Author: LINUS FERNANDES
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Richard McElreath: Bayesian inference
‘There are many ways to use the term “Bayesian.” But mainly it denotes a particular interpretation of probability. In modest terms, Bayesian inference is no more than counting the numbers of ways things can happen, according to our assumptions. Things that can happen more ways are more plausible. And since probability theory is just a…
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C S Lewis: Literary people
“.. literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention. When they are denied such attentive and undisturbed reading even for a few days they feel impoverished.” —C S Lewis.
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Arthur C Clarke: Indistinguishable from magic
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”— Arthur C. Clarke.
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Sun Tzu: Art of war
“The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.” — Sun Tzu
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John F Sherry Jr: Brand
“A brand is a differentiator, a promise, a license to charge a premium. A brand is a mental shortcut that discourages rational thought, an infusing with the spirit of the maker, a naming that invites this essence to inhabit this body. A brand is a performance, a gathering, an inspiration. A brand is a semiotic…
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Warren Buffett: Dumb things
“New things coming along don’t take away the opportunities. What gives you opportunities is other people doing dumb things. In the 58 years we’ve been running Berkshire, I would say there’s been a great increase in the number of people doing dumb things. And they do big, dumb things. And the reason they do it,…
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Seamus Heaney: Scaffolding
“Masons, when they start upon a building, Are careful to test out the scaffolding; Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points, Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints. And yet all this comes down when the job’s done Showing off walls of sure and solid stone. So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to…
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C S Lewis: Opportunity for heroism
“Pain provides an opportunity for heroism; the opportunity is seized with surprising frequency.” —C S Lewis.
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C S Lewis: Golden apple of selfhood
‘The golden apple of selfhood, thrown among the false gods, became an apple of discord because they scrambled for it. They did not know the first rule of the holy game, which is that every player must by all means touch the ball and then immediately pass it on. To be found with it in…
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Christopher Morley: Ingredients to good life
“There are three ingredients to the good life; learning, earning, and yearning.” —Christopher Morley.
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Best opening question
‘Asking “What most recently changed?” gets people thinking about what they did that might have caused the problem at hand. It gets your team focused on attempting to quickly undo anything that is correlated in time to the beginning of the incident. In our experience, it is the best opening question for any discussion around…
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C S Lewis: Forgiveness
“To condone an evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if it were good. But forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered if it is to be complete: and a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.” —C S Lewis.
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Morgan Housel: Being needy
“Nothing destroys relationships – in love and careers – like being needy.”—Morgan Housel.
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Change management
“Great companies implement change management not to reduce the rate of change, but rather to allow the rate of change to increase while decreasing the number of change related incidents and their impact on shareholder wealth creation. Increasing the velocity and quantity of change while decreasing the impact and probability of change related incidents is…
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Horace Mann: Ask for truth
“If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.” —Horace Mann.
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Process and documentation
“The real question here is how much process you need and how much needs to be documented. The answer to that is the same answer as with any process: You should implement exactly enough to maximize the benefit of the process. This in turn means that the process should return more to you in benefit…
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C S Lewis: Love seeks to enjoy its object
“A man’s love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object.” —C S Lewis.
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Seth Klarman: Better the bargain
“Generally, the greater the stigma or revulsion, the better the bargain.” —Seth Klarman.
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Niccolo Machiavelli: Prince
“A prince who is not wise himself will never take good advice.” —Niccolo Machiavelli.
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Sun Tzu: Know your enemy, know yourself
“If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”—Sun Tzu.
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Not the right thing to do
“Steering a company toward a crisis as a method of changing culture is like putting a gun to your head to solve a headache. It’s just not the right thing to do.” —Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott, The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise.
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Crisis
“A crisis is an incident on steroids. If not handled properly and if approached in the same fashion you would approach smaller incidents, a crisis will drive your customers away and tear your organization and company apart. Crisis situations, if handled properly, including ensuring that you learn from them and that they never happen again,…
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C S Lewis: Post of Satan
‘…because a man is sometimes entitled to hurt (or even, in my opinion, to kill) his fellow, but only where the necessity is urgent and the good to be attained obvious, and usually (though not always) when he who inflicts the pain has a definite authority to do so—a parent’s authority derived from nature, a…
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Benjamin Spock: Man
“Man can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet he’s potentially more vicious than any other. He is the only one who can be persuaded to hate millions of his own kind whom he has never seen and to kill as many as he can lay his hands on in the name of…
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C S Lewis: Likeable something
‘The people never admire a man for doing something he likes: the very words “But he likes it” imply the corollary “And therefore it has no merit”.’ —C S Lewis.
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A M Tybout and B Sternthal: Brand positioning
“Brand positioning plays a key role in the building and managing of a strong brand by specifying how the brand is related to consumers’ goals. It can be thought of as answering three questions: (1) Who should be targeted for brand use? (2) What goal does the brand allow the target to achieve? and (3)…
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Anthony Bourdain: Mise-en-place
“Mise-en-place is the religion of all good line cooks… The universe is in order when your station is set up the way you like it: you know where to find everything with your eyes closed, everything you need during the course of the shift is at the ready at arm’s reach, your defenses are deployed.”—Anthony…
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Joseph Addison: Spectator of mankind
“I live in the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species.” —Joseph Addison.
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C S Lewis: Trial and error
“What is learned by trial and error must begin by being crude, whatever the character of the beginner. The very same pot which would prove its maker a genius if it were the first pot ever made in the world, would prove its maker a dunce if it came after millenniums of pot-making. The whole…
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Sun Tzu: No instance
“There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.”—Sun Tzu.
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Annie Dillard: Spend the afternoon
“Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.” —Annie Dillard.
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Sam Zell: Failure doesn’t exist
“Remember, for an entrepreneur, the word failure doesn’t exist. It just didn’t work out. And you get up off the floor and try again.” —Sam Zell.
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Sun Tzu: After victory
“In war, the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won.” — Sun Tzu.
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Richard Nixon: Purpose
“If you don’t have [nice things], they can mean a great deal to you. When you do have them, they mean nothing. 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…
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Freeman Dyson: Continuing exploration of mysteries
“The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.” — Freeman Dyson.
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C F Braun: Gregarious animal
“Man is a gregarious animal. We work in herds, in teams. The bear can do exactly as he pleases, for he works alone. We do not work alone. We depend throughout our lives on the goodwill of other men. If a man does not learn to bend, to be friendly and considerate, and to respect…
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C S Lewis: Complex good out of simple evil
“Now the fact that God can make complex good out of simple evil does not excuse—though by mercy it may save—those who do the simple evil. And this distinction is central. Offences must come, but woe to those by whom they come; sins do cause grace to abound, but we must not make that an…
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C S Lewis: Moments of sanity
‘We must guard against the feeling that there is “safety in numbers”. It is natural to feel that if all men are as bad as the Christians say, then badness must be very excusable. If all the boys plough in the examination, surely the papers must have been too hard? And so the masters at…
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Enemy of scalability
“Recurring incidents are the enemy of scalability. Each time we allow an incident with the same root cause to recur in our production environments, we steal time away from our teams that would be better used developing systems and features that maximize shareholder value. This theft of engineering time runs counter to our scalability goals…
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C S Lewis: Strange illusion
“We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a…
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Karl Kraus: Terrible vision
“I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.” —Karl Kraus.
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Sun Tzu: Protracted campaign
“Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.”—Sun Tzu.
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Process issues
“…the reality is that processes can cause issues themselves. Similar to how a poorly designed monitoring system can cause downtime on the production site due to load issues, processes can, when the complexity and level of rigor are not carefully considered, cause issues within the organization. These challenges are generally not the fault of the…
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C S Lewis: Habitual vices
‘We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues—like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his “bad days” and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth…
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Seth Klarman: Governed by behavioral science
“Do not trust financial market risk models. Despite the predilection of some analysts to model the financial markets using sophisticated mathematics, the markets are governed by behavioral science, not physical science.” —Seth Klarman.
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Ellen Ullman: Programming
“Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code.” – Ellen Ullman.
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Tim Calkins: Brand
“A brand is a set of associations linked to a name, mark, or symbol associated with a product or service. The difference between a name and a brand is that a name doesn’t have associations; it is simply a name. A name becomes a brand when people link it to other things. A brand is…
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Mary Wollstonecraft: Woman’s sceptre
“Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.” —Mary Wollstonecraft.
