Tuesday, May 6, 2025
So much of my work in strategy revolved around the achievement of goals: quarterly goals, annual goals, and five-year goals. All of these were tied to a specific metric, which often produced an unintended counter-result. Focus on the inputs that will make you smarter and stronger. Do the workouts, practice your craft. Be one percent better every day. Play the long game.
Currently reading: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain 📚💙
This has been an eye-opening book for the ways that extroverts and introverts differ. Bloggers, who Cain suggests are almost all introverts, will share personal details with an online multitude they would never disclose at a cocktail party. This hits close to home!
Currently reading: Laozi’s Dao De Jing by Laozi 💙📚
To solve the hard you must begin with the easy; To do something big you must start very small. All difficulties must be resolved through simple steps. All grand deeds must be performed through tiny details.
Wisdom from Kevin Kelly:
Productivity is often a distraction. Don’t aim for better ways to get through your tasks as quickly as possible, rather aim for better tasks that you never want to stop doing.
Wednesday, February 12, 2025 →
Ah, Patrick O’Brian. He was truly one of a kind. If you haven’t discovered Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, there’s not a moment to lose. 💙📚
💬 You learn to dance with the limp.
Sometimes I’ve thought of grief as missing an amputated limb, but walking with a limp is better. Thank you @chrisheck for sharing this.
Think different. 💬
Book-wrapt — that beneficent feeling of being wholly imbooked, beshelved, inlibriated, circumvolumed, peribibliated …
— The Private Library by Reid Byers 📚
Community is a body of people crying for one another, working together for a common cause, enjoying and overlooking (or grimly tolerating) each other’s foibles; it’s a rough and beautiful quilt sewn of patches that don’t seem to go together at all, and then do.
Anne Lamott, Somehow
Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.
Enduring and grounding advice from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones, onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, in conversation with the elements. Looking back, we see the wake we have left as only a brief glimmering trace on the waters.
There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep growing until I die. This has exasperated my daughters, amused my friends and baffled my accountant. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer.
— Pete Hamill
There is no better teacher than history in determining the future. There are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book.📚
Charlie Munger
Steinbeck captures my basic attitude towards New Years Resolutions here in the third week of January:
It is very strange that when you set a goal for yourself, it is hard not to hold toward it even if it is inconvenient and not even desirable.
It’s been a couple years since I finished In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. I read all six volumes with an amazing Twitter book group over the course of a year. I struggled with the serpentine sentences and French society references at the time, but passages like these stuck with me. 📚
Replace “book” with “blog” and you’ve captured what makes a community like Micro.blog so special:
Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer’s belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another.
The first lesson of philosophy is that we cannot be wise about everything. We are fragments in infinity and moments in eternity; for such forked atoms to describe the universe, or the Supreme Being, must make the planets tremble with mirth.
Will Durant, The Story of Civilization Volume III: Caesar and Christ
The English word lost derives from the Old Norse los, which refers to the disbanding of an army. This etymology implies that losing one’s way is less about being in the wrong place than it is about letting go of planned endeavors, and embracing surprises rather than avoiding them.
Rolf Potts, The Vagabond’s Way