one child development researcher said
Marketers have become child experts, just like pedophiles.
Mother Teresa
Tell me, Father, why is there so much pain and darkness in my soul?
2 seconds
i was waiting for the cough medicine to take effect when for about 2 seconds, there was a moment of absolute clarity. i was mindful about that moment and nothing else. after that 2 seconds, it occurred to me that i was sick and i felt normal again.
JM Coetzee
God, grant me one wish before I die, I whispered; but then was overtaken with shame at the specificity of the wish, and withdrew it.
Brian Boyd
Nabokov uses humor to undermine our attachment to the ready-made, to enlarge our sense of the possible, to whet our appetite for the surprise of life.
608
a colleague in Australia asked me today about why I’m the firm’s “biggest user” of Factiva. apparently, I have opened 608 articles in July.
One World, One Dream, Universal Human Rights
We find no consolation or comfort in the rise of grandiose sports facilities, or a temporarily beautified Beijing city, or the prospect of Chinese athletes winning medals. We know too well how these glories are built on the ruins of the lives of ordinary people.
Haruki Murakami
Writers and artists are supposed to live a very unhealthy, bohemian kind of life… But I just wanted to do it differently.
fifty percent japanese
Analysts estimate that 20 percent of all luxury goods are sold in Japan and another 30 percent to Japanese traveling abroad — meaning Japanese buy half of all luxury goods. Today, approximately 40 percent of all Japanese own a Vuitton product.
Jack Kerouac
the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing … but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.
marina square and kierkegaard
while trying to escape the mob that thronged marina square for the fireworks, the iceman uttered, the crowd is untruth.
the lesser said, the better
the people at the frontline of many of our food establishments are quite simply, incompetent.
The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss
pg. 7 – The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility. This is an art and a science we will refer to as Lifestyle Design (LD).
pg. 8 – People don’t want to be millionaires – they want to experience what they believe only millions can buy.
pg. 8 – How can one achieve the millionaire lifestyle of complete freedom without first having $1,000,000?
pg. 24 – If you can free your time and location, your money is automatically worth 3-10 time as much.
pg. 32 – The NR aims to distribute “mini-retirements” throughout life instead of hoarding the recovery and enjoyment for the fool’s gold of retirement. By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable.
pg. 70 – The goal is to find your inefficiencies in order to eliminate them and to find your strengths so you can multiply them.
pg. 73 – Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.
pg. 74 – How is it possible that all the people in the world need exactly 8 hours to accomplish their work? It isn’t. 9 – 5 is arbitrary.
pg. 75 – Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.
pg. 78 – The key to having more time is doing less, and there are two paths to getting there, both of which should be used together: 1) Define a short to-do list 2) define a not-to-do list.
pg. 81 – Stop asking for opinions and start proposing solutions… Here are a few lines that help… :
“Can I make a suggestion?” “I propose…” “I’d like to propose…” “I suggest that… What do you think?” “Let’s try… and then try something else if that doesn’t work.”
pg. 83 – Problems, as a rule, solve themselves or disappear if you remove yourself as an information bottleneck and empower others.
pg. 83 – Lifestyle design is based on massive action – output. Increased output necessitates decreased input. Most information is time-consuming negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence.
pg. 91 – In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.
pg. 91 – Doing the important and ignoring the trivial is hard because so much of the world seems to conspire to force crap upon you.
pg. 97 – It is your job to train those around you to be effective and efficient.
pg. 209 – The new mantra is this: Work wherever and whenever you want, but get your work done.
pg. 222 – Most people aren’t lucky enough to get fired and die a slow spiritual death over 30-40 years of tolerating the mediocre.
pg. 228 – In the world of action and negotiation, there is one principle that governs all others: The person who has more options has more power.
pg. 269 – If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it. If you take just this point from this book, it will put you in the top 1% of performers in the world and keep most philosophical distress out of your life.
Quotations featured in The 4-Hour Workweek
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. – Mark Twain
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. – Oscar Wilde
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. – Niels Bohr
Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid. – Heinrich Heine
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. – Albert Einstein
These individuals have riches just as we say that we “have a fever”, when really the fever has us. – Seneca
Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them. – Bill Cosby
Once you say you’re going to settle for second, that’s what happens to you in life. – John F. Kennedy
I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time. – Herbert Bayard Swope
Everything popular is wrong. – Oscar Wilde
Many a false step was made by standing still. – Fortune Cookie
Named must your fear be before banish it you can. – Yoda
Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. – Benjamin Disraeli
Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheaperst fare, with course and rough dress, saying to yourself the whike: “Is this the condition that I feared?” – Seneca
You have comfort. You don’t have luxury. And don’t tell me money plays a part. The luxury I advocate has nothing to do with money. It cannot be bought. It is the reward of those who have no fear of discomfort. – Jean Cocteau
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. – Mark Twain
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. – George Bernard Shaw
One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity. – Bruce Lee
Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away. – Antoine De Saint-Exupéry
It is vain to do with more what can be done with less. – William Of Occam
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. – Albert Einstein
There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace. – Robert J. Sawyer
Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate. – Dave Barry
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone. – Henry David Thoreau
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it. – Malcolm X
I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow. – Woodrow Wilson
Creation is a better means of self-expression than possession; it is through creating, not possessing, that life is revealed. – Vida D. Scudder
The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. – Warren G. Bennis
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day. – Robert Frost
If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time. – Chinese proverb
Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. – Thomas J. Watson
Only those who are alseep make no mistakes. – Ingvar Kamprad
Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment. – Paul Fussel
The simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, than research. – Rolf Potts
There is more to life than increasing its speed. – Mohandas Gandhi
This is the very perfection of a man, to find out his own imperfection. – Saint Augustine
Travelling is the ruin of all happiness! There’s no looking at a building here after seeing Italy. – Fanny Burney
To be free, to be happy and fruitful, can only be attained through sacrifice of many common but overestimated things. – Robert Henri
To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass. – Anne Lamott
There is not enough time to do all the nothing we want to do. – Bill Watterson
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another. – Anatole France
People say that what we are seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive. – Joseph Campbell
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. – Viktor E. Frankl
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike. – Oscar Wilde
Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas. – Paula Poundstone
The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive. – Thich Nhat Hanh
There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living; there is nothing harder to learn. – Seneca
A hypocrite is a person who – but who isn’t? – Don Marquis
they kill us for their sport
some weeks ago, i paid some good money to watch a play and found myself seated with rich people who looked nice, dressed nice and talked nice. we saw on stage, sisters plotting and flattering, brother scheming and usurping and murders and betrayals and madness.
during the enthusiastic standing ovation, i wondered how many of us saw ourselves in the play and whether we were applauding the actors or celebrating the fact that we got away with it all.
James Kelman
I never bothered about alienating readers, neither then nor now. The priority was to write the story properly. The readers could take care of themselves.
embarrassed
i am deeply embarrassed.
many more people have been coming to the blog goggling for effortless jo’s real name.
don’t get me wrong – i love people reading. it’s just that there’s so much more better writing here (most of it not mine) than that couple of posts.
it’s like you cook up a real feast at home for a bunch of people and the real reason why they come is because of your porn collection.
of course i’m not saying that the effortless jo’s stuff is porn.
it just isn’t very good.
i found it
i finally got it. and of all places, it was at kinokuniya, ngee ann city.
at most of the christian bookstores gift shops in Singapore, nobody’s heard of n.t. wright and he’s only one of the leading New Testament scholars in the world. not to worry though, there’s lots of christian rock and roll and books on finding soul mates and lots and lots of stuff you can hang on doors and walls.
Alain de Botton
…life is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behavior of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error.
humour and religious fundamentalism
in richard wiseman’s quirkology, there is a chapter on the world’s funniest joke and a little aside on how humour and religious fundamentalism don’t go very well together.
“(Vassilis) Saroglou argues that there is a natural incompatibility between religious fundamentalism and humour. The creation and appreciation of humour requires a sense of playfulness, an enjoyment of incongruity…, and a high tolerance of uncertainty. Humour also frequently involves mixing elements that don’t go together, threatens authority, and contains sexually explicit material. In addition, the act of laughter involves a loss of self-control and self-discipline. All of these elements… are the antithesis of religious fundamentalism, with research showing that those who subscribe to it tend to value serious activities over playfulness, certainty over uncertainty, sense over nonsense, self-mastery over impulsiveness, authority over chaos, and mental rigidity over flexibility.”
Saroglou based his research on some experiments detailed in the book and his paper can be found here.
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