Thank You for Being Late Quotes

“We are generating more information and knowledge than ever today, “but knowledge is only good if you can reflect on it.” And”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist who backed Netscape, Google, and Amazon, doesn’t remember the exact day anymore; all he remembers is that it was shortly before Steve Jobs took the stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on January 9, 2007, to announce that Apple had reinvented the mobile phone. Doerr will never forget, though, the moment he first laid eyes on that phone. He and Jobs, his friend and neighbor, were watching a soccer match that Jobs’s daughter was playing in at a school near their homes in Palo Alto. As play dragged on, Jobs told Doerr that he wanted to show him something. “Steve reached into the top pocket of his jeans and pulled out the first iPhone,” Doerr recalled for me, “and he said, ‘John, this device nearly broke the company. It is the hardest thing we’ve ever done.’ So I asked for the specs. Steve said that it had five radios in different bands, it had so much processing power, so much RAM [random access memory], and so many gigabits of flash memory. I had never heard of so much flash memory in such a small device. He also said it had no buttons—it would use software to do everything—and that in one device ‘we will have the world’s best media player, world’s best telephone, and world’s best way to get to the Web—all three in one.’” Doerr immediately volunteered to start a fund that would support creation of applications for this device by third-party developers, but Jobs wasn’t interested at the time. He didn’t want outsiders messing with his elegant phone. Apple would do the apps. A year later, though, he changed his mind; that fund was launched, and the mobile phone app industry exploded. The moment that Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone turns out to have been a pivotal junction in the history of technology—and the world.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“Our democracy can work only if voters know how the world works, so they are able to make intelligent policy choices and are less apt to fall prey to demagogues, ideological zealots, or conspiracy buffs who may be confusing them at best or deliberately misleading them at worst. As I watched the 2016 presidential campaign unfold, the words of Marie Curie never rang more true to me or felt more relevant: “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“I know a lot about this subject because I saw a healthy community get built, brick by brick, block by block, neighbor by neighbor, close up. It was the one that I grew up in: St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“In May 2012—a year after the Arab awakening erupted—the United States made two financial commitments to the Arab world that each began with the numbers 1 and 3. The U.S. gave Egypt’s military regime $1.3 billion worth of tanks and fighter jets. It also gave Lebanese public school students a $13.5 million merit-based college scholarship program, putting 117 Lebanese kids through local American-style colleges that promote tolerance, gender and social equality, and critical thinking. Having visited both countries at that time, I noted in a column that the $13.5 million in full scholarships bought the Lebanese more capacity and America more friendship and stability than the $1.3 billion in tanks and fighter jets ever would. So how about we stop being stupid?”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“Average is officially over. When I graduated from college I got to find a job; my girls have to invent theirs. I attended college to learn skills for life, and lifelong learning for me afterward was a hobby. My girls went to college to learn the skills that could garner them their first job, and lifelong learning for them is a necessity for every job thereafter.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“This ain’t no cloud, folks! And so, instead of calling this new creative energy source “the cloud,” this book will henceforth use the term that Craig Mundie, the computer designer from Microsoft, once suggested. I will call it “the supernova”—a computational supernova. The”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“Wells describes three ways of thinking about a problem: “inside the box,” “outside the box,” and “where there is no box.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“The eye of a hurricane moves, along with the storm. It draws energy from it, while creating a sanctuary of stability inside it. It is both dynamic and stable—and so must we be. We can’t escape these accelerations. We have to dive into them, take advantage of their energy and flows where possible, move with them, use them to learn faster, design smarter, and collaborate deeper—all so we can build our own eyes to anchor and propel ourselves and our families confidently forward.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“I went into journalism because I love being a translator from English to English.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“«La verdad fundamental de los conservadores es que es la cultura, no la política, lo que determina el éxito de una sociedad. La verdad fundamental de los liberales es que la política puede cambiar una cultura y salvarla de sí misma».”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Gracias por llegar tarde: Cómo la tecnología, la globalización y el cambio climático van a transformar el mundo los próximos años (Deusto)

“Think of the flow of friends through Facebook, the flow of renters through Airbnb, the flow of opinions through Twitter, the flow of e-commerce through Amazon, Tencent, and Alibaba, the flow of crowdfunding through Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe, the flow of ideas and instant messages through WhatsApp and WeChat, the flow of peer-to-peer payments and credit through PayPal and Venmo, the flow”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“24/7/365”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“Life, he added, “did not take over the planet by combat but by networking”—one ecosystem to the next.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“Mother Nature is not a living being, but she is a biogeophysical, rationally functioning, complex system of oceans, atmosphere, forests, rivers, soils, plants, and animals that has evolved on Planet Earth since the first hints of life emerged. She has survived the worst of times and thrived in the best of them for nearly four billion years by learning to absorb endless shocks, climate changes, surprises, and even an asteroid or two.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“Because of the explosive power of exponential growth, the twenty-first century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress;”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“The Great Acceleration marks the phenomenal growth of the global socio-economic system, the human part of the Earth System. It is difficult to overestimate the scale and speed of change. In little over two generations—or a single lifetime—humanity (or until very recently a small fraction of it) has become a planetary-scale geological force. Hitherto human activities were insignificant compared with the biophysical Earth System, and the two could operate independently. However, it is now impossible to view one as separate from the other. The Great Acceleration trends provide a dynamic view of the emergent, planetary-scale coupling, via globalization, between the socio-economic system and the biophysical Earth System. We have reached a point where many biophysical indicators have clearly moved beyond the bounds of Holocene variability. We are now living in a no-analogue world.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“Complexity is free,” she repeated.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“I have probably seen the death of Moore’s law predicted a dozen times,” Intel’s CEO, Brian Krzanich, told me. “When we were working at three microns [one-thousandth of a millimeter: 0.001 millimeters, or about 0.000039 inches], people said, ‘How will we get below that—can we make film thickness thin enough to make such devices and could we reduce the wavelength of light to pattern such small features?’ But each time we found breakthroughs. It is never obvious beforehand and it is not always the answer that is first prescribed that provides the breakthrough. But every time we have broken through the next barrier.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“They need to operate at the speed of Moore’s law.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“If the technology platform for society can now turn over in five to seven years, but it takes ten to fifteen years to adapt to it, Teller explained, “we will all feel out of control, because we can’t adapt to the world as fast as it’s changing. By the time we get used to the change, that won’t even be the prevailing change anymore—we’ll be on to some new change.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings they start,”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“«No hay nada en la vida que debamos temer, sólo debemos entender. Ahora es el momento de entender más, para que podamos temer menos».”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Gracias por llegar tarde: Cómo la tecnología, la globalización y el cambio climático van a transformar el mundo los próximos años (Deusto)

“A failure is a circumstance not yet fully turned to your advantage”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“The rate at which we can adapt is increasing,” said Teller. “A thousand years ago, it probably would have taken two or three generations to adapt to something new.” By 1900, the time it took to adapt got down to one generation. “We might be so adaptable now,” said Teller, “that it only takes ten to fifteen years to get used to something new.” Alas, though, that may not be good enough. Today, said Teller, the accelerating speed of scientific and technological innovations (and, I would add, new ideas, such as gay marriage) can outpace the capacity of the average human being and our societal structures to adapt and absorb them. With that thought in mind, Teller added one more thing to the graph—a big dot. He drew that dot on the rapidly sloping technology curve just above the place where it intersected with the adaptability line. He labeled it: “We are here.” The graph, as redrawn for this book, can be seen on the next page. That dot, Teller explained, illustrates an important fact: even though human beings and societies have steadily adapted to change, on average, the rate of technological change is now accelerating so fast that it has risen above the average rate at which most people can absorb all these changes. Many of us cannot keep pace anymore.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“Teller arrived at our interview on Rollerblades, which is how he keeps up with his daily crush of meetings. He wasted no time before launching into an explanation of how the accelerations in Moore’s law and in the flow of ideas are together causing an increase in the pace of change that is challenging the ability of human beings to adapt. Teller began by taking out a small yellow 3M notepad and saying: “Imagine two curves on a graph.” He then drew a graph with the Y axis labeled “rate of change” and the X axis labeled “time.” Then he drew the first curve—a swooping exponential line that started very flat and escalated slowly before soaring to the upper outer corner of the graph, like a hockey stick: “This line represents scientific progress,” he said. At first it moves up very gradually, then it starts to slope higher as innovations build on innovations that have come before, and then it starts to soar straight to the sky.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“Eric “Astro” Teller, the CEO of Google’s X research and development lab, which produced Google’s self-driving car, among other innovations. Appropriately enough, Teller’s formal title at X is “Captain of Moonshots.” Imagine someone whose whole mandate is to come to the office every day and, with his colleagues, produce moonshots—turning what others would consider science fiction into products and services that could transform how we live and work.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“professors—Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee—entitled The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“today, our social media experiences are designed in a way that favors broadcasting over engagements, posts over discussions, shallow comments over deep conversations. It’s as if we agreed that we are here to talk at each other instead of talking with each other.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“Not everything is better faster or meant to go faster. I am built to think about my grandchildren.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations