Author: LINUS FERNANDES
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Risk
“You could argue that risk demonstrates a Markov property, meaning that the future states are determined by the present state and are independent of past states. We would argue that risk is cumulative to some degree, perhaps with an exponential decay but still additive. A risky event today can result in failures in the future,…
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Sun Tzu: Blended together
“Hence in the wise leader’s plans, considerations of advantage and disadvantage will be blended together.” —Sun Tzu.
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Sun Tzu: Local guides
“We shall be unable to turn natural advantage to account unless we make use of local guides.” —Sun Tzu.
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Elizabeth Gilbert: Grief
‘I have learned that Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with…
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Anne Lamott: Hope begins in the dark
“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.” —Anne Lamott.
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Sun Tzu: Seek battle after victory
“Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.” —Sun Tzu.
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Sun Tzu: Make no mistakes
“He wins his battles by making no mistakes. Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated.” —Sun Tzu.
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Lorraine Hansberry: Exceptionally lonely
“The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.” —Lorraine Hansberry.
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Jeff Atwood: Optimize for users
“We have to stop optimizing for programmers and start optimizing for users.” —Jeff Atwood.
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Bertrand Russell: Motor cars and human beings
‘No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behavior to sin; he does not say, “You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go.” He attempts to find out what…
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Sun Tzu: Concentrate from the greatest distances
“Knowing the place and the time of the coming battle, we may concentrate from the greatest distances in order to fight.”—Sun Tzu.
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Alan Kay: From one context into another
“Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the ‘Aha’. Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re…
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George Goodman: Go with what is
“It has taken me years to unlearn everything I was taught, and I probably haven’t succeeded yet. I cite this only because most of what has been written about the market tells you the way it ought to be, and the successful investors I know do not hold to the way it ought to be,…
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William Henry Seward: Justice and humanity
“As a general truth, communities prosper and flourish, or droop and decline, in just the degree that they practise or neglect to practise the primary duties of justice and humanity.” —William Henry Seward.
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Max Frisch: Hatred
“I feel fairly certain that my hatred harms me more than the people whom I hate.” —-Max Frisch.
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Daniela Lamas: Expectations placed on mothers
“For all the pressure I have felt as a doctor or a writer, there is nothing that compares with the expectations placed on mothers.” —Daniela Lamas.
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Phil Fisher: Background conditions
“To look at the per-share earnings by themselves and give the earnings of four or five years ago any significance is like trying to get useful work from an engine which is unconnected to any device to which that engine’s power is supposed to be applied. Just knowing, by itself, that four or five years…
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Niccolo Machiavelli: Good advice
“A prince who is not wise himself will never take good advice.” —Niccolo Machiavelli.
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Muhammad Ali: Impossible
“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary.…
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Kurt Vonnegut: Rotten lesson
“If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the education of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books— books…
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George Carlin: Special, obscene imprint to Christmas
‘At some point, someone who worked at Rockefeller Center must have said, “Boys, I have a great idea for Christmas. Let’s kill a beautiful tree that’s been alive for seventy-five years and bring it to New York City. We’ll stand it up in Rockefeller Plaza and conceal its natural beauty by hanging shiny, repulsive, man-made…
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Chris Pine: Programming
“Programming isn’t about what you know; it’s about what you can figure out.” —Chris Pine.
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Edsger W Dijkstra: Simply reliable
“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.” —Edsger W. Dijkstra.
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Sophie Scholl: I have to go
“How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause… It is such a splendid sunny day, and I have to go. But how many have to die on the battlefield in these days, how many young, promising lives. What does my death…
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St. Thomas Aquinas: Unjust and unlawful
“To sell a thing for more than its worth, or to buy it for less than its worth, is in itself unjust and unlawful.” — St. Thomas Aquinas.
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Karl Popper: No book can ever be finished
“No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it.” —Karl Popper.
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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.
