Long Weekend Quotes

As it’s Memorial Day Weekend in the U.S., I’ll keep the post light. Here are some quotes I’ve saved over the past year or so. The types of quotes I print out and put around my office to remind me.

We’ll start with a few quick hitters from Kevin Kelly:

“Aim to be effective, but unpredictable. That is, you want to act in a way that AIs have trouble modeling or imitating. That makes you irreplaceable.”

“You have 5 minutes to act on a new idea before it disappears from your mind.”

“Don’t fear failure. Fear average.”

“The most common mistake we make is to do a great job on an unimportant task.”

“Do not cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.”

“Working differently is usually more productive than working harder.”

“Many fail to finish, but many more fail to start. The hardest work in any work is to start. You can’t finish until you start, so get good at starting.”

One from our friend James Clear:

“My personal rule is that it's a good idea to be patient as long as I'm in the mix. If I'm taking action, putting in my reps, and trying things out, then I should remain patient and see what opportunities arise. But if I'm not taking action consistently, then I'm not practicing patience. I'm just waiting.”

Two from Good Strategy / Bad Strategy:

“The first natural advantage of good strategy arises because other organizations often don’t have one. And because they don’t expect you to have one, either. A good strategy has coherence, coordinating actions, policies, and resources so as to accomplish an important end. Many organizations, most of the time, don’t have this. Instead, they have multiple goals and initiatives that symbolize progress, but no coherent approach to accomplishing that progress other than “spend more and try harder.”

“Use your relative advantages to impose out-of-proportion costs on the opposition and complicate his problem of competing with you.”

And one last one from Seth:

“Extraordinary benefits accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most.”