Taylor Pearson > Taylor's Quotes

“We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“Too many consultants fall in love with their own methodology. Success in this business comes from marketing, not from the depth of consulting expertise. I know that this is heresy to many of you, but all the nonrainmaking consulting gurus are working for somebody else and merely earning a paycheck.”
― Alan Weiss, Million Dollar Consulting: the Professional's Guide to Growing a Practice

“Million Dollar Consulting Orchestration: if you don’t blow your own horn, there is no music.”
― Alan Weiss, Million Dollar Consulting: the Professional's Guide to Growing a Practice

“Always ask yourself, “Would I be proud of this if it appeared all over the Internet tomorrow?”
― Alan Weiss, Million Dollar Consulting: the Professional's Guide to Growing a Practice

“All work is an act of philosophy.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The purpose of life is not to be happy—but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.”
― Leo Rosten

“Ambition, I have come to believe, is the most primal and sacred fundament of our being. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act upon that ambition is to turn our backs on ourselves and on the reason for our existence.”
― Steven Pressfield, Turning Pro

“every man is worth   just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself. ”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.” —Elbert Hubbard”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.” —Voltaire”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“somehow it is only when you don’t care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“The fleetest beast to bear you to perfection is suffering.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra A book for all and none

“When in doubt, create assets,”
― Tim Grahl, Your First 1000 Copies: The Step-by-Step Guide to Marketing Your Book

“Creating—that is the great salvation from suffering, and life's alleviation. But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation. Yea, much bitter dying must there be in your life, ye creators! Thus are ye advocates and justifiers of all perishableness. For the creator himself to be the new-born child, he must also be willing to be the child-bearer, and endure the pangs of the child-bearer.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“[Society] is structured to distract people from the decisions that have a huge impact on happiness in order to focus attention on the decisions that have a marginal impact on happiness.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time. —Leonard Bernstein, composer”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“No, markets weren’t “efficient” at finding the truth; they were just very efficient at converging on a conclusion—often the wrong conclusion.”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

“Your most scarce resource is focus.”
― Jeff Walker, Launch: An Internet Millionaire's Secret Formula to Sell Almost Anything Online, Build a Business You Love, and Live the Life of Your Dreams

“Knowest thou not who is most needed by all? He who commandeth great things. To execute great things is difficult: but the more difficult task is to command great things.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“The natural strategic orientation of many companies is toward retaining existing customers and seeking further segmentation opportunities.”
― Renée Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

“For too long we’ve been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching—a market response to inefficient distribution.”
― Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More

“In a world of infinite choice, context—not content—is king.”
― Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More

“The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net’s other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.”
― David Foster Wallace

“If a drug failed as often and had as many side effects as western marriage, the FDA probably would not approve it.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“What is perhaps most interesting about this change is that in each succeeding generation, one’s way of being has been defined less by the society one is, by chance, born into and defined more by personal choice. There is little reason to believe that the ratio of intentionality and choice to chance and destiny will not continue to rise. Increasingly, individuals will define their lives rather than leave that definition to the society into which they are born. This is already happening.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“At that moment, when you feel like you were born into the wrong society or culture, you have a few choices. You can ignore the gap between the world around you and what you feel within. There are lots of ways to do this, from TV to drugs to desperately trying to succeed within the world’s big social inventions. Another way is to rail at the world for its failings, creating a narrative in which you are right and “they” are wrong. Or you can be humbled by trying to change the world around you just enough to realize your own potential.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“[T]he very point of emancipation … is not to give power to those who have earned the right to it, but to lift the helpless to a level where they are free to learn how to use the right. “Those who oppose freedom argue that as illiterates, as slaves, as children, they cannot manage the household, which is true though illiberal. The political history of the West has been a running battle between the "realistic" deniers of one freedom after another and the generous ones who gambled on another truth, that capacity is native to all and depends only on fair conditions for its development.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“pay gap could be less about market realities than the fact that the corporation has yet to be democratized.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“It seems likely that the Internet will do for the corporation what the Guttenberg press did for the church. That is, it will break up structures we had always assumed were permanent: it will render temporal what we assumed was timeless.”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

“Entrepreneurs become entrepreneurs for one simple reason: to be free. If you give that up, then you stop being an entrepreneur, and to hell with that. -          Wilson Harrell, founder of over 100 companies and former publisher of Inc. Magazine”
― Ron Davison, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization