Tag: david brooks

August Quotes: “It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero” – David Brooks

Homer Simpson the vegetarianSee all previous ones here. Tucker Max writes a monthly quotes post which is great.

Love the way this sounds:

Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree. – Joyce Kilmer

From a favorite Brooks article:

I saw young people with deep moral yearnings. But they tended to convert moral questions into resource allocation questions; questions about how to be into questions about what to do…It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. – David Brooks

Even other cultures, millenia ago, were thinking about habits:

Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habit. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny. – Lao Tzu

Reminds me of the rage to master:

The dirty little secret of every creative workshop or motivational seminar is simply this: The person who is going to change is going to change anyway. She has no choice. She is impelled by inner necessity. – Steven Pressfield

I don’t like when people say that something is “strictly business” or that they’re “being logical”. Your emotions are to thinking like bread is to a sandwich, without which it cannot exist.

Reason is and ought to be only a slave to the passions, and can never pretend to be any other office than to serve and obey them. – David Hume

Certainly feels true, no?

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket – Eric Hoffer

Meditation is helping me with this:

Infinite patience gets you immediate results – James Altucher

I suck at this:

Love your enemies, for they tell you your faults – Ben Franklin

I agree with the below. Sometimes overly so?

The only path to amazing runs directly through not-so-amazing – Seth Godin

Like the old saw, “a fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing”…

Fanaticism is the only way to put an end to the doubts that constantly trouble the human soul – Paulo Coehlo

Haha:

If most of your courtship attempts have succeeded, you must be a very attractive and charming person who has been aiming too low – Geoffrey Miller

Why I stay away from email and social media in the evening:

Arguing with people is like reading your email at 4am in the morning. There is absolutely no good that can come of it. It’s just scratching an itch – James Altucher

This Hemingway guy, really something:

This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an effect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic quality. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.
-Ernest Hemingway

5 articles you should read, or at least, browse

A high school friend once confessed that he spent 4 hours a day reading the news. Ridiculous, I thought.

Here’s a running list of my readings. It’s not 4 hours – yet – and I avoid the news, but look who’s ridiculous now…

From that list, here are 5 July favorites:

1. David Brooks’ The Service Patch [link]

Young people – particularly the accomplished ones – have a “blinkered view of their options” and don’t think about the kind of person they want to be.

It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job.

2. Emily Nussbaum’s Difficult Women: How Sex and the City lost its good name [link]

I enjoyed SATC (see, I even used the acronym). Clever, fast, and at times provocative. The show’s weakness is that – while Carrie and friends began energetically against-type – they had a whiff of cardboard-cutout by the end.

Like the Simpsons and Friends, you were watching a magician perform the same card trick for the 37th time.

In contrast, Carrie and her friends—Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte—were odder birds by far, jagged, aggressive, and sometimes frightening figures, like a makeup mirror lit up in neon.

3. Paul Krugman’s Hitting China’s Wall [link]

Krugman takes big public stances that have substance. His ire is usually focused on our economy, but here it turns to China.

China is in big trouble. We’re not talking about some minor setback along the way, but something more fundamental. The country’s whole way of doing business, the economic system that has driven three decades of incredible growth, has reached its limits.

4. Anahad O’Connor’s How the Hum of a Coffee Shop Can Boost Creativity [link]

I prefer working alone, but it can be hard to maintain focus; I’m always looking for hacks and tools to provide a boost. If that sounds familiar, try Coffitivity.

Their results, published in The Journal of Consumer Research, found that a level of ambient noise typical of a bustling coffee shop or a television playing in a living room, about 70 decibels, enhanced performance compared with the relative quiet of 50 decibels.

5. Paul Graham’s Do Things that Don’t Scale [link]

Another PG gem that challenges startup orthodoxy. When you’re early, it’s ok to do things that don’t scale, like Pebble assembling its own watches. You learn, you show grit, and you move your baby forward.

The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you’re going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you’re going to do initially to get the company going.