If you wish to remove avarice you must remove its mother, luxury.
~ Cicero
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On this day
April 27thMistakes
Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.
~ Thomas Carlyle
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Learning
I’ve always treated the world as my classroom, soaking up lessons and stories to fuel my path forward. I hope you do the same. The worst thing you can ever do is think that you know enough. Never stop learning. Ever.
~ Arnold Schwarzenegger
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Pessimist? Optimist?
This has been distilled to a motto: “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. I am a pessimist or optimist of the intellect according to facts on the ground, but I am ever an optimist of the will.
~ Jason Crawford from, Descriptive vs. prescriptive optimism
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Frankly, I’ve never cared for the simple dichotomy of, “are you an optimist, or a pessimist?” There is simply too much complexity—in the world, in the mind—for that level of simplicity to be useful. I’m interested in models, and this article from Crawford spreads out some of the complexity nicely. (It also includes some interesting references.)
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Choose today
Stick to what’s in front of you—idea, action, utterance. This is what you deserve. You could be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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Professional versus Amateur
I believe a man is a professional when he can do what needs to be done no matter how he feels within. An amateur is an amateur in his attitude emotionally. A professional is a professional in the way he thinks and feels and in his ability to execute under the most trying conditions.
~ Cus D’Amato
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Too grandiose an aspiration
To be sure, understanding the whole of the universe seems like too grandiose an aspiration when we are continually struggling to understand the tiny subset of the universe that is ourselves.
~ Maria Popova from, Carl Sagan on Mystery, Why Common Sense Blinds Us to the Universe, and How to Live with the Unknown
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As with many things Maria Popova creates, anything I add would simply detract. Click. Thank me later.
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Happy, healthy and successful.
Happy, healthy and successful people, like the mature tree, have grown deep roots in the important areas of their life. They have, over time and a great number of small actions, built habits that are so fixed, that no one would even try to challenge them.
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” – Lao Tzu
~ Zachary Sexton from, How to Build the 25 Habits of People who are Happy, Healthy and Successful
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Dunbar’s number
Dunbar’s Number is a favorite blunt diagnosis for the pains that affect rapidly growing teams. The number, which is somewhere between 100 and 250 describes a point at which a group of people can no longer effectively maintain social connections in their respective heads. What was simple from a communication perspective becomes costly. What was a familiar family that you saw wandering the hallway becomes Stranger Town.
~ Rands from, The Old Guard
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Also, Dunbar’s Number on Wikipedia.
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