Interesting Quotes

Over the years I continue to collect quotes as I come across them. Some are more common than others but they all share a similar gene – they cause me to pause and think a little bit.

"Organizations are built on language, and language begins with noticing and naming. If you want to change an organization, change its language. But noticing and naming are in constant tension - noticing is unbundling and naming is bundling. Every business is a search for an untapped advantage and a plan to execute on it. Those advantages come from noticing, and those plans come from naming.” 
—Tom Critchlow

“Now that your worry has proved such an unlucrative business
Why not find a better job?”
― Hafiz

"Graphic design is important but coupons are just as effective”
—Dan Cassaro

"Only fools worship their tools"
―Dee Hock

"Chaos is a ladder"
—Littlefinger 

"Mediocrity gets further with industry than superiority without it."
― Gracian

“In a world deluged with information, clarity is power”
—Yuval Harare 

"If you are a killer and a poet, you will be rich"
― David Oglivy

"Your comfort zone is a beautiful place but nothing grows there"
—Gina Milicia

"The key to life is realizing that it’s all made up… but you get to make it up”

—Garry Tan

"Leadership is getting people to want to do what must be done"
―Eisenhower

"Leadership is disappointing people at a rate they can absorb"
― Unknown

"Leadership is getting people to want to do what must be done"
―Eisenhower

"Force breeds counterforces"
―Douglas McGregor

"How you do one thing, is how you do everything."
―Tim Ferris

"Don’t always bet on the little guy, but do always bet against headquarters. Because headquarters politics will invariably and inevitably “bland up” and then kill any worthwhile project."
―Tom Peters

"Brand is high quality, low variance outcomes over time."
― Uknown

"The best climber in the world is the one who's having the most fun."
―Mountaineer Alex Lowe on how to be the best:

“To suffer before it is necessary is to suffer more than necessary.”
—Seneca

“Half doing something is an expensive way of not doing it.”
—Angela Jiang

"What would this look like if it were easy?"
—Tim Ferriss

Bill Bowerman refused to be called a coach, he preferred "Teacher of competitive response"

Frank Slootman's formula for building a successful company:
* Narrow the focus.
* Up the quality. 
* Increase the speed.

Culture

“If I could pick one course to teach everyone in the company, it would be the fundamentals of how the business works”

“In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas.” In Essentials Unity, In Non-Essentials Liberty, In All Things Charity

Hofstadter's law is the observation that “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law"

"Product is merit, distribution is connections"
—Balaji

“Tutto passa” - everything passes 
— Italian folk saying

"Our fears are always more numerous than our dangers.”
—Seneca

The art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen on how to teach so people learn: "First delight, then instruct."

“Pressure is a privilege”
—Billie Jean King

"We question our teaspoons" 
 —George Perec on when asked about planning    

A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.
— General Patton

"Take a simple idea, and take it seriously.”
—Charilie Munger

“If you know how to think, you will know what to do”
—Cameron Mitchell on culture 

"What comes out of your mouth is either positive or poison. There is no in between. Its good because it is  SIMPLE."
—Legendary women's softball coach Sue Enquist

"Happiness as reality minus expectations”
—Tim Urban

"A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."
—Jorge Luis Borges

"Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership"
—Colin Powell

“Hard work is undefeated”
— Unknown

“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work”  
—Peter Drucker

“Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.” 
—Peter Drucker

“Carpent tua poma nepotes.” (Your descendants shall gather your fruits.)
— Virgil, Eclogues, XI., 37 B.C.

“Brand is the distribution of likely outcomes that you can expect from any company or person.”
—Morgan Housel

"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea”
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Things that never happened before happen all the time. The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising”
—Morgan Housel

"A philosophy is the aggregate of your attitudes toward fundamental matters and is derived from a process of consciously thinking about critical issues and developing rational reasons for holding one particular belief or position rather than another."
—Bill Walsh,

“Instead of diagnosing behavior, I got people together across levels and functions to figure out what they needed to do. Instead of training everybody, I looked for ways to help people use the skills and knowledge they had. Instead of asking what’s wrong and what will fix it, I began asking what’s possible here and who cares. I discovered Robert Fritz’s The Path of Least Resistance. He had found an alternative to the diagnosis/intervention cycle. Fritz suggested, and I confirmed by doing it, that when people develop a keen appreciation of how things are now and then internalize a desirable future, they do not need gap-closing interventions. They begin to seize opportunities they had not noticed before. In this strategy, you put time into appreciating the past and present, good times and bad, and sharing future aspirations with those who can help realize them. Your purpose might be anything—a problem to solve, a system to improve, a community to heal, a corporation to renew. By the time everybody puts the puzzle together they know what to do.”
—Marvin Weisbord

Innovation

"You have to prioritize. Innovation requires commitment”
—Unknown

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
– George E.P. Box, British Statistician

 “Most of the world will make decisions by either guessing or using their gut. They will be either lucky or wrong.” 

“You can’t save your way to rich”
—Unknown

"Remember that great expectations create great capabilities”
—Ray Dalio

"Not reading is expensive" 
—Shane Parish 

“Venture investing is like finding needle in a haystack and we don’t have time to search through haystacks, but we are very good at building magnets”

“Industries that: accumulate data and understate and interpret that data, create a direct relationship with a consumer in a better way”
—Hunter Walk

“Predicting the future is harder than misremembering the past."
—Cliff Asness

"I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create"
— William Blake

"If you need a machine and don't buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don't have it."
—Henry Ford

“Consistency is the playground of dull minds.”
― Yuval Noah Harari

“It is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong”
—Warren Buffett

“Walmart started in Rogers, Arkansas. Nobody was scared that day.” 
—Doug McMillion 

“Ask yourself: When approaching risky decisions, you have to ask yourself What do you believe is true for this to succeed? Then make the decision. 
—Doug McMillion 

"You can never predict the outcome, but you can manipulate the collision."
—Unknown

"Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. If you’re a coach, your goal might be to win a championship. Your system is the way you recruit players, manage your assistant coaches, and conduct practice.”
—James Clear

"A product is something that solves someone’s problem.
A business is a product that works so well that people will pay more than it costs to produce."
—Unknown

"Action yields information"
—David Baker 

"Attention spans aren’t falling, opportunity costs are rising”
—David Perell

"First, there’s a foundational question: are high standards intrinsic or teachable? If you take me on your basketball team, you can teach me many things, but you can’t teach me to be taller. Do we first and foremost need to select for “high standards” people? If so, this letter would need to be mostly about hiring practices, but I don’t think so. I believe high standards are teachable. In fact, people are pretty good at learning high standards simply through exposure. High standards are contagious. Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they’ll quickly adapt. The opposite is also true. If low standards prevail, those too will quickly spread. And though exposure works well to teach high standards, I believe you can accelerate that rate of learning by articulating a few core principles of high standards.”

—Unknown

"So why is it important to be a multidisciplinary thinker? The answer comes from the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (link 1, 2, 3) who said, ‘To understand is to know what to do.’ Could there be anything that sounds simpler than that? And yet it’s a genius line, to understand is to know what to do. How many mistakes do you make when you understand something? You don’t make any mistakes. Where do mistakes come from? They come from blind spots, a lack of understanding. Why do you need to be multidisciplinary in your thinking? Because as the Japanese proverb says, ‘The frog in the well knows nothing of the mighty ocean.’ You may know everything there is to know about your specialty, your silo, your “well”, but how are you going to make any good decisions in life…the complex systems of life, the dynamic system of life…if all you know is one well?

Albert Einstein once listed what he said were the five ascending levels of cognitive prowess. (link) Now there’s nobody in this room that doesn’t want to be level number one. Right? That’s why we’re here. You don’t want to be level number five. You want to be level number one. Wait until you hear what these levels are, it’s going to blow your mind. So number 5 he said, at the very bottom, was smart. OK. That’s the lowest level of cognitive prowess is being smart. The next level up, level 4, is intelligent. Level 3, next up, is brilliant. Next level up, level 2 he said is genius. What? What’s higher than genius? He must have that backward. No he doesn’t. Wait until you hear what number one is according to Albert Einstein. We just demonstrated it. Number one is simple. Simple transcends genius."

—Peter Kauffman 

Doing good work

"We don't create dishes, we create preparations. This way we make many dishes. "
—Ferran Adria

"Delivery is the strategy.”
—Unknown

"Price is what you pay, value is what you get”
—Warren Buffett

“You can’t buy what you can’t see”

"You can give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. You can give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, and they will either fix it or throw it away. I think that is especially true of this group.”
—Ed Catmul

Money

“You can be risk loving and yet completely averse to ruin.”

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"If there’s a common denominator in these, it’s a preference for humility, adaptability, long time horizons, and skepticism of popularity around anything involving money. Which can be summed up as: Be prepared to roll with the punches"

 “The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Napoleon said something interesting: that to understand a person, you must understand what the world looked like when he was twenty. I think there’s a lot in that. When I was twenty, it was 1982, right in the middle of the Cold War and the Thatcher/Reagan years. Interest rates were well into double digits, inflation was over 8 per cent, there were three million unemployed, and we thought the world might end in nuclear holocaust at any moment.“

— Unknown

Vulnerability

"Are you going to choose courage or comfort?”

"There is nothing courageous about putting yourself out there if you can predict or guess the outcome”

"We are losing our tolerance for discomfort.”

“Don’t let the cheap seats in”

"Write the names of people on a 1:1 inch that you actually care about their opinion of you. Everyone else doesn’t matter.”

“Are your values operationalized into behaviour that your employees could rattle them off to you?"

—Brene Brown

Creativity

Most creative people are very passionate about their work, but remain extremely objective about it as well. They are able to admit when something they have made is not very good.

Interesting Quotes

Over the years I continue to collect quotes as I come across them. Some are more common than others but they all share a similar gene – they cause me to pause and think a little bit.

“Now that your worry has proved such an unlucrative business
Why not find a better job?”
― Hafiz

"Chaos is a ladder"
—Littlefinger 

"Mediocrity gets further with industry than superiority without it."
― Gracian

“In a world deluged with information, clarity is power”
—Yuval Harare 

"If you are a killer and a poet, you will be rich"
― David Oglivy

"Your comfort zone is a beautiful place but nothing grows there"
—Gina Milicia

"Leadership is getting people to want to do what must be done"
―Eisenhower

"Graphic design is important but coupons are just as effective”
—Dan Cassaro

"Only fools worship their tools"
―Dee Hock

"Leadership is disappointing people at a rate they can absorb"
― Unknown

"Leadership is getting people to want to do what must be done"
―Eisenhower

"Force breeds counterforces"
―Douglas McGregor

"How you do one thing, is how you do everything."
―Tim Ferris

"Don’t always bet on the little guy, but do always bet against headquarters. Because headquarters politics will invariably and inevitably “bland up” and then kill any worthwhile project."
―Tom Peters

"Brand is high quality, low variance outcomes over time."
― Uknown

"The best climber in the world is the one who's having the most fun."
―Mountaineer Alex Lowe on how to be the best:

“To suffer before it is necessary is to suffer more than necessary.”
—Seneca

“Half doing something is an expensive way of not doing it.”
—Angela Jiang

"What would this look like if it were easy?"
—Tim Ferriss

Bill Bowerman refused to be called a coach, he preferred "Teacher of competitive response"

Frank Slootman's formula for building a successful company:
* Narrow the focus.
* Up the quality. 
* Increase the speed.

Culture

“If I could pick one course to teach everyone in the company, it would be the fundamentals of how the business works”

"Organizations are built on language, and language begins with noticing and naming. If you want to change an organization, change its language. But noticing and naming are in constant tension - noticing is unbundling and naming is bundling.Every business is a search for an untapped advantage and a plan to execute on it. Those advantages come from noticing, and those plans come from naming.” 
—Tom Critchlow

“In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas.” In Essentials Unity, In Non-Essentials Liberty, In All Things Charity

Hofstadter's law is the observation that “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law"

"Product is merit, distribution is connections"
—Balaji

“Tutto passa” - everything passes 
— Italian folk saying

"Our fears are always more numerous than our dangers.”
—Seneca

The art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen on how to teach so people learn: "First delight, then instruct."

“Pressure is a privilege”
—Billie Jean King

"We question our teaspoons" 
 —George Perec on when asked about planning    

A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.
— General Patton

"Take a simple idea, and take it seriously.”
—Charilie Munger

“If you know how to think, you will know what to do”
—Cameron Mitchell on culture 

"What comes out of your mouth is either positive or poison. There is no in between. Its good because it is  SIMPLE."
—Legendary women's softball coach Sue Enquist

"Happiness as reality minus expectations”
—Tim Urban

"A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."
—Jorge Luis Borges

"Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership"
—Colin Powell

“Hard work is undefeated”
— Unknown

“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work”  
—Peter Drucker

“Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.” 
—Peter Drucker

“Carpent tua poma nepotes.” (Your descendants shall gather your fruits.)
— Virgil, Eclogues, XI., 37 B.C.

“Brand is the distribution of likely outcomes that you can expect from any company or person.”
—Morgan Housel

"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea”
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Things that never happened before happen all the time. The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising”
—Morgan Housel

"A philosophy is the aggregate of your attitudes toward fundamental matters and is derived from a process of consciously thinking about critical issues and developing rational reasons for holding one particular belief or position rather than another."
—Bill Walsh,

“Instead of diagnosing behavior, I got people together across levels and functions to figure out what they needed to do. Instead of training everybody, I looked for ways to help people use the skills and knowledge they had. Instead of asking what’s wrong and what will fix it, I began asking what’s possible here and who cares. I discovered Robert Fritz’s The Path of Least Resistance. He had found an alternative to the diagnosis/intervention cycle. Fritz suggested, and I confirmed by doing it, that when people develop a keen appreciation of how things are now and then internalize a desirable future, they do not need gap-closing interventions. They begin to seize opportunities they had not noticed before. In this strategy, you put time into appreciating the past and present, good times and bad, and sharing future aspirations with those who can help realize them. Your purpose might be anything—a problem to solve, a system to improve, a community to heal, a corporation to renew. By the time everybody puts the puzzle together they know what to do.”
—Marvin Weisbord

Innovation

"You have to prioritize. Innovation requires commitment”
—Unknown

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
– George E.P. Box, British Statistician

 “Most of the world will make decisions by either guessing or using their gut. They will be either lucky or wrong.” 

“You can’t save your way to rich”
—Unknown

"Remember that great expectations create great capabilities”
—Ray Dalio

"Not reading is expensive" 
—Shane Parish 

“Venture investing is like finding needle in a haystack and we don’t have time to search through haystacks, but we are very good at building magnets”

“Industries that: accumulate data and understate and interpret that data, create a direct relationship with a consumer in a better way”
—Hunter Walk

“Predicting the future is harder than misremembering the past."
—Cliff Asness

"I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create"
— William Blake

"If you need a machine and don't buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don't have it."
—Henry Ford

“Consistency is the playground of dull minds.”
― Yuval Noah Harari

“It is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong”
—Warren Buffett

“Walmart started in Rogers, Arkansas. Nobody was scared that day.” 
—Doug McMillion 

“Ask yourself: When approaching risky decisions, you have to ask yourself What do you believe is true for this to succeed? Then make the decision. 
—Doug McMillion 

"You can never predict the outcome, but you can manipulate the collision."
—Unknown

"Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. If you’re a coach, your goal might be to win a championship. Your system is the way you recruit players, manage your assistant coaches, and conduct practice.”
—James Clear

"A product is something that solves someone’s problem.
A business is a product that works so well that people will pay more than it costs to produce."
—Unknown

"Action yields information"
—David Baker 

"Attention spans aren’t falling, opportunity costs are rising”
—David Perell

"First, there’s a foundational question: are high standards intrinsic or teachable? If you take me on your basketball team, you can teach me many things, but you can’t teach me to be taller. Do we first and foremost need to select for “high standards” people? If so, this letter would need to be mostly about hiring practices, but I don’t think so. I believe high standards are teachable. In fact, people are pretty good at learning high standards simply through exposure. High standards are contagious. Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they’ll quickly adapt. The opposite is also true. If low standards prevail, those too will quickly spread. And though exposure works well to teach high standards, I believe you can accelerate that rate of learning by articulating a few core principles of high standards.”

—Unknown

"So why is it important to be a multidisciplinary thinker? The answer comes from the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (link 1, 2, 3) who said, ‘To understand is to know what to do.’ Could there be anything that sounds simpler than that? And yet it’s a genius line, to understand is to know what to do. How many mistakes do you make when you understand something? You don’t make any mistakes. Where do mistakes come from? They come from blind spots, a lack of understanding. Why do you need to be multidisciplinary in your thinking? Because as the Japanese proverb says, ‘The frog in the well knows nothing of the mighty ocean.’ You may know everything there is to know about your specialty, your silo, your “well”, but how are you going to make any good decisions in life…the complex systems of life, the dynamic system of life…if all you know is one well?

Albert Einstein once listed what he said were the five ascending levels of cognitive prowess. (link) Now there’s nobody in this room that doesn’t want to be level number one. Right? That’s why we’re here. You don’t want to be level number five. You want to be level number one. Wait until you hear what these levels are, it’s going to blow your mind. So number 5 he said, at the very bottom, was smart. OK. That’s the lowest level of cognitive prowess is being smart. The next level up, level 4, is intelligent. Level 3, next up, is brilliant. Next level up, level 2 he said is genius. What? What’s higher than genius? He must have that backward. No he doesn’t. Wait until you hear what number one is according to Albert Einstein. We just demonstrated it. Number one is simple. Simple transcends genius."

—Peter Kauffman 

Doing good work

"We don't create dishes, we create preparations. This way we make many dishes. "
—Ferran Adria

"Delivery is the strategy.”
—Unknown

"Price is what you pay, value is what you get”
—Warren Buffett

“You can’t buy what you can’t see”

"You can give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. You can give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, and they will either fix it or throw it away. I think that is especially true of this group.”
—Ed Catmul

Money

“You can be risk loving and yet completely averse to ruin.”

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"If there’s a common denominator in these, it’s a preference for humility, adaptability, long time horizons, and skepticism of popularity around anything involving money. Which can be summed up as: Be prepared to roll with the punches"

 “The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Napoleon said something interesting: that to understand a person, you must understand what the world looked like when he was twenty. I think there’s a lot in that. When I was twenty, it was 1982, right in the middle of the Cold War and the Thatcher/Reagan years. Interest rates were well into double digits, inflation was over 8 per cent, there were three million unemployed, and we thought the world might end in nuclear holocaust at any moment.“

— Unknown

Vulnerability

"Are you going to choose courage or comfort?”

"There is nothing courageous about putting yourself out there if you can predict or guess the outcome”

"We are losing our tolerance for discomfort.”

“Don’t let the cheap seats in”

"Write the names of people on a 1:1 inch that you actually care about their opinion of you. Everyone else doesn’t matter.”

“Are your values operationalized into behaviour that your employees could rattle them off to you?"

—Brene Brown

Creativity

Most creative people are very passionate about their work, but remain extremely objective about it as well. They are able to admit when something they have made is not very good.