New entries of my favourite books are regularly updated here
“For most artists, making good art depends upon making lots of art, and any device that carries the first brushstroke to the next blank canvas has tangible, practical value.”
"...So if you want to figure out what we can't say, look at the machinery of fashion and try to predict what it would make un-sayable. What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress? What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent struggle? if a self conscious person wanted to differentiate himself from preceding fashion, which of their ideas would he tend to reject?"
"If a genius is someone with exceptional abilities and the insight to find the not so obvious solution to a problem, you don't need a nobel prize to be one."
"It's difficult to not pick sides. Either you'll want to spend your time and effort betting on mass and the status quo and trying to earn your spot in this crowded mob or you'll abandon that quest and realise that there are better opportunities and growth if you market to and lead the weird."
"And yet nowhere is it written in stone that we must settle for things as they are. After all, changing the world is part of an artist's job description."
"Go ahead and make something. Make something really special. Make something amazing that will blow the mind of anybody who sees it. If you try to make something just to fit your uninformed view of some market, you will fail. If you make something special and powerful and honest and true, you will succeed."
"Concrete language helps people, especially novices, understand new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert. If you've got to teach an idea to a room full of people, and you aren't certain what they know, concreteness is the only safe language."
"All these management consultants, planning departments, and efficiency experts relied on the mathematics of the average to conduct their analyses. Managers believed in treating each worker like a cell on a spreadsheet, as a number in a column, an interchangeable Average Man. It was not very difficult to convince managers that individuality did not matter, since it made their job easier and more secure. After all, if you make decisions about people using types and ranks, you will not be right every time but you will tend to be right on average, and that was good enough. On those occasions where managers did make a wrong decision about an employee, they could simply blame the employee for not fitting into the system."
"Simplicity likes to make a point quickly. Few people who attend an overblown, hard-to-digest presentation return to their offices eager to se the world on fire. Most prefer to head to the nearest bar. This is not the way to inspire people to greatness."
"In very general terms, a good strategy works by harnessing power and applying it where it will have the greatest effect."
"Depth is all about qualities that do not meet the eye: those that not merely are visible but must rather be looked for; those that cannot be seen by all but can be understood by only a few."
"Don't forget, there are people out there looking to get you. They want to intimidate you. Rattle you. Pressure you into making a decision before you've gotten all the facts. They want you thinking and acting on their terms, not yours."
"No man made structure is built with the care of a single honeycomb.... bit by bit the bees put these pieces into place to create the tile work that make the honeycomb. The work is peicemeal and local, with no boss to oversee it all... Now imagine doing that with hundreds of friends, in total darkness, yet it works."
"Then again, imagine that two men a addressing the same natural objective. One successfully accomplishes it while fulfilling his natural role; the other is utterly unable to exercise that role, but against his nature he imitates the one who has attained the objective, rather than implement it himself. Which of the two do you regard as the stronger?"
"For me, it's how many useful things I create, wether songs, companies, articles, websites, or anything else. If I create something that's not useful to others, it doesn't count. But I'm also not interested in doing something useful unless it needs my creative input. How do you grade yourself? It's important to know in advance, to make sure you're staying focused on what's honestly important to you, instead of doing what others think you should."
When you experience a visual illusion, you may see something that is not there, fail to see something that is there, or see something different from what is there. Your perceptions contradict the physical properties of what you are looking at. What you see, hear, feel,and think is based on what you expect to see, hear feel, and think.
Imagine an old, heavy suitcase whose well-worn handles are hanging by a few threads. The handle is "Story is king" - a pithy statement that seems, on the face of it, to stand for much more. The suitcase represents all that has gone into the formation of the phrase: the experience, the deep wisdom, the truths that emerge from struggle. Too often, we grab the handle and - without realising it - walk off without the suitcase. What's more we don't even think about what we've left behind. After all, the handle is so much easier to carry than the suitcase. Once you're aware of the suitcase / handle problem, you'll see it everywhere. People glom onto words and stories that are often just stand-ins for real action and meaning... words like quality and excellence are misapplied so relentlessly that they border on meaningless.
"When everything that matters can be bought and sold, when commitments can be broken because they are no longer to our advantage, when shopping becomes our litany, when our worth is measured by how much we earn and spend, then the market is destroying the very virtues on which in the long run it depends."
"The business world is littered with dead documents that do nothing but waste people's time. Reports no one reads, diagrams no one looks at, and specs that never resemble the finished product. These things take forever to make but only seconds to forget."
Learners are often attracted to those who write or speak beautifully about great truths. To discuss the truth and not live it is hypocrisy. Insincere teaching can weaken or even destroy a student's faith. A real teacher practices what he or she preaches. Empty words have no weight."
"When you engineer early successes, what you're really doing is engineering hope. Hope is precious to a change effort. It's Elephant fuel."
"One of the things that limit our learning is our belief that we already know something."
"Ideally, though, your goal should be "No interaction left behind", because what pays off is your willingness to show people that you care - about them, about their experience, about their business."
"The law is like a lamp showing you the way. Without a lamp, there is no going forward. When you join the way, your progress along the way is the path. And when you reach your journey's end, that is the Truth. Thus it is said, 'If the Truth were manifest, the Law would be nothing..."
If we were all rational, there would be no small business, there would be no exploration, there would be very little innovation and there would be no great leaders to inspire all those things. It is the undying belief in something bigger and better that drives that kind of behaviour.
The purpose of describing, say, your professional life or your family traditions as a game is twofold. You instantly shift the context from one of survival to one of opportunity and growth. You also have the choice of imagining other games you might prefer to play in these realms. Naming your activities as a game breaks their hold on you and puts you in charge.