Antonios Hadjigeorgalis > Antonios's Quotes

“ask the person trying to convince you of something to explain how it would work. Odds are they have not done the work required to hold an opinion.”
― Anonymous

“I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.”
― Charles T. Munger

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
― Bob Samples

“Some can be more intelligent than others in a structured environment—in fact school has a selection bias as it favors those quicker in such an environment, and like anything competitive, at the expense of performance outside it. Although I was not yet familiar with gyms, my idea of knowledge was as follows. People who build their strength using these modern expensive gym machines can lift extremely large weights, show great numbers and develop impressive-looking muscles, but fail to lift a stone; they get completely hammered in a street fight by someone trained in more disorderly settings. Their strength is extremely domain-specific and their domain doesn't exist outside of ludic—extremely organized—constructs. In fact their strength, as with over-specialized athletes, is the result of a deformity. I thought it was the same with people who were selected for trying to get high grades in a small number of subjects rather than follow their curiosity: try taking them slightly away from what they studied and watch their decomposition, loss of confidence, and denial. (Just like corporate executives are selected for their ability to put up with the boredom of meetings, many of these people were selected for their ability to concentrate on boring material.) I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Always make your future bigger than your past.”
― Dan Sullivan, The Quotable Dan Sullivan

“Questions are infinitely superior to answers.”
― Dan Sullivan

“An important place to begin in philosophy is this: a clear perception of one’s own ruling principle.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living

“But what is philosophy? Doesn’t it simply mean preparing ourselves for what may come? Don’t you understand that really amounts to saying that if I would so prepare myself to endure, then let anything happen that will? Otherwise, it would be like the boxer exiting the ring because he took some punches. Actually, you can leave the boxing ring without consequence, but what advantage would come from abandoning the pursuit of wisdom? So, what should each of us say to every trial we face? This is what I’ve trained for, for this my discipline!” —EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 3.10.6–7”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living

“In forming your plan for your future you need to distinguish three different questions: What is possible? What is likely to happen? What is desirable to have happen?”
― Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

“For a complete explanation of the dangers of managers with the wrong kind of ambition, I strongly recommend Dr. Seuss’s management masterpiece Yertle the Turtle.”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers—Straight Talk on the Challenges of Entrepreneurship

“am looking for a [choose product, distribution, or service] company with [enter the type of growth opportunity], generating [define size by SDE range], with [enter any limiters].”
― Walker Deibel, Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game

“The first was that the constantly changing, entirely unforgiving environment in which we all now operate denies the satisfaction of any permanent fix. The second was that the organization we crafted, the processes we refined, and the relationships we forged and nurtured are no more enduring than the physical conditioning that kept our soldiers fit: an organization must be constantly led or, if necessary, pushed uphill toward what it must be. Stop pushing and it doesn’t continue, or even rest in place; it rolls backward.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“More generally, what they lacked was a certain combination of abstract knowledge and knowledge embodied in technological artefacts, namely sufficient wealth. Let me define that in a non-parochial way as the repertoire of physical transformations that they would be capable of causing.”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“Would we seem like insects to it? This can seem plausible only if one forgets that there can be only one type of person: universal explainers and constructors. The idea that there could be beings that are to us as we are to animals is a belief in the supernatural.”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“Instead of looking upon discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all. Pericles, ‘Funeral Oration’, c. 431 BCE”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“Working with a master firsthand is the best education; it’s the surest way of raising the bar. Their excellence demands your excellence. But most of us aren’t lucky enough to have that opportunity. Still, not all is lost. If you don’t have the chance to work with a master directly, you can still surround yourself with people who have higher standards by reading about them and their work.”
― Shane Parrish, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

“Your exemplars needn’t be alive. They can be either dead or fictional, as well. We can learn from both Atticus Finch and Warren Buffett, along with Genghis Khan and Batman. It’s up to you.”
― Shane Parrish, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

“I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything unless I know the other side’s argument better than they do.”
― Shane Parrish, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

“Thus we acquire ever more knowledge of reality by solving problems and finding better explanations. But when all is said and done, problems and explanations are located within the human mind, which owes its reasoning power to a fallible brain, and its supply of information to fallible senses. What, then, entitles a human mind to draw conclusions about objective, external reality from its own purely subjective experience and reason?”
― David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications

“Most errors in judgment happen when we don’t know we’re supposed to be exercising judgment.”
― Shane Parrish, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

“socrates. There’s one proposition that I’d defend to the death, if I could, by argument and by action: that as long as we think we should search for what we don’t know, we’ll be better people—less faint-hearted and less lazy—than if we were to think that we had no chance of discovering what we don’t know and that there’s no point in even searching for it. Meno 86bc”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“People rarely feel as though they’re in caves. They don’t notice until they’ve gotten out and can look back. (The simplest way to illustrate this for yourself is to think about what a fool your younger self was.) So it helps to have provocations that suggest how much we don’t understand but might. To put it more plainly, nobody walks through life feeling like an idiot, though you can no doubt think of plenty of people who fit that description, and it fits all of us from a certain point of view. Idiocy is a relative state and an invisible one to its occupant. People vary widely in how much wisdom they have, but not in their sense of how much they have; anyone’s felt sense of wisdom at any given time tends to be high and stable. It’s tempting to describe that feeling as a constant in the workings of the mind, because that is how it usually seems—but Socrates himself shows that it can vary between people. So let’s just call that sensation of one’s own wisdom a deceptive, insidious, and stubborn feature of human nature. This is the root of the problem that Socrates means to address; it is the master mistake that makes all other mistakes more likely, over a lifetime and by the hour. The Socratic method is a way to correct for it.”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“Clouds stand for the beginnings and ends of flows. They are stocks—sources and sinks—that are being ignored at the moment for the purposes of simplifying the present discussion. They mark the boundary of the system diagram. They rarely mark a real boundary, because systems rarely have real boundaries. Everything, as they say, is connected to everything else, and not neatly. There is no clearly determinable boundary between the sea and the land, between sociology and anthropology, between an automobile’s exhaust and your nose. There are only boundaries of word, thought, perception, and social agreement—artificial, mental-model boundaries.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“The problem can be avoided up front by intervening in such a way as to strengthen the ability of the system to shoulder its own burdens. This option, helping the system to help itself, can be much cheaper and easier than taking over and running the system—something liberal politicians don’t seem to understand. The secret is to begin not with a heroic takeover, but with a series of questions. Why are the natural correction mechanisms failing? How can obstacles to their success be removed? How can mechanisms for their success be made more effective?”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Good-quality olive oil costs a little bit more. However, it tastes neither greasy nor rancid, but rather green and fruity, and it sometimes leaves a peppery feeling in your throat after you swallow it. This is due to the tannins it contains. If this description sounds too abstract, simply try out various oils to find the best, using the various quality seals as a guide. But merrily drizzling your olive oil into the pan for frying is not such a good idea as heat can cause a lot of damage. Hotplates are great for frying up steaks or eggs, but they are not good for oily fatty acids, which can be chemically altered by heat. Cooking oil or solid fats such as butter or hydrogenated coconut oil should be used for frying. They may be full of the much-frowned-upon saturated fats, but they are much more stable when exposed to heat.”
― Giulia Enders, Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ

“Until scientists have filled those gaps in their knowledge, we can make use of the facts we already know to improve gut health. It starts with the little things like mealtimes, for example, which should be enjoyed without pressure, at a leisurely pace. The dinner table should be a stress-free zone, with no place for scolding or pronouncements like “You will remain at the table until you’ve finished the food on your plate!” and without constant television channel hopping. This is important for adults, but it is vital for small children, whose gut brain develops in parallel with their head brain. The earlier in life mealtime calm is introduced, the better. Stress of any kind activates nerves that inhibit the digestive process, which means we not only extract less energy from our food, we also take longer to digest it, putting the gut under unnecessary extra strain.”
― Giulia Enders, Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ

“Have you clarified the primary purpose of the project and communicated it to everyone who ought to know it? And have you agreed on the standards and behaviors you’ll need to adhere to to make it successful? Have you envisioned wild success lately? Have you envisioned success and considered all the innovative things that might result if you achieved it? Have you gotten all possible ideas out on the table—everything you need to take into consideration that might affect the outcome? Have you identified the mission-critical components”
― David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

“31. There is a Method Either we make the system or the system makes us. Constructing a strategy connects our goals to our insight”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“Sergey Brin”
― Seth Godin, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit