scheuguy

Mar
7th

Wed

Effective people know that time is the limiting factor. The output limits of any process are set by the scarcest resource. In this process we call “accomplishment,” that resource is time. Time is also a unique resource.

One cannot rent, hire, buy, or otherwise obtain more time. The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the demand, the supply will not increase. There is no price for it and no marginal utility curve for it. Moreover, time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday’s time is gone forever and will never come back. Time is, therefore, always in exceedingly short supply.

Time is totally irreplaceable. Within limits we can substitute one resource for another, copper for aluminum, for instance. We can substitute capital for human labor. We can use more knowledge or more brawn. But there is not a substitute for time.

Everything requires time. It is the only truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.

— Drucker

Dec
17th

Sat

Mick Jagger to Andy Warhol. April 21, 1969.

(via @ernieschenck2)

Oct
4th

Tue

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence. If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, … what gimmicks can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh?

— Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Apr
27th

Wed

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. for the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. but your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

—

Ira Glass

(via texturism)

Jan
17th

Mon

There is something in our faith that says evil may so shape events, that Caesar will occupy the palace and Christ the cross, but one day that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name.

— Martin Luther King, Jr., “Give Us the Ballot”

Jan
12th

Wed

Now the big question of character is do we let a fluke of a probably one-in-a-hundred lapse in concentration make us throw up our hands and go dragging characterlessly back to our dens to lick the whimpering wounds, or do we narrow our eyes and put out the chin and say Pemulis we say we say Pemulis, Double or Nothing, when the odds remain so almost crazily stacked in our favor today?

— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Dec
3rd

Fri

The best way to do something ‘lean’ is to gather a tight group of people, give them very little money, and very little time.

— Bob Klein, chief engineer of the F-14 program (via)

Dec
2nd

Thu

In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent.

— Paul Graham - “The Anatomy of Determination”

Dec
1st

Wed

It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You’re thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all.

— Thomas Watson, Sr. (via)

Nov
23rd

Tue

All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. Certainly that was my conviction back in the summer of 1968. Tim O’Brien: a secret hero. The Lone Ranger. If the stakes ever became high enough—if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough—I would simply tap into a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those little bothersome acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future.

— The Things They Carried

There was a siege going on: it had been going on for a long time, but the besieged themselves were the last to take it seriously.

— Desperate Characters (via Jonathan Franzen)

Nov
16th

Tue

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves.

— Charles Bukowski

Oct
29th

Fri

If you have purpose, you can just wade right through. It’s like running past people who are asleep.

— Full Frontal

Oct
12th

Tue

The heart of any moral system is the connection between action and consequences. Today’s public anger rises from the belief that this connection has been severed in one realm after another.

— David Brooks, “The Responsibility Deficit”

Aug
23rd

Mon

(via)