provocations
provocative ideas, musings, and statements to mull on
sari and
provocations
In New York, people speak fast. In the American South, they speak slowly. Both of them are a form of politeness, understood in a different way. In New York, you speak quickly because you respect the value of the other person’s time and you don’t want to take up too much of it. In the South, you speak slowly because you want to respect the person by... See more
Adam Grant • Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?
the opposite of a good idea is also a good idea
What are the words you do not have yet? [Or, “for what do you not have words, yet?”]
What do you need to say? [List as many things as necessary]
“What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?” [List as many as necessary today. Then write a new list tomorrow. And
Normal behavior is forgotten. Only weird behavior survives.
Nobody tells stories of when you did the expected — they only tell stories when you did the unexpected.
Normal behavior costs nothing in the short term — but it disappears into the abyss.
Unconventional behavior costs a social price in the short term — but the actions live on as story assets... See more
Nobody tells stories of when you did the expected — they only tell stories when you did the unexpected.
Normal behavior costs nothing in the short term — but it disappears into the abyss.
Unconventional behavior costs a social price in the short term — but the actions live on as story assets... See more
for the first 20 years we teach people to fit in.then they have to unlearn that and figure out how to stand out
It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
Thomas Sowell, “A childish letter” for Jewish World Review (1998)
“It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
–Chuck Palahniuk
“The change before the change suggests that perhaps indescribability is, in itself, an evolutionary condition, a built-in extra budget of possibility for unfamiliar formations. I suspect it is, and this indescribability offers the challenge of how to communicate this unseen, submerged process. One is to accentuate the lateness of responding to
... See moreNot all questions seek answers, some seek journeys.