epigrams.htm

Epigrams

Useful sayings

• I think of strength training as a form of retirement saving. Just as we want to retire with enough money saved up to sustain us for the rest of our lives, we want to reach an older age with enough of a “reserve” of muscle and bone density to protect us from injury and allow us to pursue the activities that we enjoy. (Arnold Schwarzenegger)

• Help people not because they will help you back, but because you are able to help them. (Unknown)

• Choose beliefs that are useful, even if they're not true; e.g. imagine a pot of gold or a tiger behind you when running. (Unknown)

• Find your community orchestra, where can you do things with other people that matter, that bring joy and happiness to others, or connect you with nature. (Unknown)

• Talk to an acquaintance in my industry at least once a week, remember the power of weak ties. (Unknown)

• If you do something scary today, you'll be creative and inspired. You will find new solutions tomorrow. If you don't, then you will be exactly the same. (Unknown)

• Don't be the best, be the only. (Kevin Kelly)

• Don't worry about making things useful all the time, dare to make art, useless art. (Derek Sivers)

• “To a disciple who was forever complaining about others, the Master said, ‘If it is peace you want, seek to change yourself, not other people. It is easier to protect your feet with slippers than to carpet the whole of the earth.’” (Anthony de Mello)

• It is easy to complain. Any idiot can highlight a problem. It is not easy to brainstorm, to learn, and to find solutions. (Arnold Schwarzenegger)

• When you do a lot of practice, try to learn a bit of theory, when you do too much theory, try to do a bit of practice. (Unknown)

• My teacher offered this ingenious tactic: Don't tell yourself you'll practice thirty minutes everyday. This will fail. Instead, pick the shakuhachi up and just hold it. Of course, if you've already picked it up, you may as well play a bit, right? (Unknown)

• Action begets inspiration; once I start working on something I become inspired to learn more about it. When working on a project, seek to invest 20-30 min on it and see what parts I enjoy, do more of those. (Unknown)

• The quality of the recipe is as good as the quality of the ingredients and how you treat them. (Danny Meyer)

• And as the authors of “Crucial Conversations” observe, in any conversation, respect is like air. When it’s present nobody notices it, and when it’s absent it’s all anybody can think about. (Crucial Conversations)

• “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." (John Maynard Keynes)

• When you take the time to sit alone with your thoughts, you can find who you want to be; not who your parents want you to be, not who your friends want you to be, and definitely not who some shyster on Instagram or TikTok wants you to be. (Arnold Schwarzenegger)

• Choosing to be nice is strength. Feeling compelled to always be nice is weakness. Choosing when to be disagreeable, when required, is strength. Always being disagreeable is weakness. (Mark Manson)

On Technology

• People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.— Don Knuth

On Opinions

• “If your opinions on one subject can be predicted from your opinions on another, you may be in the grip of an ideology. When you truly think for yourself, your conclusions will not be predictable.” (Kevin Kelly)

On Writing

• Nassim Taleb once wrote about how publishers always try to push authors to write about topics specific to recent news events. “No, no; it’s the exact opposite,” he wrote. “If you want to be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past. We have no idea of what’s in the future, but we have some knowledge of what was in the past … I speculated that books that would have been relevant twenty years in the past (conditional of course of being relevant today) would be interesting twenty years in the future.”

On Work

• “Look at this generation, with all of its electronic devices and multitasking. I will confidently predict less success than Warren, who just focused on reading. If you want wisdom, you’ll get it sitting on your ass. That’s the way it comes.” (Charlie Munger)

• Work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. (Steve Jobs)

• Hard work is a competitive advantage. Even the belief that hard work is a competitive advantage is itself now a competitive advantage. (Balaji Srinivasan)

• I’m not a consumption person; I’m a production person. I’m not burning capital on stuff. Everything is going into the next compounding outcome—not just compounding money, though money is an important tool. Knowledge compounds on other knowledge. Impact, same thing. (Balaji Srinivasan)

On Financial Advice

• “One of the great defenses—if you’re worried about inflation—is not to have a lot of silly needs in your life—if you don’t need a lot of material goods.” (Charlie Munger)

• "The less money you need, the less dependent you are." (Balaji Srinivasan)

On Philosophy

• “In the human life time is but an instant, and the substance of it a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of certainty. And, to say all in a word, everything that belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapor, and life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after- fame is oblivion. What then can guide a man? One thing and only one, philosophy.” (Marcus Aurelius)

On efficiency

“I’ll tell you what is convenient,” he said after a moment. “To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.” - A Gentleman in Moscow