Stuff About Things #27

"If people knew how hard I worked to achieve my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful after all."
     — Michelangelo

"Success at anything will always come down to this: focus and effort, and we control both."
     — Dwayne Johnson

"Doubt kills more dreams that failure ever will."
     — Suzy Kassem

"The difference between a pebble and a mountain lies in whom you ask to move it."
     — Marcus Buckingham

"Be at war with your vices."
     — Ben Franklin

"Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body."
     — Seneca

"People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.... Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.... People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision.... Learn to say 'no' to the good so you can say 'yes' to the best.... A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit."
     — John C. Maxwell

"It occurred to Yancy that, in the time they'd known each other, he hadn't once seen her look at her cell phone. She never texted, tweeted, Facebooked, Instagrammed, or posted a single picture when they were together. He found this behavior alluring."
     — Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen

"Connectivity is one of the great blessings of the internet era, and it makes extraordinary things possible. But constant connectivity can be a curse, encouraging the lesser angels of our nature. None of the nine Muses of classical times bore the names Impatience or Distraction."
     — Will Schwalbe

"Simple can understand complicated but complicated cannot understand simple."
     — Shambhala Buddhist saying 

"Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things."
     ― Isaac Newton

"Clothing is a language, a visual language. And it's one you can learn and develop and use to express yourself ."
     — Mark Cho

"Stress, anxiety, and depression are caused when we are living to please others."
     — Paulo Coelho

"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted."
     — Aldous Huxley

"Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude... nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude."
     — Thomas Jefferson

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers."
     — Thomas Jefferson

"All our previous positions are now exposed as absurd. But people don't draw the obvious conclusion..."
     — Terence McKenna

"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real."
     — Niels Bohr, physicist 

"What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach inkblot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself."
     — Lewis Mumford

"Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death."
     — Wernher von Braun

"Men are born soft and supple; dead they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead they brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail."
     — Lao Tzu

"The amount of revenue lost (by the TV and film industry) to piracy has skyrocketed from US$6.7 billion in 2010 to nearly US$31.8 billion in 2016. The figure will hit nearly US$52 billion in 2022. These stats do not include sports or pay TV, making the numbers all the more shocking."
     — Digital TV Research Ltd

"Kim Libreri, who spent years in the film industry working on special effects... predicts that by 2022 graphics will be so advanced that they will be indistinguishable from reality." (This is not good news for Hollywood and movie stars.)
     — Vanity Fair magazine

"I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. I’m still learning how to write. I don’t know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoyevsky, from Balzac."
     — James Baldwin

"I hope we're not that soft. I hope we can hear comments or read comments and not get offended by things. It's a professional environment; it's not a personal environment. The things I'm saying, I don't have some vendetta against any player. I care about winning, No. 1, and I'm going to say and do the things that I feel like can advance us. It's going to be tough at some points. It's not a popularity contest all the time. Obviously, as a human, you like being liked and appreciated, but I'm trying to win games because that's my job. Again, I don't feel like when you make a statement like that (criticizing the team's effort in practice) that there needs to be some big response or feelings hurt or offense that somebody takes with it. If they do, they're taking it the wrong way because this is a professional environment. Like I said, I'm doing things that I feel like are in the best interest of the team from a leadership standpoint, and if no one else is going to stand up and criticize a bad practice, then maybe I need to be the one to do it. So I did it.... You get to this league, and to stick around, you've got to be self-motivated. So as a leader, you try to inspire, but the motivation to change and to improve has got to come from within."
     — Aaron Rodgers

"Identify issues and beliefs (about yourself) and self-talk make a big difference. A lot of people believe they just can't do certain things, like remember names. A lot of people say, 'Oh, I have a bad memory.' Right? They're always like 'I have memory' or 'I have focus' or 'I don't have focus' or 'I have creativity' or 'I don't have creativity.' I want you to scrap that. Creativity is not something you have, it's something you do. Focus is not something you have, focus is something you do, energy is not something you have or don't have, it's something you do. Memory is not something you have, it's something you do. And what's the benefit of turning it into a do, as opposed to something you have? You have control over it, because you can put it into a process. It becomes a strategy. Because there's a strategy for remembering names. There's a strategy for having focus. It's a verb, not a noun."
     — Jim Kwik

"Love is a verb.... Love is not a feeling, it is behavior, it is how a person acts..."
     — Oprah

"Nobody loves free stuff more than rich people."
     — Crazy Rich Asians

On Motherhood

"It’s hard to describe the joy of motherhood. It isn’t as easily Instagrammable as a life (without kids) of endless holidays, blue skies, cocktails and local pastries on cobbled streets in faraway lands, so it doesn’t necessarily register in surveys or even in casual conversation. It isn’t a joy that’s as easily shared with the world or on social media. In restaurants when my daughter, in her high chair with her two and a half teeth, scrunches up her face, I look around to see if everyone has noticed and been charmed. Nobody has (except for the occasional old lady) and I get annoyed, even though I myself constantly ignore all other babies in my vicinity. The joy and fun of motherhood are so deeply personal, so intimate and so selfish, there’s no way to explain it to the world, particularly our current social media heavy world. Jennifer Senior, author of All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, says in an interview that the 'feeling when your kid laughs or when your kid says something that’s so totally, like, amazingly weird, or insightful, or sensitive – it’s not the same as like getting a good laugh out of watching a movie or having a really nice time with a friend. It’s just like a different category of experience.' It is a different category – one that can’t compare to your life before you had the child because no point of reference is the same after you’ve had the child." 
     — Diksha Basu, from her article Rebranding Motherhood in The New York Times

On Attitude

When I was a kid, I remember being overly-competitive about certain things, and also bent to the negative; a little misfortune, during any contest, immediately convinced me that my team, my score, my effort, my mission was doomed. I worried and fretted. I pouted. I gave up. My attitude sucked. (Not always! but sometimes.) A loss at a board game was devastating. Not winning the most trivial, skill-less competition could ruin my day. Eventually, I learned the wisdom below. Attitude dictates mood, mindset, energy, personality, perspective, everything. Figuratively, it's an ever-present lens in life; we see everything through it. It's the loudest garment we wear; it's a sign around our necks. It's the horse we're riding whether we realize it or not. It's not a reaction to some game, it is the game. Okay, my metaphors are silly but my point – for M 'n' m – is not: attitude is powerful. Around M 'n' m, I try to be positive, grateful, optimistic, energetic. Of course, it's not easy; I've whined and limped and dragged myself through many-a-day, but M 'n' m know it's what I strive for, it's how I try to live life, and it's what I wish for them: when it comes to attitude, try not to suck!

"Attitude is everything." ... "Life is an attitude, have a good one." ... "A bad attitude is like a flat tire, if you don't change it, you won't go very far."

"The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That's the day we truly grow up."
     — John C. Maxwell

"Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens."
     — Khalil Gibran

"The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes."
     — William James

"The last of the human freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances."
     —Victor E. Frankl 

"People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude."
     — John C. Maxwell

"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
     — Albert Einstein

"The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way.... The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you... we are in charge of our attitude."
     — Charles R. Swindoll

"Live life as if everything is rigged in your favor."
     — Rumi

"If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished?"
     — Rumi

Stuff About Things #26

"The question is not what a man can scorn, or disparage, or find fault with, but what he can love, and value, and appreciate."
     — John Ruskin

"I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving."
     — Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.... We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.... The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.... Youth is wasted on the young.... I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.... People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.... A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."
     — George Bernard Shaw

"May you live all the days of your life."
     — Jonathan Swift

"When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.... It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.... Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own."
     — Jonathan Swift

"The corporate system is set up to favor those with steel elbows."
     — Elena Herdieckerhoff

"You're on earth. There's no cure for that."
     — Samuel Beckett

"I have no yesterdays, time took them away; tomorrow may not be, but I have today."
     — Pearl Yeadon McGinnis

"I have four things to learn in life: to think clearly without hurry or confusion; to love everybody sincerely; to act in everything with the highest motives; to trust in God unhesitatingly."
     — Helen Keller

"I said, 'Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel Catch-22 has earned in its entire history?' And Joe said, 'I’ve got something he'll never have.' And I said, 'What on earth could that be, Joe?' And Joe said, “Enough.'"

     — Kurt Vonnegut, recalling a conversation he had with Joseph Heller at a party hosted by a billionaire

"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.... True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.... A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.... Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward."

     — Kurt Vonnegut

 

"Every writer I know has trouble writing."
     — Joseph Heller

"Humans will always choose what they understand over what they do not."
     — Dr. Robert Ford, fictional character in Westworld

"School's a piece of cake compared to life, man."
     — Papa Mike

"We need dark in order to show light."
     — Bob Ross, painter, creator of The Joy of Painting

"Of course I'm not Shakespeare or Hegel; but I have written works that I've polished as carefully as I could, and some have been failures, surely, but others less so, while still others have been successes. And that's enough."
     — Jean-Paul Sartre

"Sartre had taught me to think in the present as if yesterday's thoughts did not count: they would come back if they were still needed."
     — Benny Levy

"(Joaquin Phoenix and I) were talking on the first day about the fact I had never done a serious scene in a movie, and he asked, 'Well, are you nervous?' I said, 'Yeah, I don't know what I'm doing!' And he said, 'Do you think that any of us ever know what we're doing?' He may have just been saying that to make me feel better, but if he was saying it in earnest, it's kind of a clue as to why he's so good. If someone really is approaching their work as though it's the first time they've ever done it, then that is an incredible sort of openness and lack of complacency. It's such an alive place to be working from."
     — Joanna Newsom

"Everybody treats me like an old man. I laugh about it. Why? Because an old man never feels like an old man. The attitude of other people makes me understand what old age means to the person who looks at it from outside, but I don't feel my old age. So to be old doesn't in itself teach my anything. What does teach me something is the attitude of other people toward me. In other words, the fact that for others I am old is to be profoundly old. Old age is a reality that is mine but that others feel..."
     — Jean-Paul Sartre, 1980 (so he was 75 years old)

"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm."
     — Aldous Huxley

"Then (my father) told my sister Mary and me that he was going to prepare us to fight the battle of life by giving us an education, which he and our mother had not had."
     — Anson Mills

"My family shaped me almost entirely. I'm my mother's son, and she had a vision of what I should be capable of. She provided the means to nurture whatever it was that would become my actualized self. My grandfather was the closest thing I had to a father growing up; he was enormously inspirational. He is in some ways a small-town, country-days man - a touch-stone of masculinity and humor and selflessness. He was all man to me. There was a deeper level of discovery that came the moment my son's head crowned at birth. My children have taught me as much as I've tried to teach them. My daughter, particularly, has taught me a new level of appreciation for what it is to be female, what it is to be a woman, and about my relationship to femininity and women."
     — Jeffrey Wright, actor

"Each person has something he can do easily and can't imagine why everybody else has so much trouble doing it."
     — Kurt Vonnegut

"... it is sometimes wise courageously to defy and disobey injurious and useless commands. Such actions often injure the reputation of the reformer for a time, but eventually they will distinguish him above the larger number of his fellows..."
     — Anson Mills

"Few things break us out of our routines and awaken us to the living substance of happiness more powerfully than travel."
     — Maria Popova

Tiger Woods may be a lot of things...

... but two of them I can relate to, at least a little: he's my age and he's a father. Last week, he said this about his two kids – a daughter and a son – being with him during his final round at the British Open:

"In team sports you can hide, in individual sports you cannot. You're exposed. They saw their dad get into contention and end up leading the tournament. Then end up losing the tournament. But I tried until the very end. They saw me make that birdie on the par 5, and they saw I stuffed that shot on 18 even though that yahoo was yelling at me on the tee shot. They saw how much I was grinding. They said, 'Well, you weren't going to win.' I said, 'I know I wasn't going to win, but that doesn't stop me from grinding.' That is a teachable moment because they were there in the present, in person. Sometimes you can't always see that on TV."