Category Archives: Quote

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves – slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. — Thich Nhat Hanh in The Miracle of Mindfulness

I like neologisms. We need new words because we have new ideas, and ideas are the only things that break the law of the conservation of energy. Where once there was nothing there now is something, and the history of the neologism is a history of those moments of pure creation. ‘Gamification’, that said, can go take […]

One thing that I think is really important — that I think is context for this, is that I generally think that most other companies now are undervaluing how important social integration is. So even the companies that are starting to come around to thinking, ‘oh maybe we should do some social stuff’, I still […]

Sync took a different tack, and started off with “what if we didn’t want the data? What if even having that data was a failure state?” That led us to cryptography. Sync uses strong crypto to encode your data before it is uploaded. The secret phrase is the key to this encryption, and we never […]

People commonly use the word “procrastination” to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what’s happening as merely not-doing-work. We don’t call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working. Paul Graham’s The Acceleration of Addictiveness.

1. Lack of motivation. A talent is irrelevant if a person is not motivated to use it. Motivation may be external (for example, social approval) or internal (satisfaction from a job well-done, for instance). External sources tend to be transient, while internal sources tend to produce more consistent performance. Read Why Intelligent People Fail from […]

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, […]

Q. If you had a crystal ball would you have given more thought to the commercial aspects that WordPress has to offer? A few months ago I did an interview with Web Designer magazine they just published on the web asThe Wizard of WordPress, An interview with Matt Mullenweg. It includes the answer to the […]

“In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead […]

Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis: Most people approach their work in one of three ways: as a job, a career, or a calling. If you see your work as a job, you do it only for the money, you look at the clock frequently while dreaming about the weekend ahead, and you probably pursue […]

From Alain de Botton’s book How Proust Can Change Your Life, highly recommended: Take the unemotive example of the telephone. Bell invented it in 1876. By 1900, there were thirty thousand phones in France. Proust rapidly acquired one (tel. 29205) and particularly liked a service called the “theater-phone,” which allowed him to listen to live […]

“The difference between a vision and a hallucination is that other people can see the vision.” — Marc Andreessen from a talk at Stanford a few days ago. Hat tip: Niall.

Two excerpts from Rational Irrationality: The real reason that capitalism is so crash-prone. What boosts a firm’s stock price, and the boss’s standing, is a rapid expansion in revenues and market share. Privately, he may harbor reservations about a particular business line, such as subprime securitization. But, once his peers have entered the field, and […]

For the first time in his life Rahn met someone even more obsessed with finding the Grail than he was. Indeed, so confident was Himmler of finding the Grail that he’d already prepared a castle – Wewelsburg in Westphalia – for its arrival. In the basement, surrounded by busts of prominent Nazis, was an empty […]

Apparently advertisers who take the tour have been known to drool ovr the opportunities of putting recipes on the kitchen counter and apparel recommendations in the closet. It will come true — advertisers abhor blank space like nature abhors a vacuum. The home of the future?, Rob Norman

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