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But that was the thing about games. If you weren’t playing, you were being played.
“It was a painful lesson, but eventually I realized that building something meaningful requires you to let go of the obsession with perfection. It requires empowering others and trusting them to do their part, even if they do it differently than you might have. But trust is a two-way street. Autonomy means you’re held accountable.”
you have as much of a chance as an earthworm aspiring to win an Olympic gold. No matter how much wriggling he does, it’s not going to help his triple axel.
“Shankar Vedantam wrote that those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers, while those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine,”
Coercion is no kind of victory.
“Ultimately, the only power we have is to choose how we see the world,” she continued. “We don’t control what happens. But we do get to decide how to interpret what happens, how to synthesize it, what to do next.”
If there’s one thing I believe, it’s that optimism compounds better than cynicism. You can either complain about how some French noble predetermined your desire for a lawn, or laugh at how ridiculous life is and build yourself a rock garden. It all depends on your point of view. And at the end of the day, your point of view makes all the difference in the world.”
You had her, he said. You just needed to let her decide it was her idea. Never sell past the close.
Idealism was a strange house to enter via a broken window.
Sexual predilection is a window into the soul.”
enthusiasm. Eventually, the arguments became circular and ideology corroded affection.
Books are sharks, he remembered reading somewhere once. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.
When you’ve always had something to lose, you don’t know what true desperation feels like. Nobody fights like a rat in a corner.”
Narrative was so much easier to follow when you weren’t living it.
We’re all flawed, myself included, but we also get to choose what to do about
Those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers, while those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine.
Ends and means didn’t justify one another—they were two sides of the same coin.
Dag would take the frustrations of cooperation over the predations of coercion.
Critical thinking without hope was cynicism, while hope without critical thinking was naïveté.
