Josh Kaufman

One of my favorite passages from The Dhammapada, the collected sayings of Siddhartha Gautama, who is popularly known as The Buddha:

A single wise word bringing peace to the listener
Is worth more than a thousand speeches
Full of empty words.

A single verse full of meaning
Bringing peace to the listener
Is worth more than a thousand verses
Full of empty words.

One may recite a hundred verses full for vain descriptions
But a single verse bringing peace to the listener
Is worth far more.

One may conquer a million men in a single battle;
However, the greatest and best warrior
Conquers himself.

Conquest of one’s self is the greatest victory of all.
Neither a god nor a heavenly musician
Nor a mischievous angel
Of the highest of the six heavenly abodes -
The Paranimmita-heaven, where sensual pleasures prevail -
Can deprive the self-vanquished, restrained person of victory.

The honor paid to the one who has achieved self-mastery
For one single instant
Is worth more than monthly offerings
Of a thousand pieces of gold.

Honoring the one who has achieved self-mastery
For one single instant
Is worth more than living in the forest,
Tending the sacred fire for a hundred years.

Making offerings for glory and recognition
Is not one-quarter as worth as honoring the upright.

Whoever shows reverence and respect for the aged
Is rewarded fourfold…
With long life, beauty, happiness and strength.

Even a single day of a life lived virtuously and meditatively,
Is worth more than a hundred years lived wantonly and
Without discipline.

A single day’s life of a wise and contemplative man
Is worth more than a hundred years lived wantonly and
Without discipline.

A single day’s life of one who puts out great effort
Is better than a life of a hundred years
Lived in idleness and sluggishness.

A single day’s life lived by a man who grasps
The impermanence of all conditioned things
Is worth more than a hundred years lived
In blindness and ignorance.

A single day’s life of one who sees the deathless state
Is worth more than a hundred years
Lived without perceiving it.

A single day’s life of one who sees the truth
Is worth more than a hundred years
Of not seeing the truth.

Herbert Spencer, English philosopher and political theorist:

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

Robertson Davies, novelist, playwright, journalist, and professor:

“There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.”

Example: see “socialism”, as thoroughly refuted by Ludwig von Mises.

David Brin, sci-fi author:

“It is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.”

Stowe Boyd, CEO of Blue Whale Labs:

“People are the center of the universe. Not stuff.”

Fredd Kambo, financier with Shell Oil:

“I don’t bother “networking” anymore, instead, I try to build relationships with people I find interesting, and who I think are doing interesting things. And I make it my mission to help them in any way I can to achieve their mission. I find this much more satisfying, much more honorable, and much more fun. And this is the cool thing about people….When you help them out in this way, they help you out. Not because it’s a tit for tat deal, but because both parties are engaged in a mutually beneficial relationship that extends beyond the next favor.”

Hat tip to Hugh at GapingVoid.

Henry David Thoreau, writer and philosopher:

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost, that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.”

George Bernard Shaw, playwright:

“You see things and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were and I say ‘Why not?‘”

Michelangelo, Renaissance polymath:

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

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.

Karen Lamb:

“A year from now you may wish you had started today.”

W.H. Murray, Scottish mountain climber:

“Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.”

Kelsey and I were walking around the Upper East Side of Manhattan this afternoon, and went into the Metropolitan Museum of Art 15 minutes before closing time. We only had time to see one exhibit (Ancient Egypt) , but it was a fantastic quick date for both of us.

I think “15 Minutes” is a great idea for an ongoing photojournalism / photoblogging series. Take a camera, give yourself 15 minutes to capture the essence of the place you’re visiting, and pick the best shots of your experience. It’s a wonderful exercise in “embracing constraints,” and it’s a great deal of fun.

(For those of you who aren’t aware, Kelsey and I recently moved to Manhattan. More details coming soon.)

Carl Sagan, astronomer and science writer:

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot.

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.

On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Bill Watterson, cartoonist and creator of Calvin and Hobbes, the finest comic strip ever to grace the pages of a newspaper:

“I thought I had a great idea today, but it never really took off. In fact, it didn’t even get on the runway. I guess you could say it exploded in the hangar.”

In my opinion, Watterson is an inspiring model of persistence and integrity - check out the strip’s Wikipedia entry for the story of how he kept Calvin and Hobbes true to his artistic principles and values for 10 years. (He is also the first cartoonist to use the word “booger” in a comic strip.)

(Fun fact: Calvin and I got the chicken pox on the same day - June 12, 1990. As a little guy with an overactive imagination, I related with Calvin very well, and I’ve loved the strip ever since. If you’re in the mood to randomly buy me a Christmas present, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes would make my decade.)

(Images copyright Bill Watterson, of course.)