Benjamin Franklin on Money & Life
“I would rather have it said, ‘He lived usefully,’ than, ‘He died rich.’”
Benjamin Franklin in a letter to his mom
How to Think Like a Scientist More Often
“So if we want to think like a scientist more often in life, those are the three key objectives—to be humbler about what we know, more confident about what’s possible, and less afraid of things that don’t matter.”
From the same article:
“To swing the balance, we need to figure out how to lose respect for the general public, your tribe’s dogma, and society’s conventional wisdom. We have a bunch of romantic words for the world’s chefs that sound impressive but are actually just a result of them having lost this respect. Being a gamechanger is just having little enough respect for the game that you realize there’s no good reason not to change the rules. Being a trailblazer is just not respecting the beaten path and so deciding to blaze yourself a new one. Being a groundbreaker is just knowing that the ground wasn’t laid by anyone that impressive and so feeling no need to keep it intact.”
How to Notice Your Own Evolution
“You can’t get rid of the fog, and you can’t always keep it thin, but you can get better at noticing when it’s thick and develop effective strategies for thinning it out whenever you consciously focus on it. If you’re evolving successfully, as you get older, you should be spending more and more time on Step 2 and less and less on Step 1.”
From a really wonderful read about religion for the non religious.
Lewis Lapham on the Uses of Money
“Let men employ money as energy made by mortal men for the use of mortal men—as the active and productive wealth underwriting Hamilton’s projections of the public good, in the form of the Medici loans floating the speculation of the Renaissance—and money enlarges the sum of man’s humanity to man.”
Lewis Lapham emphasis added
From the same article:
“Andrew Carnegie would have seconded Wharton’s motion. The builders of America’s nineteenth-century industrial colossus, among them John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan, tended to take money less seriously than did their heirs and publicists. As often as not, they were more interested in something else—an idea or a contraption or a problem in geography. Money was a secondary consequence, accumulating in the hall with the flowers, the dachshunds, and the art collection. ‘The amassing of wealth,’ Carnegie regarded as ‘one of the worst species of idolatry.’”
Emerson on New Books for New Generations
“Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.”
Emerson on “Bibliomaniacs” and the Limitation of Books
“I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.”
Elon Musk on What a Company is
“I don’t know what a business is. All a company is is a bunch of people together to create a product or service. There’s no such thing as a business, just pursuit of a goal—a group of people pursuing a goal.”
Holy crap this series from Wait but Why was amazing to read.
Miles Davis on Finding Your Voice
“Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.”
Scherezade Siobhan on How to Break
“Break often – not like porcelain, but like waves.”
Maya Angelou on Success
“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”