With this post I just introduce a weekly post about 10 quotes, mantras or everything related to this, which I’ve read in books, posts or somewhere else. Which inspire me or let me more think about something. Quotes are in my opinion something like art. Something you can get inspiration from. I created already some lists in the past with 100+ quotes here, here and here but I think it’s more effective to keep this weekly and short now instead of posting a big list once a year. So here is list #1:
- Considering breadth and reach, I think it’s a fair conclusion that Facebook is the worst thing that’s ever happened to the internet. - DHH
- Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories. - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
- That which you most need will be found where you least want to look. - Carl Jung
- Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us. - Hal Borland
- He had this rhetoric that I think is still relevant today, even in the digital world, which is: there’s a cost [to these additions]. You can’t just say, “Another hundred acres of land is gonna give me another hundred dollars a month of profit.” You also have to say, “Another hundred acres of land is gonna cost me another 30 hours a week of labor, and that’s life that I’m losing.” He had this great example: Consider the farmer who buys the new wagon and says, “It now takes me only 20 minutes to get to town, instead of an hour, so I’ve saved myself time. What a great investment!‘” Yeah, but if you do the numbers, you’re having to work two extra hours a week to afford the wagon. So actually, you’re worse off. - Cal Newport on Why We’ll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes
- This is mostly Facebook since it’s zero-rated where most Filipino mobile users are prepaid. Young and old, rich and poor Filipinos are glued to their phones like zombies all day browsing Facebook. - Philippines tops world internet usage index with an average 10 hours a day
- Melinda Gates’s children don’t have smartphones and only use a computer in the kitchen. Her husband Bill spends hours in the office reading books while everyone else is refreshing their homepage. The most sought-after private school in Silicon Valley, the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, bans electronic devices for the under-11s and teaches the children of eBay, Apple, Uber and Google staff to make go-karts, knit and cook. Mark Zuckerberg wants his daughters to read Dr Seuss and play outside rather than use Messenger Kids. Steve Jobs strictly limited his children’s use of technology at home. It’s astonishing if you think about it: the more money you make out of the tech industry, the more you appear to shield your family from its effects. - Alice Thomson in The Times
- But time feels especially shallow these days, as the wave of one horror barely crests before it’s devoured by the next, as every morning’s shocking headline is old news by the afternoon. Weeks go by, and we might see friends only through the funhouse mirrors of Snapchat and Instagram and their so-called stories, designed to disappear. Not even the pretense of permanence remains: we refresh and refresh every tab, and are not sated. What are we waiting for? What are we hoping to find? - Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction
- Most people overestimate what they can do in a day, and underestimate what they can do in a month. We overestimate what we can do in a year, and underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade. - The Long View: Some Thoughts About One of Life’s Most Important Lessons
- This resonates with me. I love my work, I really like what I do, I think it’s mentally challenging, interesting, and important for our world and civilization and I believe I’m compensated well enough. But it’s tiring ok? And all I can ever do on weekends is lying on my bed watching netflix. I work 9 to 6 and work out intensely for 2 hours every week day. By the time it’s saturday I’m both physically and mentally exhaust. I cannot do anything other than sleeping. Of course this is not a good situation for various reasons: no friends, no relationships, no hobbies. Just work, gym, and recovering from those two. I like this for a lot of reasons (which is why I do it) but I acknowledge that my life is also pathetic. I wouldn’t be surprised if I died alone. - Why I hate the weekends