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Any large system is going to be operating most of the time in failure mode. What the system is supposed to be doing when everything is working well is really beside the point, because that happy state is rarely achieved in real life. The truly pertinent question is: How does it work when its components aren’t working well? How does it fail? How well does it work in failure mode?

– John Gall, The Systems Bible

The more successful someone is in backing one generation of companies, the more they’ll have access to a cohort of executives from that era who are credible, well-informed, persuasive, and about to get blindsided by industry shifts.

– Byrne Hobart

Bubbles form when the momentum of short-term returns attracts enough money that the makeup of investors shifts from mostly long term to mostly short term. That process feeds on itself.

– Morgan Housel

The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge.

Knowledge grows fractally. From a distance its edges look smooth, but when you learn enough to get close to one, you’ll notice it’s full of gaps. These gaps will seem obvious; it will seem inexplicable that no one has tried x or wondered about y. In the best case, exploring such gaps yields whole new fractal buds.

– Paul Graham

To me, the unhappiest people in the world are those in the watering places, the international watering places, the south coast of France and Newport and Palm Springs and Palm Beach. Going to parties every night, playing golf every afternoon, then bridge. Drinking too much, talking too much, thinking too little. Retired. No purpose.

I know there are those who would totally disagree and say, ‘If I could just be a millionaire, that would be the most wonderful thing. If I could just not have to work every day. If I could be out fishing or hunting or playing golf or traveling, that would be the most wonderful life in the world.’ They don’t know life. Because what makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle. The struggle. Even if you don’t win it.

– Richard Nixon

Overconfidence is a powerful source of all illusions, primarily determined by quality and coherence of story you can construct, not by its validity.

– Daniel Kahneman

A book is far more than what the author wrote; it is everything you can imagine and read into it as well.

– Dee Hock

Strategy is an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions the firm in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.

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The reason I’ve spent so long establishing this rather obvious point – that writing helps you refine your thinking – is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.

– Henrik Karlsson