Life’s too short” is repeated often enough to be a cliche, but this time it’s true. You don’t have enough time to be both unhappy and mediocre. It’s not just pointless, it’s painful. Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.
The Dip creates scarcity; scarcity creates value.
Stick with the Dips that are likely to pan out, and quit the Cul-de-Sacs to focus your resources.
The challenge is this: training creative, independent, and innovative artists is new to us.
Group projects are the exception in school, but they should be the norm.
Being surrounded by educated people makes democracy stronger, and it benefits our entire economy.
The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.
This is an addictive pastime. You take no real risk, touch the world, and it responds. Repeat.
For many of us, the happiest future is one that’s precisely like the past, except a little better.
A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.
Librarians who are arguing and lobbying for clever e-book lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending the library-as-warehouse concept, as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher, and impresario.
This is not a book for the wild-haired crazies your company keeps in a corner. It is a book for you, your boss, and your employees, because the best future available to us is a future where you contriubute your true self and your best work. Are you up for that?
Transparency in the traditional school might destroy it.
Change is powerful, but change always comes with the possibility of failure as its partner. “This might not work” isn’t merely something to be tolerated; it’s something you must seek out.
The future of your organization depends on motivated human beings selflessly contributing unasked-for gifts of emotional labor.
Never quit something with great long-term potential just because you can’t deal with the stress of the moment.
The essential thing to know about the Dip is that it’s there. Knowing that you’re facing a Dip is the first step in getting through it.
Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success.
All marketers are storytellers. Only the losers are liars.
On top of this, if you do great work you gain the reward of knowing you’re doing great work. Your day snaps into alignment with your dreams, and you no longer have to pretend you’re mediocre. You’re free to contribute.