Naveen Kumar Chowdari

“There’s just the Earth and me. Hungrily I stare at it—the faint dot of blue—tiny, infinitesimal, precious, vulnerable, even now receding beyond my eyes’ ability to see. It is my last anchor, my one and only point of connection, of familiarity, of sanity. Even so, a few more minutes, seconds, incalculable moments, and I begin to doubt if I’m looking at anything at all. And after what might be another quarter of an hour . . . “Good-bye, little Pale Blue Dot,” I whisper. But silently, stubbornly, I tell myself, This is not good-bye. No, I do not accept it. Somehow, I will come back. And then, I see it no more. The Earth has dissolved into the darkness, has been swallowed by the cosmic grandeur all around. Only Sol is outside the window, our Sun—and now it alone remains an anchor point of visual reference.”
― Vera Nazarian, Compete

“Part Three In A Nutshell How To Break The Worry Habit Before It Breaks You RULE 1: Crowd worry out of your mind by keeping busy. Plenty of action is one of the best therapies ever devised for curing “wibber gibbers”. RULE 2: Don’t fuss about trifles. Don’t permit little things—the mere termites of life—to ruin your happiness. RULE 3: Use the law of averages to outlaw your worries. Ask yourself: “What are the odds against this thing’s happening at all?” RULE 4: Co-operate with the inevitable. If you know a circumstance is beyond your power to change or revise, say to yourself “It is so; it cannot be otherwise.” RULE 5: Put a “stop-loss” order on your worries. Decide just how much anxiety a thing may be worth—and refuse to give it any more. RULE 6: Let the past bury its dead. Don’t saw sawdust.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and start Living

“We see the same behavior when athletes wear unwashed lucky socks, when investors buy hot stocks, or when people throw good money after bad, confident that things must take a turn for the better. We yearn to make an uncertain world more certain, to gain control over things that we do not control, to predict the unpredictable. If we did well wearing these socks, then it must be that these socks help us do well. If other people made money buying this stock, then we can make money buying this stock. If we have had bad luck, our luck has to change, right? Order is more comforting than chaos. These cognitive errors make us susceptible to all sorts of statistical deceptions. We are too quick to assume that meaningless patterns are meaningful when they are presented as evidence of the consequences of a government policy, the power of a marketing plan, the success of an investment strategy, or the benefits of a food supplement. Our vulnerability comes from a deep desire to make sense of the world, and it’s notoriously hard to shake off.”
― Gary Smith, Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics

“how is it that you came up with so many clever solutions to what seemed to be impossible problems?” “They weren’t, not really . . . clever, I mean. They were actually kind of crazy and not even well thought out. Stupid, you might say.” I pause, feeling like a fool before an audience of millions. “But—with all factors put together, they worked—for the circumstances. It’s like—you know that old myth about the bee? That, according to ‘physics,’ a bumblebee is not ‘aerodynamic’ enough, is not supposed to be able to fly—it just does because it doesn’t know any better? Well, that’s all nonsense. A bumblebee flies just fine! It flies according to physical laws, only different ones, because it itself is different, using other complex variables for its flight method—for example, something called ‘dynamic stall’ comes into play. . . . Anyway, what I did wasn’t clever but kind of all over the place, using everything at my disposal . . . like the bee. It’s like—if you move fast enough and just the right way—if you do some things quickly and desperately enough, hoping they don’t have time to fall apart on you—you can make the seemingly impossible happen. And it’s not ‘before it knows any better.’ It’s before the whole unstable construct falls apart. Move fast enough and you can walk on water. .”
― Vera Nazarian, Qualify