For all species other than us humans, things just are what they are. Our problem is that we’re always trying to figure out what things mean—why things are the way they are. As though the why matters.

— Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way

Failure of second-order thinking: he tells you a secret and somehow expects you to keep it, when he just gave you evidence that he can’t keep it himself.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

If you really want to be smart, use your intelligence to cause action in the physical universe…

— Max Kanat-Alexander, Understanding Software

Meetings must exist, but meetings cannot be seen as the only solution for making progress. If you must meet, start the meeting by remembering that the definition of a successful meeting is that when the meeting is done, it need never occur again.

— Michael Lopp, Managing Humans

If you want to outperform—if you want to do anything not usually done—then you’ll need to conceptually divide our civilization into areas of lower and greater competency.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Inadequate Equilibria