“Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent.”

― Miles Davis

You need a point of view. Something you stand for. Something you believe that others don’t. Something you see that others are blind to. That’s the writing that spreads and makes a difference.

It’s like taking a hallucinogenic drug, without all the bad stuff, like it being illegal and maybe killing you. You come back from the “trip” with a different perspective. A different sense of who you are, and why we’re all here.

It took me awhile to get used to. I would eye every upcoming cluster of people (mostly men) sitting idly around, thinking they were gonna be brown bagging it, eyes vacant from some drug, and get ready to be pestered for help. Instead I found men sitting on tiny stools, sipping tea, hands working prayer beads, deep in conversation.

Who really has it better? Us bankers running around collecting more and more money, stressed by emails piling up, sitting in overly lit corporate spaces, casting judgement on people spending their afternoons laughing outdoors with friends? As the kids say, feels like cope.

Kurt Vonnegut, talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope:

Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of b

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"Today’s CMOs need to operate on a much quicker test-place-analyze-optimize cycle, know which of the thousands of marketing technology solutions can give them an advantage, rebalance their media mix frequently, and juggle vendors, agencies, and services providers with the skill of a top performer at Cirque du Soleil."

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There’s this design heuristic that if people cut across the grass, you should pave the shortcut they make. This gives the path a lovely human fit. But sometimes you want to do the opposite. You want to design ways to get people to take a longer path, a longcut, so they can see or do things they’d miss otherwise.

it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of N... See more