To make a life together was to be forever putting ourselves at each other’s mercy, chamber loaded, safety off.

If you know something’s going to work, it’s not worth working on. It requires no courage. It requires no faith. It requires no skin in the game. Whether you’re a spy or a teacher or a spouse or a painter or an abuela or an astronaut or a monk or a barista or a board-game designer, the bits that matter are the bits you make matter by putting

When someone says you’re a natural, it just means they don’t realize how much practice you’ve had.

Once you see perfection for what it is, a mirage, you start to notice new possibilities in the real world it was obscuring.

True coffee nerds realize the quest is hopeless. They recognize that perfection is abstract, a conceptual ideal, while coffee is a hot fluid sloshing around your chipped mug. By abandoning the quest and thereby graduating from aspiring to true coffee nerds, they attain the grail they were seeking all along: a deep appreciation of every sip of

“People who manage people live on calendar time,” said Jerry. “People who solve problems live outside time, at least temporarily. When people who manage people who solve problems forget that interruption is sabotage, things fall apart.”

Wealth is wanting what you have. Money is a tool for trading what you have for what you want.

you can’t extract the terror from the power.

With a few notable exceptions, the profoundly unimaginative suburban office parks are full of buildings built for people who couldn’t care less because they live on the internet, meatspace being but a poor shadow of the digital dimension they can bend to their wills with a single commit.