Random Quotes: “The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried” – Stephen McCranie

Recent favorite:

Education perverts the mind since we are directly opposing the natural development of our mind by obtaining ideas first and observations last. This is why so few men of learning have such sound common sense as is quite common among the illiterate – Arthur Schopenhauer

This changed how I think about negative advertising:

Do you know why McDonald’s never ran a negative ad against Burger King, saying their burgers were all full of maggots? It might have worked for a year or two but then no one would have ever eaten another hamburger. – advertising exec in Tom Friedman’s That Used To Be Us

Others:

For warriors in particular, if you calm your own mind and discern the inner minds of others, that may be called the foremost art of war – Shiba Yoshimasa

Meditation is a powerful tool for calming your own mind. When I get in my 10-15 minutes a day, it makes a real difference (especially in the morning). And sometimes on weekends, I try to meditate for longer – 30 minutes to an hour. Often I fall asleep.

Work saves us from 3 great evils: boredom, vice and need – Voltaire

Greed does not have a memory – an economist on Planet Money

Human memory sucks. It is constantly deleted, edited, and curated. While we are willing to believe that such things happen, we forget that they happen to us, too.

Each of you has an economic pie over your heads that represents the value you’ve lost because you haven’t negotiated. You need to stop that pie from growing – bschool professor

Thanks to Medrano for the above.

Money is nothing more than neutral proof that you’re adding value to people’s lives. – Derek Sivers

Thanks to Cal Newport for the above.

Real cultures are built over time. They’re the result of action, reaction, and truth. They are nuanced, beautiful, and authentic. Real culture is patina. – Jason Fried

A perpetual favorite for startups. Thanks to Matt for the above.

The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. – Stephen McCranie

Reminds me of this Chris Dixon post. If you like Chris Dixon, here are my notes from his talk on why good ideas often seem like bad ideas.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority – Lord Acton

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something – Thomas Huxley

The first hour of the morning is the rudder of the day – Henry Ward Beecher

An analogue could be, “the last hour of today is the springboard for tomorrow.”

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win – Mahatma Gandhi

Martin Seligman’s 3 types of happy lives

I’m not a fan of the lazy belief that happiness is a worthwhile pursuit; it scares me that some people go so far as to organize their lives around it.

Dr. Drew sums it up for me:

I don’t buy into this happiness stuff…if you want to know happiness, look at a heroin addict. Now THEY’RE happy.

Or as Don so pithily sums up in Mad Men:

Happiness…is the moment before you need more happiness

Yet I found this Martin Seligman talk about happiness to be very interesting. Its insights are overlooked, or forgotten, in our happiness dialogue.

Seligman is a UPenn professor, psychology eminence grise and a key proponent of positive psychology (the academic label for happiness). His TED talk was recorded back in 2004, just as the happiness movement was finding its legs. Those legs are pretty tired, now, but you never know…

In the talk, Seligman says there are 3 types of happy lives:

1. The Pleasant Life – what most people mean when they talk about happiness; think George Clooney or that bubbly, cheerful office receptionist; it’s about creating and maintaining as much positive emotion as possible; about 50% of your baseline is inherited, and it habituates over time (you get used to it and need more)

Ok, got it. But there’s gotta be more…

2. The Good Life – think Elon Musk, Serena Williams; a life of engagement and flow, when time stops because you’re absorbed in the moment, in what you’re doing; “during flow, you can’t feel anything”; it’s about developing strengths and then applying them to every area of your life

We’re not done, yet!

3. The Meaningful Life – think Mother Teresa; using your strengths to serve something larger than you, typically a positive institution or moral issue. To quote Eleanor Roosevelt:

Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively. After a short time, a very short time, there would be little that one really enjoyed. For what keeps our interest in life and makes us look forward to tomorrow is giving pleasure to other people.

Ahhh, much better.

In your perfect world, you probably want a combination of all 3. Probably more of 2 and 3 than of 1, although to each their own. Just don’t ask me if I’m happy…I still can’t figure it out.

Watch the talk here.

Podcast recommendation: Planet Money!!

Planet Money podcastIf you like podcasts, check out Planet Money.

I started a few weeks ago and was immediately hooked. It’s fast (around 15-25 minutes), fun (the reporters enjoy their work, I love Zoe Chace’s voice), and you learn interesting things about the big, hairy, sometimes secretive world of money.

I’ve been working my way through the archives. Some favorites:

  • The One-Page Plan To Fix Global Warming [link]
  • Top Of The Charts [link]
  • Will A Computer Decide Whether You Get Your Next Job? [link]

Thanks to Lily and Haomiao for the recommendation.

Here’s more on podcasts.

Interesting de Tocqueville quote

So I’m reading Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. I wish I could say it was more entertaining and engaging than it is; perhaps I’m unused to his 19th century writing style, all long sentences with twists and u-turns.

This quote caught my eye:

In Europe, the criminal is an unfortunate who is fighting to hide from the agents of power; the population in a way helps in the struggle. In America, he is an enemy of the human species, and he has all of humanity against him.

This was pre-Civil War America, the America of 1835-1840. Things have changed.

Snowden, anyone?

What is a book worth?

George Packer writes a New Yorker-quality piece on Amazon’s changing, always-provocative role in book publishing.

It’s long but worth a thorough read and two.

The usual themes are there – that Amazon’s DNA is influenced by its online bookstore origins…that Bezos’s relentless customer focus creates some friends, many enemies and even many-er customers…that its forays in content (from literary magazines to trade publishing to the Kindle device), while ambitious, have seen mixed results. And finally, that the publishing establishment feels about Amazon what an alcoholic feels about a bottle of Johnny Walker black.

Jane Friedman, the former Random House and HarperCollins executive, who now runs a digital publisher called Open Road Integrated Media, told me, “If there wasn’t an Amazon today, there probably wouldn’t be a book business.” The senior editor who met Grandinetti said, “They’re our biggest customer, we want them to succeed. As I recover from being punched in the face by Amazon, I also worry: What if they are a bubble? What if the stock market suddenly says, ‘We want a profit’? You don’t want your father who abuses you physically to lose his job.”

Packer’s argument is that, while Amazon’s role in book publishing has been largely positive for customers (by making it better, faster and cheaper to buy books), it is what might be called a Pyrrhic victory. That Amazon won the book retail battle, but it may lose the publishing war and pull everyone down with it, especially those hard-working authors.

“Amazon has successfully fostered the idea that a book is a thing of minimal value,” Johnson said. “It’s a widget.”

It’s still early, but some new data shows that self-publishing is doing well for readers and authors. You can’t hold back the tides of change: of technology, of transparency, of individual empowerment. However, this sort of debate has been – and will continue to be – around for decades.

As for me? I’ve got a growing backlog of ebooks, blog posts, tweets and Quora threads to get to! :)

A thorough and entertaining piece. Read it here.

Disclaimer: I run Hyperink, an ebook publisher.