The better a man is, the more mistakes will he make – for the more new things he will try. I would never promote a man into a top level job who had not made mistakes, and big ones at that. Otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.
~ Peter Drucker
Students are trained to be good hurdle-clearers. We shower them with approval or disapproval depending on how they measure up on any given day. Childhood and adolescence are thus lived within an elaborate system of conditional love. Students learn to ride an emotional roller coaster—congratulating themselves for clearing a hurdle one day and demoralized by their failure the next. This leads to an existential fragility: If you don’t keep succeeding by somebody else’s metrics, your self-worth crumbles.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
~ Lewis Mumford
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It is very important to grasp that Level 5 leadership is not just about humility and modesty. It is equally about ferocious resolve, an almost stoic determination to do whatever needs to be done to make the company great.
~ Jim Collins, Good to Great
There’s always a Mormon around when you don’t want one, trying your patience with unsolicited kindness.”
~ David Foster Wallace via The Atlantic
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An original is a creation motivated by desire.
Any reproduction of an original is motivated by necessity.
~ Emmanuel Radnitzky
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Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in art, in music, in poetry, in mathematics, or philosophy.
~ John Steinbeck
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The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not well armed, it follows that where they are well armed they have good laws.
~ Niccolò Machiavelli
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Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
~ Henry David Thoreau
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Culture is the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously and define in a basic ‘taken for granted’ fashion an organization’s view of its self and its environment.
~ Edgar H. Schein
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