A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor (The Carls, #2)

by Hank Green

The point is, if you want to be happy, let go of your wants. If you want to be effective, harness them.

You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce. It is not the only thing you will make, nor should it be, but it is something valuable and beautiful.

There are no great men, only moments when power is unleashed, and then dicks like you turn theft and murder from taboos into tools. Really you’re just falling into the well of your own power.

You say I turn theft and murder into tools, but they always have been.”

His tone wasn’t scary because he sounded evil. He sounded sad, like he didn’t want to have to kill me, and that was more terrifying than any malice.

at some point, we have to realize that the places where we share information are not services we use, they are places where we live.

“Power is nothing but ability without restriction.

“You really do believe that power must always go to the people who deserve it, don’t you?” I said, more amazed than angry. “If you didn’t believe it, you’d have to spend some fraction of your time not feeling like Jesus, and that wouldn’t be any fun. “But then someone else gets some power, and you lose some of yours, and you don’t like that power has gone somewhere else. But you also can’t stop believing that power organizes itself correctly because your entire understanding of the world is based on that single idea. So, instead, you convince yourself that they’re cheating or corrupt or lying. Well, guess what? Today, power has organized itself in our hands instead of yours. That doesn’t mean something broke, it means you were never right. It is neither just nor unjust, it is just what happened. And you can rationalize it however you want, but it happened. You lost.”

Appreciation is almost synonymous with value, and I think this is where most meaning comes from.

But we are empathy machines, and one of the most lasting and true ways of finding meaning is to actually be of service.

But it’s more than just comparing ourselves to other people; we also compare our current selves to our past selves, which is why getting better at something makes us feel valuable, even if we’re the only ones who really understand how much we’re improving.

Power concentrates naturally, but that concentration is, by itself, a problem.

The most impactful thing you can do with power is almost always to give it away.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s very important to have friends who are smarter than you . . . and who are also kind to you.

Every day we come in and we do science. We do great science, and I actually feel like the leader of this little team. I feel like I belong to something again. We do it right, and we do it well, and in the morning I come in and I look at my little bent, mangled piece of hard drive and feel something lovely. I feel whatever feeling is the exact opposite of regret.

I think part of the point of loving someone is being able to deal with their brokenness.

You’re radically collaborative, profoundly empathetic, and deeply communal. Everyone who tells you anything different is selling the fear that is the only thing that can break that nature. They do that because it turns people into devices. My only advice: Never do that to another person, and do not let anyone do it to you.

We were awake until morning, laughing and talking about what we’d done and where we were going, and nothing seemed too heavy to carry because all of these people could share the burden. But we also just talked about our friends and our hopes and our scars.

“Your life is written on this body, and I love every piece of it.”

Somehow she made me feel human, and that is, I’ve learned, one of the very best things to be.