21 quotes from books I read in 2021
This year wasn’t a very good one for my writing, but I read a lot. To that end, here’s listicle of 21 good quotes from books I read this year. These are in no particular order and are not categorised.
... there is only Myself and the Other in the World and (it may surprise you to read this) the Other is not always the best of company.
Each person learns to be aware of himself—is constrained toward self-consciousness—by other people being aware of him. He learns to manage his image in the minds of others, and finds himself reflected, as in a mirror, through the interface of language and non-verbal communication.
Our minds habitually distort or ignore critical information in ways that seem, on the face of it, counterproductive.Our mental processes act in bad faith, perverting or degrading our picture of the world.
Others, of course, know much less about you and therefore cannot notice all of your fine-grained details. They look at you with the broader lens of a novice, evaluating you in general and in comparison to other people.
First, in the past, the best salespeople were adept at accessing information. Today, they must be skilled at curating it—sorting through the massive troves of data and presenting to others the most relevant and clarifying pieces. Second, in the past, the best salespeople were skilled at answering questions (in part because they had information their prospects lacked). Today, they must be good at asking questions—uncovering possibilities, surfacing latent issues, and finding unexpected problems.
What the Asian crisis clarified was that a consistent set of government policy interventions had indeed made the difference between long-run success and failure in economic development in east Asia. In Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China, governments radically restructured agriculture after the Second World War, focused their modernisation efforts on manufacturing, and made their financial systems slaves to these two objectives.
This is the way we misinterpret the facts of our lives, the way we assume and don’t check it out, the way we invent a story to tell ourselves, reinforcing the very thing in us we already believe.
We are ideologically trained, repeatedly, every day, to love consumer goods; naturally we would want to become a consumer good ourselves, to appear deserving of love — from ourselves as well as from other people (who, on social media, offer quantifiable tokens of that deserved love in the form of likes and so on).
Each was doing what was best for the problems he was working on, but neither side made any attempt to understand what the other was doing. A popular in-house riddle described the situation: 'What’s the collective noun for a group of statisticians?' 'A quarrel.'
To a person finding himself at the beginning of an era, its simple fundamental structures may become visible like a distant landscape in the flash of a single stroke of lightning. But the path toward them in the dark is long and confusing.
During the early nineteen-twenties the commuters who left their cars at the suburban railroad station at first parked them at the edge of the station drive; then they needed a special parking lot, and pretty soon an extended parking lot, and in due course a still bigger one–and the larger the lot grew, the more people wanted to use it. New boulevards, widened roads, and parkways relieved the bottlenecks at the approaches to the big cities–and invited more and more cars to enter. At the end of the half century the question, 'Where do I park?' was as annoyingly insistent as it had been at any time since the arrival of the automobile.
We need more variety on the web. We need more people creating their own spaces on the web. Spaces that they own, spaces that they control. Spaces where they can share their creativity, personality, voice, experience, knowledge, skills. So if you feel that the web is getting boring, commodified and homogeneous, if you feel that the web is controlled by a handful of large corporations, this is one way that you can make a bit of a difference.
The long corridor for the wing that would house many of the physics researchers was intentionally made to be seven hundred feet in length. It was so long that to look down it from one end was to see the other end disappear at a vanishing point. Traveling its length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions, and ideas would be almost impossible.
Once an active commitment is made, then, self-image is squeezed from both sides by consistency pressures. From the inside, there is a pressure to bring self-image into line with action. From the outside, there is a sneakier pressure—a tendency to adjust this image according to the way others perceive us.
Researchers have found that merely asking people to assume their initial judgment is wrong, to seriously consider why that might be, and then make another judgment, produces a second estimate which, when combined with the first, improves accuracy almost as much as getting a second estimate from another person.
Danger—like speed—is an experience that follows a logarithmic, ever-shallowing curve. Once you’ve been exposed to a lot of risk (and Anders had been, as a fighter pilot) then a hell of a lot of risk doesn’t seem like that much more.
Though he was virtually fearless in the physical sense, he suffered an almost pathological dread of losing control of the situation. In part, this attitude grew out of a consuming sense of responsibility. He felt he had gotten them into their situation, and it was his responsibility to get them out. As a consequence, he was intensely watchful for potential troublemakers who might nibble away at the unity of the group.
I built my class for students who typically struggle in graduate classes. I expected the class to evaluate better for those people, and probably worse for folks who typically do well in traditional graduate classes. I was wrong. My techniques worked better for almost all my students, including the ones who tend to manage fine under typical academic paradigms. I learned a lesson and I’ll never forget it. And it’s this: ... Build your [X] for people who have had it up to HERE with [X].
The CEO, and companies in general, have very little ability to directly control output metrics. What’s really important is to focus on the 'controllable input metrics', the activities you directly control, which ultimately affect output metrics such as share price.
She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn’t think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.
Experts seem to have a larger stock of procedures that they can think of to use as starting points in building a new plan or strategy. These can serve as holds to get the process moving, or in combination with other fragmentary actions. Novices, in contrast, are often at a loss about where to begin.