Quotes
There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs
– Thomas Sowell
We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom
— E.O. Wilson
If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking
— Leslie Lamport
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and the gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace
— Frederick Buechner
‘As Philip Yancey wrote, Buechner “tries to reawaken the child in people: the one who naïvely trusts, who will at least go and look for the magic place, who is not ashamed of not knowing the answers because he is not expected to know the answers.”’
”One of Buechner’s often cited observations is that you find your vocation at the spot where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need. ”
”Buechner’s vocation was to show a way to experience the fullness of life. Of death, he wrote, “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”
Everyone has a firmly held belief that an equally smart and informed person disagrees with
— Morgan Housel https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/rare-skills/
”… Good questions to ask to combat this reality are:
What haven’t I experienced firsthand that leaves me naive to how something works?
Which of my current views would I disagree with if I were born in a different country or generation?
What do I desperately want to be true, so much that I think it’s true when it’s clearly not?
Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different?
But an even better skill is realizing that everyone else struggles with those questions and winces at the potential answers.
You don’t have to agree with others’ delusions or put up with their collateral damage. Just accepting that everyone wants easy and comforting answers in a complex and painful world is a rare skill.”
It’s staggering how expectations can alter how you interpret current circumstances …
— Morgan Housel (https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/goalpost/)
”… In 2004 the New York Times interviewed Stephen Hawking, the late scientist whose motor-neuron disease left him paralyzed and unable to talk since age 21.
“Are you always this cheerful?” the Times asked.
“My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21,” Hawking said. “Everything since then has been a bonus,” he replied.
If an abjectly terrible situation can be offset with low expectations, the opposite is true.
Not long after the Times interviewed Hawking it interviewed Gary Kremen, who founded Match.com. At the time Kremen was 43 years old and worth $10 million. That put him in the top half of 1% in the country, and probably the top 1,000th of 1% in the world. In Silicon Valley, it made him just another guy. “You’re nobody here at $10 million,” he said. The Times wrote: “He logs 60- to 80-hour workweeks because he does not think he has nearly enough money to ease up.”
The point here isn’t to say Hawking has the clarity of a monk or that Kremen was out of touch. Just that all happiness has its roots in expectations.
And Kremen’s situation is by far the more common one. It’s natural. It’s so natural that an important question is wondering if most of us walk through life on the same path.”