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Kindle Notes & Highlights
there is a difference between being beaten and being strengthened, for as it happens, it is hard to perceive.
Danish hygge, a word with no cognate in English that describes the feeling of sitting around a campfire in the cold with friends.
Failure became not the outcome, but the refused attempt.
FailCon, a summit in Silicon Valley, which also takes place around the world from France to Australia, helping people “be wrong as fast as they can,”
“When you go this long, all the people who were giving you advice in the beginning start to think you are crazy,” Travis said. “So ultimately, by the time you get this far in, you don’t have anyone to talk to.
Not only do we often give up on ourselves when faced with holding a minority opinion. We don’t even know that we’re doing it.
Concepts are patchworks like centos, an aggregate of ideas from others over time.
“Innovation is an outcome. Play is a state of mind. Innovation is often what we get when we play,”
Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust recently said that we need to make it safer to fail.15
Will Smith. He once said, “The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be outworked. Period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me; you might be all of those things—you got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things: You’re getting off first, or I’m gonna die. It’s really that simple, right? … You’re not going to outwork me.”
The higher level it is, the more you should be tenacious. The lower level it is, the more concrete or particular it is, the more you should be willing to give it up.
“Every important work of art can be regarded both as a historical event and as a hard-won solution to some problem,” art historian George Kubler said about the entire arc of artistic production in The Shape of Time, his seminal text describing what he sees as the generative force behind artistic development across the ages.
The gift of failure is a riddle. Like the number zero, it will always be both the void and the start of infinite possibility.
Mizuta Masahide’s haiku: “My barn having burned down / I can now see the moon.”
