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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a3aebb5 | IN THINKING ABOUT this chapter and about the limits of our perception, a familiar, oft-repeated phrase kept popping into my head: "Hindsight is 20-20." When we hear it, we normally just nod in agreement--yes, of course--accepting that we can look back on what happened, see it with total clarity, learn from it, and draw the right conclusions. The problem is, the phrase is dead wrong. Hindsight is not 20-20. Not even close. Our view of the pa.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| ba73df9 | Change and uncertainty are part of life. Our job is not to resist them but to build the capability to recover when unexpected events occur. If you don't always try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 767d360 | Engaging with exceptionally hard problems forces us to think differently. | Ed Catmull | ||
| f49b205 | Countless times, I remember watching him toss ideas--pretty far-out ideas--into the air, just to see how they played. And if they didn't play well, he would move on. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 37a0d45 | While the allure of safety and predictability is strong, achieving true balance means engaging in activities whose outcomes and payoffs are not yet apparent. The most creative people are willing to work in the shadow of uncertainty. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 44f17d5 | Left to their own devices, most people don't want to fail. But Andrew Stanton isn't most people. As I've mentioned, he's known around Pixar for repeating the phrases "fail early and fail fast" and "be wrong as fast as you can." He thinks of failure like learning to ride a bike; it isn't conceivable that you would learn to do this without making mistakes--without toppling over a few times. "Get a bike that's as low to the ground as you can f.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| e1903f7 | FOR MOST OF us, failure comes with baggage--a lot of baggage--that I believe is traced directly back to our days in school. From a very early age, the message is drilled into our heads: Failure is bad; failure means you didn't study or prepare; failure means you slacked off or--worse!--aren't smart enough to begin with. Thus, failure is something to be ashamed of. This perception lives on long into adulthood, even in people who have learned.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| c1e037c | Ideas, though, are not singular. They are forged through tens of thousands of decisions, often made by dozens of people. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 46560d7 | The problem is, the phrase is dead wrong. Hindsight is not 20-20. Not even close. Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future. While we know more about a past event than a future one, our understanding of the factors that shaped it is severely limited. Not only that, because we think we see what happened clearly--hindsight being 20-20 and all--we often aren't open to knowing more. "We should be careful to ge.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 927182d | Paying attention to the present moment without letting your thoughts and ideas about the past and the future get in the way is essential. Why? Because it makes room for the views of others. It allows us to begin to trust them--and, more important, to hear them. It makes us willing to experiment, and it makes it safe to try something that may fail. It encourages us to work on our awareness, trying to set up our own feedback loop in which pay.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| df415e3 | Likewise, we "trusted the process," but the process didn't save Toy Story 2 either. "Trust the Process" had morphed into "Assume that the Process Will Fix Things for Us." It gave us solace, which we felt we needed. But it also coaxed us into letting down our guard and, in the end, made us passive. Even worse, it made us sloppy. Once this became clear to me, I began telling people that the phrase was meaningless. I told our staff that it had.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| dff185e | if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 5043278 | any eye at all practiced in the signs of a frontier warfare, might easily have traced all those unerring evidences of the ruthless results which attends an Indian vengeance. Still, the sun rose on the Lenape a nation of mourners. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 0e7dc46 | It's wisest always to be so clad that our friends need not ask us for our names. | dress fashion sartorial style style-guides | James Fenimore Cooper | |
| 0d7f76c | Walking about streets, going to church of Sundays, and hearing sermons, never yet made a man of a human being. Send the boy out upon the broad ocean, if you wish to open his eyes, and let him look upon foreign nations, or what I call the face of nature, if you wish him to understand his own character. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| a67a549 | Washington, who, after uselessly admonishing the European general of the danger into which he was heedlessly running, saved the remnants of the British army, on this occasion, by his decision and courage. The reputation earned by Washington in this battle was the principal cause of his being selected to command the American armies at a later day. It is a circumstance worthy of observation, that while all A.. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 6778ff7 | I want no thunder or lightning to remind me of my God, nor am I as apt to bethink on most of all His goodness in trouble and tribulations as on a calm, solemn, quiet day in a forest, when His voice is heard in the creaking of a dead branch or in the song of a bird, as much in my ears at least as it is ever heard in uproar and gales. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 4ab2d38 | Judith:"And where, then, is your sweetheart, Deerslayer?" Deerslayer: "She's in the forest, Judith - hanging from the boughs of the trees, in a soft rain - in the dew on the open grass - the clouds that float about in the blue heavens - the birds that sing in the woods - the sweet springs where I slake my thirst - and in all the other glorious gifts that come from God's Providence!" | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 70a0045 | I care not for your envy, or your hypocrisy, or even for your human nature. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 4668c53 | On the human imagination events produce the effects of time. Thus he who has travelled far and seen much is apt to fancy that he has lived long; and the history that most abounds in important incidents soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity. In no other way can we account for the venerable air that is already gathering around American annals. When the mind reverts to the earliest days of colonial history, the period seems remote and obscur.. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 9af2300 | that all-seeing eye which reads the heart, could not fail to discriminate between the living and the dead, and the gentle soul of the unfortunate girl was already far removed beyond the errors, or deceptions, of any human ritual. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| a0cca7a | Say to these kind and gentle females, that a heart-broken and failing man returns them his thanks. Tell them, that the Being we all worship, under different names, will be mindful of their charity; and that the time shall not be distant when we may assemble around His throne without distinction of sex, or rank, or color." The" | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 6b971d5 | In short, the magnifying influence of fear began to set at naught the calculations of reason, and to render those who should have remembered their manhood, the slaves of the basest passions. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| fcc7ba9 | If a man believed all that other people choose to say in their own favor, he might get an oversized opinion of them, and an udersized opinion of himself. | pride self-reliance | James Fenimore Cooper | |
| e2b6a86 | But bankers used to be subjected to Hammurabi's rule. The tradition in Catalonia was to behead bankers in front of their own banks | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 4026371 | I then completely gave up reading newspapers and watching television, which freed up a considerable amount of time (say one hour or more a day, enough time to read more than a hundred additional books per year, which, after a couple of decades, starts mounting). | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9747127 | We practitioners and quants aren't too fazed by remarks on the part of academics--it would be like prostitutes listening to technical commentary by nuns. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 81f7948 | While in the past people of rank or status were those and only those who took risks, who had the downside for their actions, and heroes were those who did so for the sake of others, today the exact reverse is taking place. We are witnessing the rise of a new class of inverse heroes, that is, bureaucrats, bankers, Davos-attending members of the I.A.N.D. (International Association of Name Droppers), and academics with too much power and no re.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 30cdd93 | English "manners" were imposed on the middle class as a way of domesticating them, along with instilling in them the fear of breaking rules and violating social norms." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 983d9b5 | Having an assistant (except for the strictly necessary) removes your soul from the game. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f5e4a45 | the cycles of risk taking in the economy as following a pattern: stability and absence of crises encourage risk taking, complacency, and lowered awareness of the possibility of problems. Then | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1ce38f2 | He defaults to thinking that what he doesn't see is not there, or what he does not understand does not exist. At the core, he tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| d7d30b8 | Rank beliefs not by their plausibility but by how much harm they might cause | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 00eefa4 | One general, Fabius Maximus was nicknamed Cunctator, "the Procrastinator." He drove Hannibal, who had an obvious military superiority, crazy by avoiding and delaying engagement." -- | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 2335d1b | The very idea of exercise is to gain from antifragility to workout stressors--as we saw, all kinds of exercise are just exploitations of convexity effects. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| b38b5f6 | we discussed this dire problem with education and illusions of academic contribution, with Ivy League universities becoming in the eyes of the new Asian and U.S. upper class a status luxury good. Harvard is like a Vuitton bag or a Cartier watch. It is a huge drag on the middle-class parents who have been plowing an increased share of their savings into these institutions, transferring their money to administrators, real estate developers, p.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 38e142e | We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don't seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7213eda | I believe that forcing researchers to eat their own cooking whenever possible solves a serious problem in science. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 5fb6d45 | we tend to think that innovation comes from bureaucratic funding, through planning, or by putting people through a Harvard Business School class by one Highly Decorated Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (who never innovated anything) or hiring a consultant (who never innovated anything). This is a fallacy--note for now the disproportionate contribution of uneducated technicians and entrepreneurs to various technological leaps, fr.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| d3ea757 | Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system. Indeed, confusing people a little bit is beneficial--it is good for you and good for them. For an application of the point in daily life, imagine someone extremely punctual and predictable who comes home at exactly six o'clock every day for fifteen years. You can use his arrival to set your watch. The fellow will cause his family anxiety if he is barely a few minutes late. Someone with a sligh.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9062a1b | One Thousand And One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 5ae55c9 | members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 4df4836 | don't understand?" is, simply, work on the undesirable states of f(x). It is often easier to modify f(x) than to get better knowledge of x. (In other words, robustification rather than forecasting Black Swans.) Example: If I buy an insurance on" | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| aa57ae2 | We can simplify the relationships between fragility, errors, and antifragility as follows. When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as possible--for deviations are more harmful than helpful. This is why the fragile needs to be very predictive in its approach, and, conversely, predictive systems cause fragility. When you want deviations, and you don't care about the possible disp.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb |