Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t. With effort, talent becomes skill and, at the very same time, effort makes skill productive.

— Angela Duckworth, Grit

We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be “informavores”, epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.

— Freedom Evolves, Daniel C. Dennett

For flexible work to be successful, teams need to measure success by outcomes, not by how many hours someone works in a day, or by how many meetings someone attends … To do that, teams need to focus on defining outcomes, roles, and responsibilities upfront and communicating as changes and different needs arise.

— Brian Elliott, Sheela Subramanian, Helen Kupp, and Stewart Butterfield, How the Future Works

Plato controlled his disciples on a bridge and did not allow anybody to cross without his permission. One day, Socrates arrived at the bridge, and demanded that Plato let him pass. Plato did not like the tone of his teacher’s voice and said to him: “If the first statement you say is the truth, I shall let you pass; but if the first thing you say is a lie, I swear that I will throw you into the turbulent water.” Socrates thought for a bit and said: “You will throw me into the water.” …an almost identical paradox appears in chapter 51 of the second volume of Don Quixote, when Sancho Panza is appointed as governor of the Island of Barataria.

— Haim Shapira, Eight Lessons on Infinity

…there are two perceptions that lie behind this resentment: (1) the perception that members of this elite see ordinary working people as a bunch of knuckle-dragging cavemen, and (2) the perception that these elites constitute an increasingly closed caste; one which the children of the working class would actually have far more difficulty breaking into than the class of actual capitalists.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs