Gus Guerrero

he can write about anything he wants, but this freedom feels like a prison. “The less free I am, the freer I appear to be,” he tells the reader, in one of the book’s many takedowns of the creative life.

Meanwhile, given that everything we write comes to us via the many lenses of the experiences we’ve accumulated across a life—we speak of trees, for example, according to what we know of trees by actual experience and through what we’ve experienced of trees in books, movies, nursery rhymes, and more—then everything we do is at some level research fo... See more

In social science, hope is not simply the belief that one’s circumstances will get better; for that, we use the term optimism. Hope is the belief that an individual can make things better.

“Strategy can be considered a simple machine that consists of just four working parts: Ends, Ways, Means, and Assumptions”

For Gray, Ends were the goals, Ways the actions taken, Means were the resources deployed, and Assumptions were the necessary leaps, imagination, and guesses.

“The chief utility of a general theory... of strategy lies in its ability not to point out lessons, but to isolate things that need thinking about. Theory provides insights and questions, not answers.”

Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen (2016) put it even more concisely:

“A theory is a statement of causality. It’s a statement of what causes what and why.”

Theories then, are ideas about how things work - about causality and how to create change. And those who dismiss theory dismiss the practical application and power of ideas.

The untethered – people without a strong connection to an ecology and community – lack a shared past and see little value in working towards a shared future.

“Becoming a person of place makes long-term investments desirable, because the future becomes more valuable to you. Those who have committed to a place, an ecosystem, a community, feel those as... See more

“Late style arrives when you realise that you are: competent enough to write those things you wanted to write when you were twenty-five; impatient enough to have one more go at going all the way; angry enough not to allow anyone else to persuade you to do something else. At the same time, late style is cold, amused, contemptuous and savage about ev... See more

“Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middleclass men and women who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will last forever or else are so frightened it won’t that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.”