Category — Great Quotes

The most influential communicators are the ones that can boil an idea down to its core and translate it into simple, straightforward language. Here’s a perfect example from Seth Godin:

“Persistence isn’t using the same tactics over and over. That’s just annoying. Persistence is having the same goal over and over.”

Simple. Profound. Right on the money.

I wish more people in the business world would get how they create negative, counterproductive atmospheres when mistakes are made and blame is casually thrown around as a bi-product of scorched-egos. The following short, taken from my recent reading of What Happy People Know - How the New Science of Happiness Can Change Your Life For the Better (pg 174), illustrates clearly why Blame is pointless, especially in a team atmosphere. On the whole, the fact that Blame is rarely, if ever, productive is an important lesson we’d all benefit from…

“Imagine that you’re in a canoe with a friend and there’s a fork in the river. Your friend convinces you to take the channel on the right. Next thing you know, you hear the roar of a waterfall. What do you do?

Do you start yelling at your friend? Of course not! It’s counterproductive. You paddle like hell for shore.

Let’s say you make it. Now do you start screaming? That’s what a lot of people would do. But why?

You’ve paid your tuition — a brush with disaster — so learn the lesson: Blame solves nothing. It’s counterproductive. Irrelevant.”

- Dan Baker, Ph. D, Director of the Life Enhancement Program at Canyon Ranch.

As an African proverb says, “Until lions have their historians, all tales of hunting will glorify the hunter.”

Last night I had a hankering to revisit a book that I read in Grad School called Emotional Intelligence - Why It can Matter more than IQ. For the emotionally aware, it’s a great read, albeit a little tough going given all the neuro-psychology lingo, but it’s pretty damn intriguing. After pulling it out of the pile I’ve made in the hallway to my bedroom, and blowing the dust off the cover that’s accumulated since I’ve moved to San Diego, I opened to the first page and the first line of the book is Aristotle’s Challenge in bold italics…..

ARISTOTLE’S CHALLENGE:
Anyone can become angry - that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - this is not so easy. – Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics.

It hit me just as hard reading it for the 50th time as it did the first. Ponder that for a second. I think you’ll agree that it captures one of life’s greatest challenges elegantly. What makes it so profound is that it’s been a good 2000 years since these words were written and it’s still just as true today as it was the day he wrote it.

What strikes me most about Einstein’s writings (this one in particular) is how very humble he seems. For a man who has been deservedly named the greatest thinker of our time (and arguably of all time) he stresses his individuality in principal only and always makes reference to kinship, his need to give back and his endless dependence on others. I have included an excerpt of Einstein’s essay “The World As I See It” for my readers who are not familiar with Einstein’s writings. It shows, if only briefly, a window in to the soul of a very great, and very gentle human being…

“How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts — possessions, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible.

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…

My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality… The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”

Footnote: The text above is only an excerpt of the full text of Albert Einstein’s copyrighted essay, “The World As I See It” . The excerpt above was taken directly from an online exhibit at www.aip.org - The Center for History and Physics.  I have included it here, with a footnote as websites have a tendency to evaporate and I want this blog to retain it’s full text beyond aip.org’s exhibition, who’s links are likely to change. For those of you who wish to read it, Einstein’s essay was originally published in “Forum and Century,” vol. 84, pp. 193-194, the thirteenth in the Forum series, Living Philosophies. It is also included in Living Philosophies (pp. 3-7) New York: Simon Schuster, 1931. For a more recent source, you can also find a copy of it in A. Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, based on Mein Weltbild, edited by Carl Seelig, New York: Bonzana Books, 1954 (pp. 8-11).

 ”An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.”
- Mahatma Gandhi

I dont know where I heard this quote, but I had it written down on a piece of scrap paper and I, apparently, still think it’s worth writing down. Although short, it’s reasonably profound advice.

“Appreciate certain facets of people for what they are without the expectation of renaissance men.”