Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
From a 2011.04.14 GTD Newsletter by Calvin Coolidge
I asked him if he would come up with a few options. And he said,
“No. I will solve your problem for you. And you will pay me. And you don’t have to use the solution.
If you want options, go talk to other people. But I’ll solve your problem for you the best way I know how.
And you use it or not. That’s up to you. You’re the client. But you pay me.”
And there was a clarity about the relationship that was refreshing.
From a Steve Jobs interview on Paul Rand
In the late nineteen-twenties, in a famous study, the psychologist Theodore Newcomb analyzed extroversion among adolescent boys at a summer camp.
He found that how talkative a boy was in one setting—say, lunch—was highly predictive of how talkative that boy would be in the same setting in the future. A boy who was curious at lunch on Monday was likely to be curious at lunch on Tuesday.
But his behavior in one setting told you almost nothing about how he would behave in a different setting: from how someone behaved at lunch, you couldn’t predict how he would behave during, say, afternoon playtime.
How we behave at any one time, evidently, has less to do with some immutable inner compass than with the particulars of our situation.
This conclusion, obviously, is at odds with our intuition. Most of the time, we assume that people display the same character traits in different situations. We habitually underestimate the large role that context plays in people’s behavior.
Richard Nisbett, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, says,
“When you have an interview with someone and have an hour with them, you don’t conceptualize that as taking a sample of a person’s behavior, let alone a possibly biased sample, which is what it is. What you think is that you are seeing a hologram, a small and fuzzy image but still the whole person.”
Psychologists call this tendency—to fixate on supposedly stable character traits and overlook the influence of context—the Fundamental Attribution Error, and if you combine this error with what we know about snap judgments the interview becomes an even more problematic encounter.
From The New-Boy Network by Malcolm Gladwell
I met a art professor in college who believed everyone had 500 bad drawings in them. Only after getting the 500 bad drawings “out” would you start drawing well.
Some professors asked their students to complete 1 or 2 drawings in a 3 hour studio. This professor — 50.
Fifty drawings, each from 5 to 20 minutes a piece. Each one to find out what works and what doesn’t. No erasing. If you’re not happy with it, start a new one.
Number one tip is to tell the person up front what action you wish them to take.
“Please read and reply by this afternoon. We need your approval on this item for the committee meeting tomorrow,”
or
“I just want to give you a heads-up that we have an inventory problem. There’s no action needed at this time, but I want you to be informed.”
This puts the reader in the right frame of mind to process the information.
From a comment on Writing Tips: Write For Busy People by Phil
Individual decisions might seem ideal, but placed in the context of a larger series of plans, those same decisions might not make any sense at all.
Fewer than two in ten people use a decision-making strategy that addresses how their decisions fit into all phases of their life, including those that appear unrelated. Most people make decisions by examining only factors that seem directly related.
From The 100 Simple Secrets of Successful People
by David Niven
Page 146
The man of knowledge has always been expected to take responsibility for being understood. It is barbarian arrogance to assume that the layman can or should make the effort to understand him.
If a man wants to be an executive…he has to concern himself with the usability of his product—that is, his knowledge.
by