The Man In The Arena

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

  • Theodore Roosevelt

We want to be micro pessimists and macro optimists.

  • Patrick Collison

I wish upon you great pain and suffering.

  • Jensen Huang

I trained 4 years to run 9 seconds.

  • Usain Bolt

Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.

  • George Box

Do hard things easily.

  • Xanadu (Levi Jones Leary)

You want to control people? Tell them a messiah will come. They will wait. For centuries.

  • Dune

Only the paranoid survive.

  • Andy Grove

You can only get what you want if you know what you want.

The world will come and ask you who you are and if you don’t know, it will tell you

  • Carl Jung

Nothing changes if nothing changes.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

  • Oscar Wilde

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

  • Arthur C. Clarke

Even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you’ve lost the source of. It works, but you don’t know why.

  • Paul Graham

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

  • Robert A. Heinlein

Some games are not worth winning.

Now I suggest to you that a group of us could be sitting around after dinner, discussing matters that were extremely serious like the education of our children, or our marriages, or the meaning of life, and we could be laughing, and that would not make what we were discussing one bit less serious. Solemnity, on the other hand, I honestly don’t know what it’s for. I mean, what is the point of it? The two most beautiful memorial services that I’ve ever attended both had a lot of humor and it freed us all and made the services inspiring and cathartic. But solemnity, it serves pomposity. And the self-important always know, at some level of their consciousness, that their egotism is going to be punctured by humor. That’s why they see it as a threat.

  • John Cleese

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

  • Dale Carnegie

Do things that are hard. Do things that will have an impact if successful. Do things that you believe matter. Do that in a place and with people who feel the same. Have integrity while doing all that.

  • Jeremy Barenholtz

Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

  • Marianne Williamson

I’m the kind of person who like if I see something wrong in a company it doesn’t matter what company I worked at or how junior or senior I’ve been like I like to go to the person most senior in charge and tell them like this thing seems wrong to me and that’s I feel like is one of my superpowers uh I’m just like not being afraid of just like saying when something seems wrong to me and sometimes like I’m just totally wrong and don’t understand the full picture and sometimes it results in something better happening and people will you know thank me for having been honest and bringing to attention something that’s actually wrong.

  • Brett Harrison

A vacation is just normal life but with less tolerance for boredom. The fact that it’s in another place is just incidental.

  • Miles

Aim to be the person who goes “what were you saying?” when someone is interrupted. Aim to be the person who tries to genuinely understand people’s point of view. Aim to be the person who smiles when people make eye contact with you. Aim to be the person who actually cares to listen to the answer when you ask people a question. Aim to be the person who waits when you see someone lagging behind the group. Aim to be the person who asks people who seem a bit down whether they want to talk about it. Aim to be the person who invites others to join the group. Aim to be the person who says compliments out loud. Aim to be the person who checks in when someone isolates themselves. Aim to be the person who celebrates other people’s success. Aim to be the kind of person you’d like to meet yourself.

  • Umi