Good habits have a price. Bad habits have a cost. Either way, you pay
“What an astonishing thing a book is… one glance at it & you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly & silently inside your head, directly to you.
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. #Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
- Carl Sagan
French philosopher Voltaire once said: “It’s difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.”
But for the 21st century, upgrade that to: “It’s impossible to free low-IQ imbeciles from their erroneous beliefs.”
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it." - Søren Kierkegaard
“There are things that can be measured. There are things that are worth measuring. But what can be measured is not always what is worth measuring; what gets measured may have no relationship to what we really want to know.
The costs of measuring may be greater than the benefits. The things that get measured may draw effort away from the things we really care about. And measurement may provide us with distorted knowledge—knowledge that seems solid but is actually deceptive.”
from The Tyranny of Metrics written by Jerry Z. Muller
"Everyone’s a murderer. You just have to meet the right person."
dialogue from Inside Man (2022 TV series) reference
“The wise have always said the same things, and fools have always done just the opposite.” Schopenhauer
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. – Daniel J. Boorstin
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Peter F. Drucker
Reinventing the wheel is bad not only because it wastes time, but because reinvented wheels are often square. There is an almost irresistible temptation to economize on reinvention time by taking a shortcut to a crude and poorly-thought-out version, which in the long run often turns out to be false economy. -- Henry Spencer
The best dividends on the labor invested have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power. - Wilbur Wright
The enemy of efficiency
“You’re efficient when you do something with minimum waste.
And you’re effective when you’re doing the right something.”
“Size expectations to resources and you will rarely be disappointed.” Living in reality is a key to happiness. Delay gratification, have a buffer, and invest for the future. What could be simpler? “Common sense isn’t.”
The cost of recording knowledge is small compared to the cost of acquiring that knowledge.
There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen. - Lenin
James Autrey : “There is no business, there are only people. Business exists only among people and for people.”
Thomas Peters: “Treating people – not money, machines or minds - as the natural resource may be the key to it all.”
Scott Miller: “Businesses evolve, people matter.”
knowledge is a process, not a possession.
Josh Wolfe : Failure comes from a failure to imagine failure.
Copper + Tin = Bronze which is more powerful than Iron.
Anyone can count the number of seeds in an apple,
but very few can count the number of apples in a seed.
Remember, Desires are endless while needs are limited
Your level of success will rarely exceed your level of personal development,
because success is something you attract by the person you become
– Hal Elrod
“The best yardstick for success isn’t whether you beat a benchmark or your neighbor,” writes Adam Grossman.
“Instead, the best measure is whether you meet your goals—while sleeping at night
Growth is a function of the available energy.
As energy sources have increased, the production of wealth has increased. Greater wealth meant better standard of living for ever greater number of people.
Humanity’s future is open-ended.
taken from Antanu Dey's blog post
Why hasn’t evolution made every species freaking huge?
Aaron Clauset of the Santa Fe Institute and Doug Erwin of the Museum of Natural History, explained why in a paper that is dense but summed up in a wonderful sentence:
The tendency for evolution to create larger species is counterbalanced by the tendency of extinction to kill” off larger species
Management has three basic tasks to perform:
Establish the requirements that employees are to meet
Supply the wherewithal that the employees need in order to meet those requirements
Spend all its time encouraging and helping the employees to meet those requirements
- Philip Crosby reference
IEEE's code of ethics includes this:
[We agree] 1. to hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public, to strive to comply with ethical design and sustainable development practices, and to disclose promptly factors that might endanger the public or the environment;
Faster... Better... Cheaper... Pick any two.
“Wealth comes from successful individual efforts to please one’s fellow man … that’s what competition is all about: “outpleasing” your competitors to win over the consumers.”
— Walter E Williams. Reference: Planning Works but not Always
“Experience is what you got when you didn’t get what you wanted.” --- Howard Marks
“It’s not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.” — Charlie Munger
The ability to risk looking like an idiot is necessary for being different.
Extraordinary performance comes from being different
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” -Friedrich Nietzsche
Peace is not a piece of paper, but a way of dealing with conflict when it arises. --Roger Fisher
It’s not the strongest of the species who survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.
--Charles Darwin
Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
To learn is to broaden, to experience more, to snatch new aspects of life for yourself. To refuse to learn or to be relieved at not having to learn is to commit a form of suicide; in the long run, a more meaningful type of suicide than the mere ending of physical life.
Knowledge is not only power; it is happiness, and being taught is the intellectual analog of being loved.
— Isaac Asimov, Yours, Isaac Asimov: A Life in Letters
Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.