Frans de Waal:

The debate is less about the truth than about how to handle it.

Jeffrey Tayler:

A good part of wisdom consists in knowing what to ignore.

Independence comes with a price to be paid, and often a high price, but the rewards of living according to one's instinct and inclination exceed all others.

We must remain students, questioning always, analyzing ever. The important thing is to get moving.

David McRaney:

Thinking about thinking, this is the key. In the struggle between should versus want, some people have figured out something crucial -- want never goes away.

Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don't have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted.

Andre Agassi:

Even if it's not your ideal life, you can always choose it. No matter what your life is, choosing it changes everything.

Paul Graham:

The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.

Decius:

Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.

Abraham Lincoln:

Whatever you are, be a good one.

Lauren Clark:

It's good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

Billy Hoffman:

Your Time is the most valuable thing that you have. There is nothing more important than how you spend your time.

Clay Shirky:

Time is a precious commodity. Increasingly, I'm trying to maximize it.

Scott Berkun:

When I was younger I thought busy people were more important than everyone else. Otherwise why would they be so busy?

Stefan Klein:

We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.

Leo Babuta:

Stop being busy and your job is half done.

Michael Lopp:

When you become a manager of people, an odd thing happens. You're automatically perceived as being busier.

Having a meaningful conversation with anyone takes time.

A 1:1 is a place to listen for what they aren't saying.

Your reward for a culture of healthy 1:1s is a distinct lack of drama.

Paul Graham:

There are two types of schedule: the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule.

Penelope Trunk:

Stop talking about time like you need to save it. You just need to use it better.

Listen For What They Aren't Saying

Paul Graham:

The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.

With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you.

Caterina Fake:

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

Noteworthy:

They say delayed gratification isn't all it's cracked up to be.

"We'll see", I tell them. "We'll see."

Carolyn Johnson:

As cures for boredom have proliferated, people do not seem to feel less bored; they simply flee it with more energy.

Judith Warner:

We're all losers now. There's no pleasure to it.

How to Lose Time and Money

Robert I. Sutton:

Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much.

Caterina Fake:

If you're actually inventing something you shouldn't know what you're doing.

Ira Glass:

If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get super-lucky.

Ian Malcolm:

You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Christian Terwiesch:

It's no good generating a great idea if you don't recognize the idea as great.

Carol Dweck:

'Hard working' is what gets the job done.

You just see that year after year.

The students who thrive are not necessarily the ones who come in with the perfect scores.

It's the ones who love what they're doing and go at it vigorously.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells:

The best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make -- as an obsession and as a life style.

Johan de Kleer:

One passionate person is worth a thousand people who are just plodding along ...

Lauren Clark:

It's good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

Charles Munger:

The way to win is to work, work, work, work and hope to have a few insights.

Decius:

Wow, life is boring.

John Givings:

Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

Frank Chimero:

No matter who said what, it's possible they were wrong, and even if they were right, sometimes pursuing your own divergent ideas leads to something brand new.

Charles Munger:

The way to win is to work, work, work, work and hope to have a few insights.

It makes sense to load up on the very few good insights you have instead of pretending to know everything about everything at all times. The wise ones bet heavily when the world offers them that opportunity. They bet big when they have the odds. And the rest of the time, they don't. It's just that simple.

Sven Birkerts:

Concentration can be had, but for most of us it is only by setting oneself against the things that routinely destroy it.

Concentration is no longer a given; it has to be strategized, fought for. But when it is achieved it can yield experiences that are more rewarding for being singular and hard-won. To achieve deep focus nowadays is also to have struck a blow against the dissipation of self; it is to have strengthened one's essential position.

David Foster Wallace:

After the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank.

n+1:

"This is a protest against the skeptics!" retorts a 30-something man with a soul patch. He hands us a leaflet. "Get out of the new road if you can't lend a hand! This is a demonstration! Read our program!"

But the leaflet is blank.

Gary Wolf:

You might not always have something to say, but you always have a number to report.

Donald G. McNeil, Jr:

For every 100 people put on treatment, 250 are newly infected.

danah boyd:

You can count until you're blue in the face, but unless you actually talk to people, you're not going to know why they do what they do.

Birkerts:

What we had imagined to be the something more of experience is created in-house by that three-pound bundle of neurons, and that it is not pointing to a larger definition of reality so much as to a capacity for narrative projection engendered by infinitely complex chemical reactions. No chance of a wizard behind the curtain. The wizard is us, our chemicals mingling.

David Shields:

Please, for the love of god, don't read the citations.

Will Wright:

For a lot of people, their job and their position are not the relevant part of how they see themselves. They have an internal view of themselves, their career aspirations, the direction they want to go. The really important motivational stuff is more in their secret identity.

Usually people always have some passion that really drives them. And this to me is one of the important points of working collaboratively with other people — trying to get a sense of what is the one thing that makes their eyes light up, they get excited about and they won’t stop talking about. And if you can get a sense of what that is from somebody, and you can harness that, that’s going to have more impact on how they perform their job, how they relate to you, how you can convey a vision to them in a way that they get excited about it.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Rita Katz:

The best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make -- as an obsession and as a life style.

Fred Wilson on Paul Graham:

I don't mean this in a negative way, but Y Combinator is more like a cult than a venture capital fund. And Paul is the cult leader.

Johan de Kleer:

One passionate person is worth a thousand people who are just plodding along ...

Pico Iyer on the Joy of Less:

It seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.

Demotivators:

No matter who you are, you have the potential to be so very much less.

C.S. Lewis:

It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don't matter, that is much worse.

Will Wright, on Solvents and Glue

Across the country, business-school faculties are grappling with the possibility that they've been instilling generations of students with a naive faith in free markets, teaching them to focus solely on short-term profits, and justifying some of the more outrageous executive-compensation schemes that have become Exhibit A in the case against corporate America. Many of those notions are tumbling quickly.

But what comes after the fall?

"This market was full of people who were really just salesmen. You'd get them in class and ask them questions [about the latest financial innovations], and, for the first ten minutes, they sound sophisticated. Then you probe a little deeper, and, for the next ten, they're an idiot."

From last December, Malcom Gladwell:

We should be lowering our standards, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about.

From last October, Andrew Lahde:

I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking.

Paul Graham:

If you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you'd do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.

MBA Frayed

In view of the devastating dip, we've gone to great pains not to make light of our customers' gloom, even as we work to magnify our margins.

Wells Fargo canceled a four-day corporate event in Las Vegas as financial firms cut perks amid criticism from lawmakers. "We had scaled back the mortgage event, but in light of the current environment, we have now decided to cancel."

He starts scrambling, easily finds holds for his hands and feet, basks in the thin sunshine. Then the gully gets steeper, tougher and narrower; thunderclouds gather overhead. Soon our adventurer, perched on a ledge with nothing below but air, realizes he's stuck. At which point, this thought occurs: knowing precisely how he got into such a fix is an interesting question, one that he will enjoy discussing with fellow climbers at that nice bar in the valley. But the important thing right now is to get down. In one piece.

In light of the current environment, Goldman decided to reschedule the hedge-fund managers' conference.

Georgia is well positioned to weather the financial crisis thanks to billions of dollars in aid ...

They said it is in consideration of the current dip in the housing industry.

Move the Texas governor into the Speaker's Apartment, and that's a savings to the state of $108,000 a year. That may seem like small potatoes, but that's probably as much as the governor spends annually on Dippity-do.

TLC liked the idea of creating a program that focuses on new good ideas out there for real estate, said Dustin Smith, TLC's director of publicity. "Of course, we take great pains not to make light of the situation," he said.

People are often at great pains to keep the bulimia outwardly hidden.

As usual, the game that's played around Washington is find something little that you can complain about and see if you can magnify it.

We should probably tell you that the full title of this game is Zombies! Apocalypse - Massive Multiplayer Online Zombies Massacre, even tho... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The pirate system was based on an important insight: leaders who are great in a battle or some other crisis are not necessarily great managers, and concentrating power in one pair of hands often leads to bad decision-making.

Pirate governance, peculiar as it may sound, offers an intriguing example of how limits on executive power can actually make an enterprise more successful and, because workers are convinced they’re being treated fairly, can deepen their commitment.

The Pirates’ Code

IEEE Spectrum will host a must-attend online Career Accelerator Forum on 11 April 2006, geared towards mid-level technology and business executives seeking career advancements, a change in career or continuation onto graduate or post-graduate studies.

Confirmed topics for the Career Accelerator Forum (to-date):
Web Cast One: Advanced Degree Solutions for High Tech Professionals
Web Cast Two: Management, Money and Marketability for Technology Managers
- How can you become an entrepreneur?
- How can you get VC’s to fund your vision?

IEEE Spectrum Career Accelerator Forum