Category: Notes

Friction makes everything harder, both the good we can do, but also the unimaginably terrible. In our zeal to reduce friction and our eagerness to celebrate the good, we ought not lose sight of the potential bad.

– Link

Evolutionary change to people is always taking place, but the pace of human evolutionary change is measured in thousands of years. Human cultures change somewhat more rapidly over periods measured in decades or centuries. Microcultures, such as the way by which teenagers differ from adults, can change in a generation. What this means is that although technology is continually introducing new means of doing things, people are resistant to changes in the way they do things.

– Don Norman

Time is volatility. Education, in the sense of the formation of character, personality, and acquisition of true knowledge, likes disorder; label-driven education and educators abhor disorder. Some things break because of error, others don’t. Some theories fall apart, not others. Innovation is precisely something that gains from uncertainty: and some people sit around waiting for uncertainty and using it as raw material, just like our ancestral hunters.

– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

One of the reasons stupid, or pigheaded people do well, and when they do well they do really well, is because they are ignoring all the category norms everybody else thinks are important and they’re emphasizing something completely different.

– Rory Sutherland

The expectations market is about speculation. The real market is about investing. The stock market, then, is a giant distraction to the business of investing.

– John Bogle

Changes are not permanent, but change is.

-Link

Risk means more things can happen than will happen.

– Elroy Dimson

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

– Leonardo da Vinci

A person understands himself not through thoughts, but with actions. It is only through making an effort that a person will understand his worth.

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe