“quotes”

Let us imagine that intelligence had resided, not in mankind, but in some vast solitary and isolated jelly-fish, buried deep in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. It would have no experience of individual objects, only with the surrounding water. Motion, temperature and pressure would provide its basic sensory data. In such a pure continuum the discrete would not arise and there would be nothing to count.

PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH
or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT.

Early in my career I wanted to be professional, that was my complete aspiration in my early life because professionals seemed to know everything – not to mention they got paid for it. Later I discovered after working for a while that professionalism itself was a limitation. After all, what professionalism means in most cases is diminishing risks. So if you want to get your car fixed you go to a mechanic who knows how to deal with transmission problems in the same way each time. I suppose if you needed brain surgery you wouldn’t want the doctor to fool around and invent a new way of connecting your nerve endings. Please do it in the way that has worked in the past.
Unfortunately in our field, in the so-called creative – I hate that word because it is misused so often. I also hate the fact that it is used as a noun. Can you imagine calling someone a creative? Anyhow, when you are doing something in a recurring way to diminish risk or doing it in the same way as you have done it before, it is clear why professionalism is not enough. After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal.

..one of the key points in the science of happiness is that happiness and unhappiness are not endpoints  of a single continuum. The Freudian model is really one continuum that, as you get less miserable,  you get happier. And that isn’t true. When you get less miserable, you get less miserable. And that happiness is a whole other end of the equation.

We’ve felt the wind blow in our sails. We’ve seen the polls prior to the election. But to stand here, today, and see the figures coming up on that screen… What do you want me to say? I’ll say anything.

It’s like downloading spyware onto your computer, but the government is the spy.

[Having to live in Canada so his spouse can work,] He misses interaction with colleagues. It hinders efficiency, slows work. He is physically drained from travel. He is frustrated that he cannot put down roots in America, and maybe start his own company, because he cannot leave Google, his visa sponsor.

He says he feels, on one hand, great gratitude that America gave him extraordinary opportunity. But he says he fulfilled his side of the bargain by striving and succeeding. [He became a multimillionaire with Google stock.] “Dude, I love this country,” he said.

But he doesn’t feel loved back: “My devotion is unrequited.”

Visions of Julia filled my head. I wanted to know what she was doing every second of the day; I wanted her to be happy, I wanted her to be safe. Why? Because I’d chosen her. But … why had I felt compelled to choose anyone? Because in the end, the one thing that most of the donors must have had in common was the fact that they’d desired, and cared about, one person above all others. Why? That came down to evolution. You could no more help and protect everyone in sight than you could fuck them, and a judicious combination of the two had obviously proved effective at passing down genes. So my emotions had the same ancestry as everyone else’s; what more could I ask?

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Chinese [writing] does deserve its reputation for heartbreaking difficulty. Those who undertake to study the language for any other reason than the sheer joy of it will always be frustrated by the abysmal ratio of effort to effect. Those who are actually attracted to the language precisely because of its daunting complexity and difficulty will never be disappointed. Whatever the reason they started, every single person who has undertaken to study Chinese sooner or later asks themselves ”Why in the world am I doing this?” Those who can still remember their original goals will wisely abandon the attempt then and there, since nothing could be worth all that tedious struggle. Those who merely say “I’ve come this far—I can’t stop now” will have some chance of succeeding, since they have the kind of mindless doggedness and lack of sensible overall perspective that it takes.

There is no such thing as an inauthentic experience. Why? ‘Cause the experience happens inside of us, it’s our reaction to the events that are staged in front of us. So as long as we’re in any sense authentic human beings then every experience we have is authentic. Now there may be more or less natural or artificial stimuli for the experience but even that is a matter of degree, not kind.

And there is no such thing as a 100% natural experience. Even if you go for a walk in the proverbial woods. There’s a company that manufactured the car the delivered you to the edge of the woods. There’s a company that manufactured the shoes that you have to protect yourself from the ground of the woods. There’s a company who provides the cell phone service you have in case you get lost in the woods. All of those are man-made, artificiality brought into the woods. By you, and by the very nature of being there.
The number one thing to do when it comes to being what you say you are is to provide places for people to experience who you are.. It’s not advertising, does it? That’s why you have companies like Starbucks, right? That doesn’t advertise at all. They say ’You want to know who we are, you have to come experience us’.

And think about the economic value they have provided by that experience, right? Coffee at it’s core is, what? It’s beans, right, it’s coffee beans. You know how much coffee is worth when treated as a commodity, as a bean? 2 or 3 cents per cup, that’s what coffee is worth. But grind it, roast it, package it and put in a grocery shop shelf and now it will cost 5, 10, 15 cents when you treat it as a good. Take that same good and perform the service of actually brewing it for a customer in a corner diner, a bodega, a kiosk somewhere you get 50 cents maybe a buck per cup of coffee. But surround the brewing of that coffee with the ambiance of Starbucks, with the authentic [seating? cedar!] that goes inside of there and now, because of that authentic experience, you can charge 3 to 4, 5 dollars for a cup of coffe.