Caterina Fake:

So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be.

John Maynard Keynes:

We have reached the third degree, where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.

Paul Graham:

Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get.

Richard Holbrooke:

In Washington smart men tend to put down people whom they regard as less smart with little regard for the substance of those people's views. The way the government works, speed gets rewarded more than deliberation, brilliance more than depth.

Only with hindsight can one look back and see that the smartest course may not have been the right one.

Bridget Riley:

For me, drawing is an inquiry, a way of finding out -- the first thing that I discover is that I do not know. This is alarming even to the point of momentary panic. Only experience reassures me that this encounter with my own ignorance -- with the unknown -- is my chosen and particular task, and provided I can make the required effort the rewards may reach the unimaginable. It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness. To break down this thickness, this deadening opacity, to elicit some particle of clarity or insight, is what I want to do.

The strange thing is that the information I am looking for is, of course, there all the time and as present to one's naked eye, so to speak, as it ever will be. But to get the essentials down there on my sheet of paper so that I can recover and see again what I have just seen, that is what I have to push towards. What it amounts to is that while drawing I am watching and simultaneously recording myself looking, discovering things that on the one hand are staring me in the face and on the other I have not yet really seen. It is this effort 'to clarify' that makes drawing particularly useful and it is in this way that I assimilate experience and find new ground.

Dan Soltzberg:

It is ironic: people don't notice that noticing is important!

Malcom Gladwell:

Effective teachers have a gift for noticing -- what one researcher calls "withitness." It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness.