joshuago’s life_lessons Bookmarks

Going out and actually seeking rejection hammers home the lesson that it's not about you, and that you shouldn't be afraid to ask. You'd be surprised what people will eventually say yes to.

Former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew on the aches and pains of age and the solace of meditation, his struggle to build a thriving nation on a resource-poor island, and his concern that the next generation might take his achievements for granted and let them slip away.

Our culture places less emphasis on the need to struggle against one’s own mental feebleness.

Even fleeting feelings of power can dramatically change the way people respond to information. Instead of analyzing the strength of the argument, those with authority focus on whether or not the argument confirms what they already believe. If it doesn't, then the facts are conveniently ignored.

There’s a lot more to life than being rich, and the people you really want to have in your life know that.

Two ways out of the starving artists problem, both fun. First is to focus on making your art more valuable to others. The second is to stop expecting it to be valuable to others. Accept it as personal and precious to only you. Get your money elsewhere.

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are leaders.

If you want to discover great new things, then instead of turning a blind eye to the places where conventional wisdom and truth don't quite meet, you should pay particular attention to them.

Who is an entrepreneur really? It turns out that there are four distinct types of entrepreneurial organizations; small businesses, scalable startups, large companies and social entrepreneurs. They all engage in entrepreneurship.

In programming as in the rest of life, attitude trumps intelligence. It is in the crucible of practical problems that great new ideas can form.