Vovka > Vovka's Quotes

“Consider the results of a study conducted at Northwestern University. Researchers gave online participants information about a pair of sofas we’ll call the Dream and the Titan. The two, manufactured by different furniture companies, were comparable in all respects except for their cushions. The Dream’s cushions were softer and more comfortable than the Titan’s but less durable. In”
― Robert B. Cialdini, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

“There's a critical insight in all this for those of us who want to learn to be more influential. The best persuaders become the best through pre-suasion - the process of arranging for recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it. To persuade optimally, then, it's necessary to pre-suade optimally. But how?

In part, the answer involves an essential but poorly appreciated tenet of all communication: what we present first changes the way people experience what we present to them next.”
― Robert B. Cialdini, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

“We are gods with anuses.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“Work, like marriage, is a place you can lose yourself more easily perhaps than finding yourself. It is a place full of powerful undercurrents, a place to find our selves, but also, a place to drown, losing all sense of our own voice, our own contribution and conversation.”
― David Whyte, The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

“wouldn’t that person be even more amazing if, instead of telling the time, he or she built a clock that could tell the time forever, even after he or she was dead and gone?3”
― Jim Collins, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

“As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.”
― Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

“The act of making music, clothes, art, or even food has a very different, and possibly more beneficial effect on us than simply consuming those things. And yet for a very long time, the attitude of the state toward teaching and funding the arts has been in direct opposition to fostering creativity among the general population. It can often seem that those in power don’t want us to enjoy making things for ourselves—they’d prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation. This might sound like I believe there is some vast conspiracy at work, which I don’t, but the situation we find ourselves in is effectively the same as if there were one. The way we are taught about music, and the way it’s socially and economically positioned, affect whether it’s integrated (or not) into our lives, and even what kind of music might come into existence in the future. Capitalism tends toward the creation of passive consumers, and in many ways this tendency is counterproductive.”
― David Byrne, How Music Works

“The two fundamental dimensions that distinguish people who rise to great heights and accomplish amazing things are will, the drive to take on big challenges, and skill, the capabilities required to turn ambition into accomplishment. The three personal qualities embodied in will are ambition, energy, and focus. The four skills useful in acquiring power are self-knowledge and a reflective mind-set, confidence and the ability to project self-assurance, the ability to read others and empathize with their point of view, and a capacity to tolerate conflict.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Power: Why Some People Have it and Others Don't

“Studying anthropology tends t change the way you look at the world. It leaves a distinctive chip in your brain, or lens over your eye. Your mind-set becomes instinctive: wherever you go to work, you start asking questions about how different elements of society interact, looks at the gap between rhetoric and reality, noting the concealed functions of rituals and symbols, and hunting out social silences. Anyone who has been immersed in anthropology is doomed to be an insider-outside for the rest of their life; they can never take anything entirely at face value, but are compelled to constantly ask: why?”
― Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

“the key point is this: with or without a formal training in anthropology, we all do need to think about the cultural patterns and classification systems that we use. If we do, we can master our silos. If we do not, they will master us.”
― Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: Why putting everything in its place isn't such a bright idea

“A great idea that excites your organization but not your customer creates no value. A great idea that you cannot implement is a theoretical dream. And a great idea that you implement, but which the competition implements better, is at best a disadvantaged effort and at worst a waste of both time and resources.”
― Ron Adner, The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation

“If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“we shall quickly find ourselves about as important to the algorithms as animals currently are to us.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“Because of preferential attachment, most social networks are profoundly inegalitarian.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“Thomas-Hunt’s research had shown that if we believe everybody is biased, we will be too. But the research also demonstrated the reverse: if we believe that everyone around us is trying hard to fight against those stereotypes and prejudices, we’ll do the same. Call it peer pressure, or call it a pack mentality. Whatever it is, it works. Our own biases disappear.”
― Joanne Lipman, That's What She Said: What Men Need to Know (and Women Need to Tell Them) About Working Together – A Practical Solutions Guide for Achieving Gender Parity and Transforming Culture

“A bigger hurdle, once we drill down into it, is the basic assumption that underlies the pipeline theory: that we are fair in the first place.”
― Joanne Lipman, That's What She Said: What Men Need to Know (and Women Need to Tell Them) about Working Together

“1. Interrupt the interrupters.....

If a woman is cut off in conversation, cut off the interruptor: 'Olivia was speaking. Let's let her finish her thought first.”
― Joanne Lipman, That's What She Said: What Men Need to Know (and Women Need to Tell Them) about Working Together

“One study found that women with blond hair earn 7 percent more than brunettes. Women who wear makeup get better jobs and quicker promotions. Thin women outearn heavier women; white women who are overweight pay a financial penalty of a 12 percent drop in their wealth.......

The average woman spends $15,000 on cosmetics alone during her lifetime.”
― Joanne Lipman, That's What She Said: What Men Need to Know (and Women Need to Tell Them) about Working Together

“With the right approach and a true ongoing commitment, you can foster a culture that encourages communication and feedback at all levels; one where honesty trumps hierarchy and even the lowest-ranking member feels safe putting problems on the table.”
― Tasha Eurich, Insight: Why We Are Less Self-Aware Than We Think—and What to Do About It

“Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“the top 10 percent of humanity have come to hold 90 percent of the planet’s wealth. It is no wonder that the American voting public—like other publics around the world—has turned more resentful and suspicious in recent years, embracing populist movements on the left and right, bringing socialism and nationalism into the center of political life in a way that once seemed unthinkable, and succumbing to all manner of conspiracy theory and fake news.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much”
― Helen Keller

“Funny, there had been a time when building things was what America did. From massive dams to towering skyscrapers, from mechanized factories to moon rockets, the nation had created, had viewed that as part of the national identity. Being an engineer or an architect had once been high aspirations.”
― Marcus Sakey, A Better World

“a pink T-shirt emblazoned with the famous image created by Andy Warhol, with the likeness of Che Guevara, repeated several times and in different tones. For her it was only a trendy T-shirt, empty of political significance”
― Pedro Barrento, The Algorithm of Power

“We dance to seduce ourselves. To fall in love with ourselves. When we dance with another, we manifest the very thing we love about ourselves so that they may see it and love us too.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Because we are atomized individuals with no collective power, we are left with a grandiose yet ultimately meaningless sense of the importance of our purchases, our gestures, our decisions.

Fisher's book asks us to accept the amorality of our own consumption. In other words, we keep looking to consumption as the site of our ethical choices, but the answer doesn't lie there. Our judgment doesn't make us better consumers. It actually makes us more trapped in the spectacle, more complicit in what Fisher calls "the atmosphere of late capitalism.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma