About Gratitude, Wellness and Potential
“Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it...myself included.” (Pablo Picasso)
"Optimism is the fuel of innovation." (Lex Friedman, Twitter)
“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” (Herbert A. Simon)
About taking risks
“Realize that by not taking risks in life, you are not saving yourself from pain. All you are doing is trading away the acute discomfort of action for the slow burning longer lasting decay of inaction, where feelings like despair and regret blossom << So, how is that any less painful?>>.” (Better Ideas [Yb])
About Overthinking
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” & “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)
"A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So, he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions. By thoughts I mean specifically “chatter in the skull”... perpetual and compulsive repetition of words... of reckoning and calculating. I’m not saying thinking is bad. Like everything else, it’s useful in moderation. A good servant, but a bad master - and all so-called civilized peoples have increasingly become crazy and self-destructive. Through excessive thinking, they have lost touch with reality. Most of us would have rather money than tangible wealth... and a great occasion is somehow spoiled for us unless photographed... and to read about it the next day in the newspaper is oddly more fun for us than the original event. This is a disaster. To get in touch with reality there is an art of meditation... It is the art of temporarily silencing the mind... of stopping the “chatter in the skull”. Of course, you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flat iron. Water becomes cool and clear only when left alone." (Alan Watts, source: http://www.mindfullyalive.com/)
"You must own the rain, Obi-Wan. It must be part of you, an extension of you. If you fight it, it will win." (Qui Gon, Star Wars)
About Habits
"You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems." (James Clear, Atomic Habits)
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit." (Aristotle)
"The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better." (Douglas Engelbart)
About Choices and Passion
"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself, And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity ." (The Alchemist)
"Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient." (Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life)
"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." (Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter)
"Many of us spend our days running from desk to desk, solving urgent but unimportant problems. Our managers are constantly looking for ways to get more out of us. We’re always living in the future, thinking about the next quota to make, the next meeting, the next car to buy, the weekend. We’re constantly trying to get somewhere instead of being where we already are. We miss the only moment we ever have access to. The Now. We're going faster and faster, but where exactly are we going? We spend more time at work than with our loved ones. And when we come home, we are busier connecting to our devices than to the people we love. We have become little more than human resources. Yet we wonder, ‘Why am I so tired?’ We figure it’s because we work too much. But what if it’s not the amount of work that exhausts us, but rather the lack of meaning in the work we do? What if we’re not doing too much, but rather we’re just doing too little of what really matters?" & "It's not hard work that exhausts us; it's meaningless work that exhausts us most." (Alexander den Heijer, Facebook)
"Doing the right thing at all costs is an absolute, and only a sith deals in absolutes." & "If all you do is fight for your life then your life worth nothing." (Dave Filoni)
About Writing and listening
"When people realize they're being listened to, they tell you things." (Richard Ford)
"Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere." (Anne Lamott)
"Assume the person you are listening to knows something you don't." (Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life)
“Unexpectedly, we found that the factors most people usually think of as driving group performance—i.e., cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction—were not statistically significant. The largest factor in predicting group intelligence was the equality of conversational turn taking; groups where a few people dominated the conversation were less collectively intelligent than those with a more equal distribution of conversational turn taking. The second most important factor was the social intelligence of a group’s members, as measured by their ability to read each other’s social signals." (Alex Pentland, Social Physics)
“It is not simply the brightest who have the best ideas; it is those who are best at harvesting ideas from others. It is not only the most determined who drive change; it is those who most fully engage with like-minded people. And it is not wealth or prestige that best motivates people; it is respect and help from peers.” (Alex Pentland, Social Physics)
About Science
"Deep Learning has instead given us machines with truly impressive abilities but no intelligence. The difference is profound and lies in the absence of a model of reality." (Judea Pearl)
"Probabilities are summaries of knowledge that is left behind when information is transferred to a higher level of abstraction ." (Judea Pearl)
About The importance of defining
"You cannot answer a question that you cannot ask, and you cannot ask a question that you have no words for." (Judea Pearl)
If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions." (Albert Einstein)