Messy Quotes

“This sudden sharpening of our attention doesn’t just apply to pioneering artworks. It can be seen in an ordinary high school classroom. In a recent study, psychologists Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, and Erikka Vaughan teamed up with teachers, getting them to reformat the teaching handouts they used. Half their classes, chosen at random, got the original materials. The other half got the same documents, reformatted into one of three challenging fonts: the dense , the florid , or the zesty . These are, on the face of it, absurd and distracting fonts. But the fonts didn’t derail the students. They prompted them to pay attention, to slow down, and to think about what they were reading. Students who had been taught using the ugly fonts ended up scoring higher on their end-of-semester exams.21 Most of us don’t have”
― Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

“Managers could be tidy-minded simply because tidiness seemed like the right and proper way to be.”
― Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

“Trump made sure both the media and his opponents reacted on his terms. He wasn’t always perfectly prepared, but his preference for speed over perfection ensured that opponents were always scrambling to figure out a response. •”
― Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

“The science writer Brian Christian had an answer: computers are able to imitate humans not because the computers are such accomplished conversationalists, but because we humans are so robotic.”
― Tim Harford, Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World

“Most playgrounds are not open to the talents and purposes of the children who use them. A swing is for swinging; a merry-go-round is for merrily going around. But it is not only children who find themselves nudged and controlled as they wander curiously through life. A good job, a good building, even a good relationship, is open and adaptable. But many jobs, buildings, and relationships are not. They are monotonous and controlling. They sacrifice messy possibility for tidy predictability. And too often, we let that happen, because we feel safer that way. That is a shame.”
― Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

“When we overprotect our children, denying them the opportunity to practice their own skills, learn to make wise and foolish choices, experience pain and loss, and generally make an almighty mess, we believe we’re treating them with love—but we may also be limiting their scope to become fully human.”
― Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

“Hammers and hoists and open fires and trees and all the rest can actually be dangerous, after all. But it turns out that children adjust for risk: if the ground is harder, the play equipment sharp-edged, the spaces and structures uneven, they will be more careful.”
― Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

“Recent research has found a correlation between playing informal games as a child, and being creative as an adult; the opposite was true of the time spent playing formal, organized games.36”
― Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

“The founder of eHarmony, Neil Clark Warren, wants to get into matching people with the perfect job or the perfect financial adviser or even the perfect friend. That may be good business, but you have to wonder whether this effort will work any better for recruiters and job seekers than it does for singles.”
― Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

“It seems to make sense that mess is bad for us, making us suspicious. We have a curious faith in the idea that if only we could live in a tidy world we’d be better people.”
― Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

“Governments continue to be motivated by the idea that the better they comprehend the world, the better they will be able to control and exploit it. They have been joined by large corporations, which also see the value in quantifying and classifying our world. From high-resolution drone and satellite images, to geographically tagged photos and tweets, mobile phones that constantly ping their location to colossal databases, and the “Internet of things”—the idea that most of the objects around us will soon be capable of communicating their whereabouts and status—one way or another, we continue to wander through the world, size it up, and digitally hammer colored nails into it.”
― Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

“A third lesson is to constantly remind yourself of the benefits of tension, which can be easy to forget when all you want is a quiet life.”
― Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

“«Los dispositivos digitales evitan errores pequeños pero preparan el terreno para grandes errores».”
― Tim Harford, El poder del desorden: Para transformar nuestras vidas

“El escritor científico Ed Young describe el método de trabajo de Aiden como «nómada. Va de un lado a otro buscando ideas que le piquen la curiosidad, extiendan sus horizontes y, con suerte, tengan un efecto importante. “No me considero el practicante de una habilidad o un método particular —me explica—. Busco constantemente cuál es el problema más interesante en el que puedo trabajar. Y entonces decido qué tipo de científicos necesito para resolver el problema que me interesa”».[24]”
― Tim Harford, El poder del desorden: Para transformar nuestras vidas