updated 1mo ago
For Want of a Nail
- As you go up the ranks of the organization, your specialty becomes less and less important, and yet the tendency is to hold on to it longer and longer. If it’s the only subject or skill you know better than anything else, you tend to see it everywhere. Even where it doesn’t exist. Every problem is a nail and you just happen to have a hammer.
from The Generalized Specialist: How Shakespeare, Da Vinci, and Kepler Excelled by Shane Parrish
Keely Adler added
Extending the metaphor of carpentry, it’s first necessary to be able to saw wood neatly and to drive nails. Later you can bevel the edges or add elegant finials, if that’s your taste. But you can never forget that you are practicing a craft that’s based on certain principles.
from On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser
The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unloved life worth examining? It seems a strange question until one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not. What we fantasize about, what we long for, are th
... See morefrom Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life by Adam Phillips
sari added