You do not need permission
Thursday, January 15, 2015
Brooke Allen: You do not need permission to do the right thing. No one can give you permission to do the wrong thing.Powerful Ideas
I just ran across this great bit of advice I got back in 1995 from Larry Wall, creator of Perl:
Don't get brainwashed by your education into thinking that all the answers have to come from teachers.
Merlin Mann in Back To Work #41:
If you're not asking the right question, then there is no correct answer.
Mart Laar, Prime Minister of Estonia (1992-1994 and 1999-2002):
I was young and crazy… I didn’t know what is possible and what’s not, so I did impossible things.
Where Good Ideas Come From
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
This is a great video from Steven Johnson about where good ideas come from.Beware the Limits of Reductionism
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophies. – Shakespeare I said before that generalization, patterns, and abstraction are powerful ideas, but they have their limits. It is useful to reduce a thing to its core principles, but beware! Taking reductionism too far you can lose the essence of the thing. Poetry is far more than words and meter; man far more than mammal; and reality far more than relativity or quantum mechanics.Powerful Ideas
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Ideas are the most basic of tools with which we understand and influence our world. And like tools, not all ideas are created equal—some ideas are more powerful than others. What makes an idea powerful? A powerful idea conforms to absolute truth—the way the world actually is, not necessarily the way we think it is or want it to be. A powerful idea has a broad scope—it can be appropriately applied across a variety of disciplines, explaining diverse phenomena or solving diverse problems (or, if you prefer to put it this way, solving the same problem across diverse domains).Generalization, Patterns, and Abstraction
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
εν αρχη ην ο λογος – John 1:1 Our world behaves in consistent, predictable ways. If it were not so, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, philosophy, economics, engineering, medicine, and countless other disciplines would simply not work. Every discipline studies a range of specific phenomena and aims to distill the detailed observations into general principles or patterns of behavior. It is this ability to generalize that allows us really to know anything at all.On Failing Successfully
Monday, May 18, 2009
Inspired by an episode of the Ockham’s Razor podcast: Mark Dodgson: I want to argue that failure doesn’t get the credit it deserves. If you want to understand success, you must appreciate the ubiquity of failure, and if you’re not regularly failing, you’re not trying hard enough. William McKnight, Chairman of the Board at 3M Corporation, 1949-1966: As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative.