An engineer’s skills are like the blade of a knife: you may spend tens of thousands of dollars to find engineers with the sharpest skills for your team, but if you “use” that knife for years without sharpening it, you will wind up with a dull knife that is inefficient, and in some cases useless.

— Brian W. Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman, Team Geek

We like to think of ourselves as independently minded and immune to manipulation, and yet imagine others – particularly those of a different political persuasion – as being fantastically gullible. The reality is probably something in between.

— Hannah Fry, Hello World

A long-term commitment to an organizational strategy creates a lot of inertia toward that strategy. This inertia can lead to suboptimal decisions, referred to as a strategy tax.

— Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, SuperThinking

The basic distinction between the individual and the crowd is that the individual acts after reasoning, deliberation, and analysis; a crowd acts on feeling, emotion, and impulses.

— Brendan Moynihan, What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars

A young man wants to marry Bill Gates’s daughter. He goes to Bill Gates and asks for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The billionaire suspiciously asks the young man, “Who are you? I will only marry my daughter to the CEO of The Bank of America.” “No problem,” says the young man and leaves. He goes to the Bank of America, applying for the CEO position. When he gets interviewed, the interviewers ask who he is. “I’m the future son-in-law of Bill Gates,” he replies.

— Albert Rutherford, The Elements of Thinking in Systems