“Death due to infectious diseases in infancy and childhood remains perhaps the cruelest fate in the modern world, and one of the most preventable. Measures needed to minimize this untimely mortality cannot be ranked as to their importance: clean drinking water and adequate nutrition are as vital as disease prevention and proper sanitation. But if you judge them by their benefit-cost ratios, vaccination is the clear winner.”
Excerpt From: Vaclav Smil. “Numbers Don’t Lie.”
“I wanted to be a theoretical physicist, and so I went to Princeton. I was a really good student, with an A+ in almost everything. I was on an honors physics track, which starts out with a hundred students, and by the time you get to quantum mechanics, it’s about thirty. So I’m in quantum mechanics, probably in junior year, and I’ve also been taking computer science and electrical engineering classes, which I’m also enjoying. But I can’t solve this one really hard partial differential equation. I’d been studying with my roommate, Joe, who also was really good at math. The two of us worked on this one homework problem for three hours and got nowhere, and we finally looked up at each other over the table at the same moment and said, “Yosanta”—the smartest guy at Princeton. ”
Excerpt From: Jeff Bezos. “Invent and Wander.”
“PHILOSOPHER: No, that is not why. That is only a secondary, superficial reason. The main reason is the presence of a cutthroat system of reward and punishment.
YOUTH: Huh! How so?
PHILOSOPHER: One is severely punished for breaking rules and praised for obeying them. And one is recognised. In other words, the people are not actually obeying out of support for the leader’s character or his thoughts and beliefs, but simply because they have the goal of being praised or not being rebuked.
YOUTH: Well, sure. That’s just how the world is.”
Excerpt From: Ichiro Kishimi. “The Courage to be Happy“
“Yin (not her real name) is in her mid-twenties, lives in Palo Alto, California, and attends Stanford University. She has all the composure and polish you’d expect of a student at a prestigious school, yet she succumbs to a persistent habit throughout her day. She can’t help it; she is compulsively hooked on Instagram… But at its core Instagram is an example of an enterprising team—conversant in psychology as much as technology—that unleashed a habit-forming product on users who subsequently made it a part of their daily routines. Yin doesn’t realize she’s hooked”
Excerpt From: Nir Eyal. “Hooked.”
“I typically start my workshops for business leaders with brief introductions.
People tend to share their name, their company, what they do, how many employees they have. All superficial stuff. No real depth. No authentic connection. No personal truth. So I always do a second round of introductions. I don’t let things stay at that first level. I want people to take off the masks. I do something simple that immediately allows the conversations to go deeper, the tone in the room to change, and relationships to begin to grow.”
Excerpt From: John O’Leary. “On Fire.”
“Very occasionally the two would attempt to clean their apartment, and when they did, they would puzzle over the scary warnings on the package labels of cleaning products, which seldom even listed the ingredients. Using the products would make their skin burn and eyes water and it made them wonder whether the cleansers were safe at all, for themselves or for the environment. One day the two friends did a Google search on the items to see if other people shared their anxieties. They found that a surprisingly large number of people had been irritated using them. So they decided that they would make a better product themselves, one that was kinder to both the environment and to the people using it.”
Excerpt From: Blake Mycoskie. “Start Something That Matters.”
“When Sukumar turned twenty-six, he noticed two things: Everyone around him was getting married and he was growing a paunch. Both came out of nowhere. Only months ago, it had seemed like everyone was single and he was still that skinny guy from Chennai, India. But now Sukumar’s belly spilled over his pants, and after parties, his friends went home with their wives while he went home alone. The same phrase kept echoing in his head: What girl is going to want to marry me?”
Excerpt From: BJ Fogg. “Tiny Habits.”
“They can make great bosses because they’re clear about setting expectations and are highly disciplined themselves. An Upholder boss would be clear about what’s expected from a particular position, fair about enforcing rules and schedules, and far-sighted in following a long process toward a conclusion; an Upholder boss wouldn’t suddenly change goals, methods, or deadlines. However, Upholders sometimes get impatient when others struggle to meet expectations. An Upholder boss may resist answering Questioners’ questions, saying, “We got a memo about the new deadline from Corporate, and I’m sure they have a good reason for changing it; let’s stop arguing about it and get to work.”
Excerpt From: Gretchen Rubin. “The Four Tendencies.”
“While Musk had initially invested $100 million of his own money into SpaceX, the company had also benefited from more than $4 billion in contracts from NASA. By contrast, Bezos was his own NASA, funding Blue Origin almost entirely on his own. He’d joked that Blue Origin’s business model has been, “I sell about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock, and I use it to invest in Blue Origin.” He bought the Washington Post for $250 million in 2013. By contrast, he spent $2.5 billion of his own money on the New Glenn rocket alone, without accepting any government investment.”
Excerpt From: Christian Davenport. “The Space Barons.”
“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever bailed out on a call to embark upon a spiritual practice, dedicate yourself to a humanitarian calling, commit your life to the service of others? Have you ever wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless; to run for office, crusade for the planet, campaign for world peace, or to preserve the environment? Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be?”
Excerpt From: Steven Pressfield. “The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle.”
