On Government

Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist:

“There are four ways in which you can spend money:

1. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.
2. You can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.
3. I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!
4. I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get.

That’s government, and that’s close to 40% of our national income.”

Source unknown:

“The last official act of any government is to loot the treasury.”

George Washington, first elected president of the United States of America:

“Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States of America and author of the Declaration of Independence:

“That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.”

“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”

(Related reading: An Open Letter to High School Students)

This entry was written by Josh Kaufman, posted on July 14, 2009 at 4:40 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

On Efficiency

Peter Drucker, 20th century management theorist and consultant:

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”

This entry was written by Josh Kaufman, posted on December 12, 2008 at 11:51 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

On Mistakes

Herbert Spencer, 19th century British author, economist, philosopher:

“The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.”

ApochPiQ, The Bag of Holding:

“The most successful people in history are not those who have attained perfection. On the contrary, the successful people are those who have learned to handle failure. Our collective consciousness is slathered with pithy quotes from Newton, Einstein, Edison, and a horde of others; they speak of standing on the shoulders of giants, of dogged persistence in the face of apparent defeat, of sweat and work and getting back up after we’ve been kicked down and beaten a little bit.

“All the great people became great not because they had some magic recipe for perfection, but because they had mastered fallibility.”

This entry was written by Josh Kaufman, posted on at 6:46 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

On Life

David Kelley, philosopher:

“You have a life. It’s a precious thing, and it’s yours. Make the most of it. Don’t give it up, don’t waste it on things you don’t value, regardless of what others demand from you. Work with others when you can, love and give yourself to them as they deserve – but always by the standard of what is best for your own life. The purpose of ethics is to help you find and enjoy what is best, not to sacrifice it. Pursuing your happiness, taking full responsibility for it, is a worthy and challenging task. It will take thought and effort, it will take ambition and courage, it will take everything you have, and if you succeed you will have the right to be proud, morally proud, of what you have accomplished.” (Source)

This entry was written by Josh Kaufman, posted on November 23, 2008 at 2:46 am, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

On Tradeoffs

Kevin Kelly, writer, photographer, and founding editor of Wired magazine:

“We know that reality is a tradeoff machine. Anything that consumes energy or information requires a tradeoff. New powers will generate new problems, and incur new costs elsewhere. You can’t be infinite in all directions.” (Source)

Thomas Sowell, economist and author:

“There are no solutions…there are only trade-offs.”

This entry was written by Josh Kaufman, posted on November 20, 2008 at 3:24 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

On Self-Deception

Eliezer Yudkowsky, Friendly AI researcher and contributor to the blog Overcoming Bias:

“Never try to deceive yourself, or offer a reason to believe other than probable truth; because even if you come up with an amazing clever reason, it’s more likely that you’ve made a mistake than that you have a reasonable expectation of this being a net benefit in the long run.”

Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist:

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”

This entry was written by Josh Kaufman, posted on October 21, 2008 at 1:03 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

On Mental Models

John T. Reed, author of Succeeding:

“When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify identify the core principles – generally three to twelve of them – that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles.”

Charlie Munger, vice-president of Berkshire Hathaway and business partner of Warren Buffett:

“What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together o­n a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

“You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct o­n this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience o­n a latticework of models in your head.

“What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models because if you just have o­ne or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does…

“It’s like the old saying, “To the man with o­nly a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” And of course, that’s the way the chiropractor goes about practicing medicine. But that’s a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world. So you’ve got to have multiple models.

“And the models have to come from multiple disciplines because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in o­ne little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.

“You may say, “My God, this is already getting way too tough.” But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly wise person. And, of those, o­nly a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.“

Full text of Mr. Munger’s excellent speech, “The Art of Stockpicking,” available here.

Bonus “man with a hammer” example: Tim Wu reviews The Long Tail by Chris Anderson.

This entry was written by Josh Kaufman, posted on October 19, 2008 at 12:29 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

On Success

John T. Reed, author of Succeeding:

“Each field of endeavor has a bunch of tricks, shortcuts, best practices, rules, whatever you want to call them. If you want to succeed in that field, you must learn them and master them. The great news about them is that everybody can master these things, but many of the more talended people will not master those things and you will beat them out as a result.”

Marcus Buckingham, The One Thing You Need to Know:

“The one thing you need to know about sustained individual success: Discover what you don’t like doing and stop doing it.“

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple:

“I get asked this a lot and I have a pretty standard answer which is, a lot of people come to me and say “I want to be an entrepreneur”. And I go “Oh that’s great, what’s your idea?”. And they say “I don’t have one yet”. And I say “I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you’re really passionate about because it’s a lot of work”. I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don’t blame them. Its really tough and it consumes your life. If you’ve got a family and you’re in the early days of a company, I can’t imagine how one could do it. I’m sure its been done but its rough. Its pretty much an eighteen hour day job, seven days a week for awhile. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there.”

Jason Fried, partner at 37signals:

“… What’s success? Do you need to make Google money? Do you need to have Microsoft market share? Do you need to have Apple’s brand loyalty? Nope.

So what do you need to be successful? Luckily that’s entirely up to you. Success is relative.

The best way to be successful is to define your own success. Success can be tiered too. If you want to eventually run a public company you can still be successful on your way there. If you want to stay small you can fight growth and remain successful too. It’s up to you, not up to someone else.

A small company with a few employees pulling in $25,000/month can be successful. Another company with a couple thousand paying customers can be successful. And another company that just breaks even but stays happily afloat can be successful. You don’t need to win every medal to be successful.”

Hat tip to workhappy.net.

This entry was written by Josh Kaufman, posted on at 12:02 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

On Work

Frank Lloyd Wright, architect:

“I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.”

Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States:

“I’m a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”

Peter Drucker, father of modern management theory:

“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”

Jean De La Fontaine, 17th century French poet:

“By the work one knows the workman.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan:

“Screw the money. No money can compensate for being turned into a rat in a cage… We’ve got plenty of slaves. You can identify them because they wear neckties.”

This entry was written by Josh Kaufman, posted on October 14, 2008 at 3:36 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

On Academia

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan:

“Academia has nothing to do with producing knowledge. They produce PR. The four most important thinkers of modern history – Freud, Marx, Einstein, Darwin – none was a conventional academic.” (Source)

A.N. Wilson, English historian and columnist:

“In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity – or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity – by being opinionated rather than by being learned.”

This entry was written by Josh Kaufman, posted on at 3:26 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.