Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They’d rather show the highlight of what they’ve become.

— Angela Duckworth, Grit

…the dog boasts to the wolf all the contraptions of comfort and luxury he has, almost prompting the wolf to enlist. Until the wolf asks the dog about his collar and is terrified when he understands its use. “Of all your meals, I want nothing.” He ran away and is still running…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

Without the transcendent and the transpersonal, we get sick, violent, and nihilistic, or else hopeless and apathetic. We need something “bigger than we are” to be awed by and to commit ourselves to in a new, naturalistic, empirical, non-churchly sense.

— Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being

The empty space left behind by one obsession can always be taken up by another.

— Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel, The Physics of Sorrow

Scientists start out doing work that’s perfect, in the sense that they’re just trying to reproduce work someone else has already done for them. Eventually, they get to the point where they can do original work. Whereas hackers, from the start, are doing original work; it’s just very bad. So hackers start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters