People are always telling me their life stories and they always tell me they have done so because I am a good listener. In fact I am a terrible listener, I don’t listen to a word: what I am doing is looking like I am listening while concentrating all my energy on not listening, on finding some refuge beyond what is being said. It is easy to be a good listener in America: all you have to do is not interrupt and it is easy not to interrupt when you are not paying attention.
– Geoff Dyer
I have always thought that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes, and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he first forms a good plan, and, cutting off all amusements or other employments that would divert his attention, make the execution of that same plan his sole study and business.
– Benjamin Franklin
“Steve was among the greatest of American innovators — brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.”
– Barack Obama
In 1999, I think right after the iMac came out in a range of colors, I happened to sit in on an internal meeting at Apple, one in a large theater filled with employees. Steve Jobs came out and the whole theater burst into applause, and the clapping went on for minutes, with people standing and cheering. The success of the iMac was just becoming evident – the first act of Steve’s big return, leading from there to what Apple is now.
Steve let the applause go on for a little bit, then, with much effort, settled down the crowd. When things got quiet, the first thing he said was: “That’s an awful lot of applause considering that you guys are the ones who do all the work.”
“All the excitement about all things new obscures the fact that most new ideas are bad and most old ideas are good. It’s a Darwinian principle: the death rate of new products and companies is dramatically higher than of old ones.”
– Robert Sutton:
“First and foremost, a start-up puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced. You flip rapidly from day-to-day – one where you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again. Over and over and over. And I’m talking about what happens to stable entrepreneurs. There is so much uncertainty and so much risk around practically everything you are doing. The level of stress that you’re under generally will magnify things to incredible highs and unbelievable lows at whiplash speed and huge magnitude. Sound like fun?”
– Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape
“The year is going, let him go; ring out the false, ring in the true.”
– Alfred Lord Tennyson
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
When I was a junior in high school, AP US History and jazz band were held at the same time. As a result, I can play a mean bebop line, but I have a totally remedial understanding of US history.
Of course, as an avid devourer of information, I’ve filled in random patches along the way – a book here, a documentary there, hours of wikipedia trolling in between.
Often enough, my best source of information is to trace backwards from a quote. Find something interesting said, and odds are the person who said it was interesting too. Which is why, in the wake of yesterday’s post, I got curious about George Jean Nathan.
A renowned theater critic, and an eminently quotable one, he also put forth perhaps the best set of life instruction I’ve yet come across:
My code of life and conduct is simply this: work hard, play to the allowable limit, disregard equally the good and bad opinion of others, never do a friend a dirty trick, eat and drink what you feel like when you feel like, never grow indignant over anything, trust to tobacco for calm and serenity, bathe twice a day . . . learn to play at least one musical instrument and then play it only in private, never allow one’s self even a passing thought of death, never contradict anyone or seek to prove anything to anyone unless one gets paid for it in cold, hard coin, live the moment to the utmost of its possibilities, treat one’s enemies with polite inconsideration, avoid persons who are chronically in need, and be satisfied with life always but never with one’s self.
“Show business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long dark plastic hallway where thieves, pimps and whores run free and most good or weak men die like dogs! There’s also a negative side.”
– Hunter S. Thompson