The problem with information is not that it is diverting and generally useless, but that it is toxic.
People do not realize that the media is paid to get your attention. For a journalist, silence rarely surpasses any word.
We favor the sensational and the extremely visible. This affects the way we judge heroes. There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do not deliver visible results – or those heroes who focus on process rather than results.
When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people’s opinion, freer, more real.
Clearly, an open mind is a necessity when dealing with randomness. Popper believed that any idea of Utopia is necessarily closed owing to the fact that it chokes its own refutations. The simple notion of a good model for society that cannot be left open for falsification is totalitarian. I learned from Popper, in addition to the difference between an open and a closed society, that between an open and a closed mind.
A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a “solution” and creates a problem.
Complex systems are full of interdependencies – hard to detect – and nonlinear responses.
Pasteur said, like all great discoverers, he knew something about accidental discoveries. The best way to get maximal exposure is to keep researching. Collect opportunities –.
Too much success is the enemy, too much failure is demoralizing.
History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history.
It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.
A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.
So just as Stoicism is the domestication, not the elimination, of emotions, so is the barbell a domestication, not the elimination, of uncertainty.
The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds...
To understand the future, you do not need technoautistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.
Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do – except, of course, when we think about it.
You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.
It is not what you are telling people, it is how you are saying it.
Contra the prevailing belief, “success” isn’t being on top of a hierarchy, it is standing outside all hierarchies.
Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.