plot points look like zero. In fact, at this rate, the curve stays below 1 for a total of thirteen doublings. To most people, it just looks like a horizontal line. But only seven doublings later, that same line has skyrocketed above 100. And it’s this kind of explosion, from meager to massive and nearly overnight, that makes exponential growth so powerful. But with our local and linear brains, it’s also why such growth can be so shocking.” (53)

“Because the quality of our tools has finally caught up to the scope of their vision – small groups of dedicated DIY innovators can now tackle problems that were once solely the purview of big governments and large corporations.” (122)

“By nature, entrepreneurs aren’t satisfied until they do change the world, and let nothing get in their way.” (135)

“There are four major motivators that drive innovation: curiosity, fear, the desire to create wealth, and the desire for significance… One tool that harnesses all four of these motivators is called the incentive prize.” (218)

“With no bureaucracy, little to lose, and a passion to prove themselves, small teams consistently outperform larger organizations when it comes to innovation.” (223)

“In a world without constraints, most people take their time on projects, assume fewer risks, spend money wastefully, and try to reach their goals in comfortable and traditional ways – which, of course, leads nowhere new.” (225)

“Incentive prizes are not a panacea; they can’t fix all that ails us. But on the road toward abundance, when a key technology is missing, or a specific end goal has been identified but not yet achieved, incentive prizes can be an efficient and highly leveraged way to get from A to B.” (226)

“As Burt Rutan puts it, “Revolutionary ideas come from nonsense. If an idea is truly a breakthrough, then the day before it was discovered, it must have been considered crazy or nonsense or both – otherwise it wouldn’t be a breakthrough.”” (229)

“Arianna Huffington says, “You’ll never be able to achieve big-time success without risking big-time failure. If you want to succeed big, there is no substitute for simply sticking your neck out. Of course, nobody likes to fail, but when the fear of failure translates into taking fewer risks and not reaching for our dreams, it often means never moving ahead. Fearlessness is like a muscle: the more we use it, the stronger it becomes. The more we are willing to risk failure and act on our dreams and our desires, the more fearless we become and the easier it is the next time. Bottom line, taking risks is an indispensable part of any creative act.” (230)

“If your goal is to reshape the world, then how the world learns about your plan is every bit as important as the plan itself.” (231)

“Each of us has an internal ‘line of credibility.’ When we hear of an idea that is introduced below this line, we dismiss it out of hand. If the teenager next door declares his intent to fly to Mars, you smirk and move on. We also have an internal line of supercredibility. Should it be announced that Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Larry Page have committed to fund a private mission to Mars, “When is it going to land?” becomes a much more reasonable question. When we hear an idea presented above the supercredible line, we immediately give it credence and use it to anchor future actions.” (231)

“A powerful first impression (in other words, announcing your idea in a supercredible way) is fundamental to launching a breakthrough concept. But I also saw the importance of mind-set. My mind-set. Sure, I had wanted to open up space since my childhood, but was I really sure this approach would work? In getting to supercredibility, I had to lay out my ideas before the aerospace industry’s best and brightest, testing my premises and answering uncomfortable questions. in doing so, whatever doubts I’d had vanished along the way. By the time I was on stage with my dignitaries, the idea that the X PRIZE could work wasn’t a hopeful fantasy, it was the tomorrow I was certain would soon arrive. This is the second thing I learned that day: the awesome power of the right mind-set.” (232)

“Before the average American earns $75,000 a year, there is a direct correlation between money and happiness. Above that number, the correlation disappears.” (237)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liked the quotes? Click here to buy the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liked the quotes? Click here to buy the book.