More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
SAM embodies a new civic architecture that has become known as the “collective impact” approach.
StriveTogether method. StriveTogether began in Cincinnati just over a decade ago.
“We’re program rich, but system poor.” In other words, Cincinnati had plenty of programs. What it lacked was an effective system to coordinate them.
organize around the data;
Again, contradicts himself. Just said you cant isolate problems with data and need biographacal narrative, tapestry
Why, despite our best efforts, have we been unable to make this situation better?
Problem oriented? Lol
If you pull one lever here, you’re probably going to produce an unexpected outcome over there.
Taleb
The uncommitted person is the unremembered person.
Great quote
The best adult life is lived by making commitments and staying faithful to those commitments: commitments to a vocation, to a family, to a philosophy or faith, to a community.
The core question for each of us is, Have we educated our emotions to love the right things in the right way?
The relationalist doesn’t walk away from the capitalist meritocracy, the systems of mainstream life. But she balances that worldview with a countervailing ethos that supplements, corrects, and ennobles. She walks in that world, with all its pleasures and achievements, but with a different spirit, a different approach, and different goals. She is communal where the world is too individual. She is more emotional when the world is too cognitive. She is moral when the world is too utilitarian.
Summary
What is my responsibility here? When a person finds his high calling in life, it doesn’t feel like he has taken control;
Society and culture are prior to and more important than politics or the market. The health of society depends on voluntary unselfishness.
Relationships do not scale. They have to be built one at a time, through patience and forbearance.
Again, contradicts
Rebuilding society is not just get-togetherism—convening people in some intellectually or morally neutral way. There has to be a shift in moral culture, a shift in the definition of the good life people imagine together.
Most of us get better at living as we go.
There comes a moment, which may come early or later in life, when you realize what your life is actually about. You look across your life and review the moments when you felt more fully alive, at most your best self.
When you see that, you realize joy is not just a feeling, it is a moral outlook. It is a permanent state of thanksgiving and friendship, communion and solidarity. This is not an end to troubles and cares. Life doesn’t offer us utopia. But the self has shrunk back to its proper size.
One of the things I learned is that if you are in need and you go to your friends for help, they prize the opportunity to help you.
I’d also like to thank Maria Popova, whose Brain Pickings blog is a continual source of wisdom and guidance.
DAVID BROOKS is one of the nation’s leading writers and commentators.
Is he really on the second mountain? Bio feels awfully first mountainy
