The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other.
James SurowieckiRead
The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn't make people happy.
Interpretation
Procrastination is a mental struggle that leads to unhappiness despite attempts to avoid unpleasant tasks.
This quote highlights the paradox of procrastination, where individuals avoid tasks they know they should complete. However, this avoidance typically does not lead to happiness, but rather contributes to a significant mental burden, suggesting that facing tasks head-on can lead to better mental well-being.
In practice
During a motivational speech about productivity.
The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other.
On the simplest level, telecommuting makes it harder for people to have the kinds of informal interactions that are crucial to the way knowledge moves through an organization. The role that hallway chat plays in driving new ideas has become a cliche of business writing, but that doesn't make it less true.
The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed: the major record labels let Apple take over the digital-music business; Blockbuster refused to buy Netflix for a mere fifty million dollars; Excite turned down the chance to acquire Google for less than a million dollars.
In a world where companies increasingly know about their business in real time, it makes no sense that public reporting mostly follows the old quarterly schedule. Companies sit on vital information until reporting day, at which point the market goes crazy.
Linux is a complex example of the wisdom of crowds. It's a good example in the sense that it shows you can set people to work in a decentralized way - that is, without anyone really directing their efforts in a particular direction - and still trust that they're going to come up with good answers.
It's a familiar truism that at any one moment, financial markets are dominated by either fear or greed. But the healthiest markets are those that are animated by both fear and greed at the same time.
Have a dream, chase it down, jump over every single hurdle, and run through fire and ice to get there.
Brains without competitive hearts are rudderless.
All I know is that the first step is to create a vision, because when you see the vision – the beautiful vision – that creates the want power.
Every moment wasted looking back, keeps us from moving forward.
But if it's tolerable mediocrity, and you're like, 'Well, you know it could be worse. At least I'm getting paid.' Then you wind up in a job that is slowly killing your soul and you're allowing that to happen. Comfort can be a very, very dangerous thing.
We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.