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Year 1981: * Prince Charles got married . * Liverpool crowned Champions of Europe. * Australia lost the Ashes tournament. * The Pope died. Year 2005: * Prince Charles got married . * Liverpool crowned Champions of Europe. * Australia lost the Ashes tournament. * The Pope died. Lesson learned: The next time Prince Charles gets married, would someone warn
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The cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic. It is easy to see fine qualities in successful books or to see unpublished manuscripts, inexpensive vodkas, or people struggling in any field as somehow lacking. It is easy to believe that ideas that worked were good ideas,
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Two friends are hiking in the woods and come to a river. They take off their shoes and clothes and go for a swim. As they come out of the water, they spot a hungry bear that immediately starts to run toward them. One of the men flees immediately, but
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This prediction error works as follows. You are about to buy a new car. It is going to change your life, elevate your status, and make your commute a vacation. It is so quiet that you can hardly tell if the engine is on, so you can listen to Rachmaninoff’
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Writers who are blessed with inborn talent can freely write novels no matter what they do—or don’t do. Like water from a natural spring, the sentences just well up, and with little or no effort these writers can complete a work. Occasionally you’ll find someone like that,
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The reason why we see so many rat racers around is that our culture reinforces this belief. If we get an A at the end of the semester, we get a gift from our parents; if we meet certain quotas on the job, we get a bonus at the end
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Select your niche. It is very difficult to succeed in a crowded field. I have found that you can move more rapidly if you select a segment of that crowded field and become an expert in it. For example, the field of law is very crowded. A new attorney entering
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My father used to tell us this story about a guy who loved soda, so he went into the soda business, with a product called 3UP. It failed. So he started again with a soda called 4UP. It failed, too. So he decided to name his product 5UP and worked
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We use the word “need” much too casually. The only things we truly need are the basics of physical survival—air, water, food, clothing, shelter—and everyone reading this book already has these. We also need the basics of intellectual and emotional well-being—love, family, friendship, satisfying work, hobbies, faith—
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Every creative person has to learn to deal with failure, because failure, like death and taxes, is inescapable. If Leonardo and Beethoven and Goethe failed on occasion, what makes you think you’ll be the exception? I don’t mean to romanticize failure, to parrot the cliche, “If you’re
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Life is sufficiently long, and has been granted with enough generosity for us to accomplish the greatest things, provided that in its entirety it is well invested; but when it is dissipated in extravagance and carelessness, when it is spent on no good purpose, then, compelled at last by the
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As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skills. In this uprising, we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture. We overthrow the programming of advertising, movies, video games, magazines, TV, and MTV by which we have