Monday Musings #007: 88 Small Pieces of Wisdom from My Notes App

Someone smart told me one time to keep an ongoing note in my phone of quotes from books, ideas from people, or fractions of wisdom from brilliant people to browse for inspiration or deep thinking. 

It was one of my favorite pieces of advice I've gotten, and I am religious about adding to it. I am not, however, religious about attributing the source. So please know that none of these are my original thoughts, and I do not take credit for them. 

Another piece of advice I've gotten is that it's hard to fully remember or grasp something until you've written it a few times. So in the interest of sharing some beautiful words, and revisiting the thoughts myself, here are the 96 bullet points in my notes app. I've bolded a bunch of my favorites. 

1. The best answers always arise out of the problem itself
2. You want to keep a balance between healthy skepticism of your reason for living and a solar confidence in your ability to come up with a fantastic idea every time you sit down to work 
3. Your clients are going to trust you more if you can talk to them about their industry in their terms. They'll quickly find you boring or irrelevant if all you can speak about is your perspective. There are no shortcuts. Know the client. Know the product. Know the market. 
4. Value is a function of scarcity, and in today's world, authenticity is a scarce commodity. 
5. Hard writing makes for easy reading. 
6. Love, honor, and obey your hunches.
7. The best ideas are truths brought to light in fresh, new ways. 
8. The things about yourself you fear are the most personal are also the most universal.
9. In my view, the amateur does not love the game enough. If he did, he would not pursue it as a sideline, distinct from his "real" vocation.
10. I'm keenly aware of the principle of priority, which states a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important and b) you must do what's important first. 
11. Presence without resistance: you are now free to turn to the question, "what do we want to do from here?" Then all sorts of pathways begin to appear. 
12. It is important to realize that good and bad are categories we impose on the world - they are not of the world itself. 
13. Under a vision, goals are treated as markers thrown out ahead to define the territory. If you miss the mark, neither you nor the vision is compromised.
14. Win by being more ordinary, more standard, and cheaper. Or, win by being faster, more remarkable, and more human. 
15. Now, the only way to grow is to stand out, to create something worth talking about, to treat people with respect and to have them spread the word. 
16. The basic rule of negotiation is to know what you want, what you need to walk away with in order to be whole.
17. Luck plays a big role. Yes, I'd like to publicly acknowledge the power of luck. Athletes get lucky, poets get lucky, businesses get lucky. Hard work is critical, a good team is essential, brains and determination are invaluable, but luck may decide the outcome. Some people might not call it luck. They might call it Tao, or Logos, or Jnana, or Dharma. Or spirit. Or god. - Phil Knight, Shoe Dog
18. Things cannot touch the mind; they are external and inert; anxieties can only come from your internal judgment. The universe is change; life is judgment.
19. Only when we admit what we don't know can we ever hope to learn it. 
20. Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. 
21. You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged. 
22. When we are honest, people know it.
23. To my mind, randomness is not just inevitable, it is part of the beauty of life. - Ed Catmull
24. Lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove. She will never sit down on a hot stove again, and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore. Her hindsight distorts her view. The past should be our teacher, not our master. 
25. And in freedom, most people find sin. 
26. Always make a note of the first word that goes through your head when you see something new. 
27. If we free ourselves from the burden of being completely original, we can embrace influence rather than running away from it. 
28. Tears are not a sad or happy thing. They mean you care. 
29. The greatest fault of humankind belongs to those who think their view of what's real is the only truth. - Flea
30. Gatherings crackle and flourish when real thought goes into them, and when a host has the curiosity, willingness, and generosity of spirit to try. 
31. The art of gathering begins with purpose: when should we gather? and why? 
32. Specificity sharpens gatherings because people can see themselves in it 
33. It's the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are. 
34. An essential step of along the path of gathering better is making peace with the necessity and virtue of using your power. 
35. The proper use of rules can help you get so much more out of a gathering because it can temporarily help change behavior. 
36. What should I write? And the standard answer is, "write what you know." This advice always leads to terrible stories in which nothing interesting happens. Don't write what you know. Write what you like. 
37. You need to find a way to bring your body into your work. Get moving. It prompts better thinking. 
38. The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life. 
39. Once we have made up our minds about an issue, stubborn consistency allows us a very appealing luxury; we really don't have to think hard about the issue anymore. 
40. We accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures. 
41. It's often what an artist chooses to leave out that makes the art interesting. 
42. We are most influenced by the action of others like us.
43. Information from a recognized authority can provide us a valuable shortcut for deciding how to act in a situation. 
44. Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure. 
45. The most powerful advantage of money is the ability to think of things besides money. 
46. A poorly written sentence is a poorly conceived idea.
47. The past was a ghost, insubstantial, unaffecting. Only the future had weight. 
48. The ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self create. 
49. Education is the ability to meet life's situations. 
50. The truth is that almost all the people you meet feel themselves superior to you in some way, and a sure way to their hearts is to let them realize that you sincerely recognize their importance. 
51. The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.
52. You measure the size of a person by what makes them angry. 
53. Success in dealing with people depends on a sympathetic grasp of the other person's viewpoint.
54. Merely stating a truth isn't enough [in marketing]. The truth has to be made vivid, interesting, dramatic. 
55. At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves. 
56. Sometimes we want to be told "I need you" more than we do "I love you" because we want to feel that our lives have a purpose. So be brave and say honestly "I need you."
57. Rather than trying to improve someone, just be a mirror, reflecting them without judgment. If you want them to improve, you stop seeing them as they are. Instead, you see only their shortcomings, measured against your own subjective standards. 
58. Climate change appears to be not merely one challenge among many... but the all encompassing stage in which all our challenges will be met - a whole sphere that contains all of the world's future problems and all of its possible solutions. 
59. We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.
60. Eating organic is nice, in other words, but if your goal is to save the climate your vote is much more important. Politics is a moral multiplier. 
61. The running boy is inside every man, no matter how old he gets. 
62. We're so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, we're involved in trillions of little acts to just keep going. So we don't get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing? You need someone to probe you in that direction.
63. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. 
64. All this emphasis on youth - I don't buy it. Listen, I know what a misery being young can be, so don't tell me it's so great.
65. Age is not just decay, you know. It's growth. 
66. If you're trying to show off for people at the top, forget it. They will look down at you anyhow. And if you're trying to show off for people at the bottom, forget it. They will only envy you. 
67. Everyone is in such a hurry. People haven't found meaning in their lives so they're running all the time looking for it. They think the next car, the next house, the next job. Then they find those things are empty too and they keep running. 
68. After all these months, lying there, unable to move a leg or foot, how could he find perfection in such an average day? Then I realized this was the whole point.
69. Nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth. 
70. I hate it when people call themselves entrepreneurs when what they're really trying to do is launch a startup then sell or go public so they can cash in and move on. They're unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company. 
71. A lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and add something to the flow. 
72. The power of words. They weaseled under door cracks and through keyholes. They hooked into individuals and wormed through generations. 
73. Unexceptional but steady and solid was not the worst thing one could be. 
74. He's forgotten more than I will ever know about his business.
75. They'd managed to expand their lifestyle to fit the salaries they were bringing in, and it's really difficult to wind that back. 
76. In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored. 
77. Man constantly makes his choice concerning the mass of present potentialities; which of these will be condemned to nonbeing and which will be actualized? Which choice will be made an actuality, once and forever, an immortal footprint in the sands of time? At any moment, man must decide, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of his existence? 
78. Fear brings about that which one is afraid of, and that hyper intention makes impossible what one wishes. 
79. What he becomes - within the limits of endowment and environment - he has made out of himself.
80. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.
81. There is ecstasy in paying attention.
82. What these people think about me is none of my business.
83. Most of us are raised to be somebodies and what a no-win game that is to buy into, because while you may turn out to be much more somebody than somebody else, a lot of other people are going to be a lot more somebody than you. And you are going to drive yourself crazy. 
84. Discipline bring liberation
85. And for so long I have wante dto escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. - Ta-Nehisi Coates
86. Good intention is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream - Ta-Nehisi Coates
87. I've never done anything alone.
88. Who makes the rules of your time? You do.