R. A. Bjork’s concept of desirable difficulty. More difficult retrieval leads to better learning, provided the act of retrieval is itself successful.

— Scott Young, Unlearning

The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or “incentives” for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

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