Navigating the geography of a creative life requires a compass — not a map
Journey, I am here for. Destined we all are for the same end
Do not forget to be happy during the journey because the journey can be a long one until we reach our destination.
Came across it via Gaur Gopal Das podcast
Way beyond survey
A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won't find any of it in a survey.
- Jeff Bezos
Self made myth
There is no such thing as a 'self-made' man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our success.
- George Burton Adams, American historian
Life’s bike
Life is like riding the bike… if it's easy, you are probably going downhill.
- said Albert Einstein, shared by Vivek
In any case, to keep your balance, you must keep moving.
Kempassion
Never underestimate the power of kindness, empathy, and compassion in your interactions with others.
- Ratan Tata
Non-living and climate change
If we want to tackle climate change, we will have to treat non-living things with higher care and respect if not equal. We have to remember that non-living things are as essential as living beings to maintain the balance in the ecosystem.
- Rahul
Life is too short for long term grudges
When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor. Life is too short for long-term grudges.
- Andrew Ng
How to erase the unwritten?
The problem with any unwritten law is that you don't know where to go to erase it.
- Glaser and Way
Effort is spelled with double F
Efforts put in bad times give you results you never imagined.
- Bibhu Dutta Rout
Tree time
If you don't like where you are, move, you are not a tree.
- Jim Rohn
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?- Unknown
Poor privileged people
There is a [kind of] poverty that comes with privilege, we are all impoverished...
- LD Russell, The story only you can tell
The Road
It is better to travel well than to arrive.
- Gautam Buddha
Life's a road but people keep aiming for destinations.
- Rahul Gupta
True leader
Anybody who changes his principle depending on whom he is dealing, that is not a man who can lead a nation.
Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.
Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.
- Nelson Mandela
Creativity - the child inside an adult
The creative adult is the child who survived.
- Ursula Le Guin
Transformational Genibels
World looks so wrong at so many levels and yet if you look back, some people have changed it ounce by ounce and continue to do so. You can call them transformational geniuses or rebels who never accepted what was served to them but the mankind owes them big. Even if certain things accelerated our way down, many other things accelerated our up. No ones knows when pressing that accelerator how fast the car exactly will go until they look at the speedometer.
Greatness
Greatness of all kinds come at "great" invisible expense.
Problems! You can be agitated by them and try to either solve them or ignore them for bigger problems, by your choice or your destiny, but they are not going to go away unless you do something.
- Rahul Gupta
Audacity to go far, Humility to bring back
To know when to seek an alternative route — with both the audacity to go far and broad in our thinking, and the humility to bring back what we find there.
Ends and Bends
Sometimes, we wait too long for ends before stepping onto a new beginning.
Ends are sometimes not the right path for a new beginning.
There was only one beginning after it all ended. Lucky me! Most people never get that chance.
- Rahul
Hunger without conscience
Hunger takes you places! Not all of them have food worthy of your conscience though.
- Rahul
Don’t let past squeeze your future
Past glory can be sometimes blinding. Never let it hinder your present to achieve future goals. --
Rahul Gupta
It all about putting it together
There is no letter which is not a Mantra, there is no root which is not a medicine, there is no person who is incapable, the one who can put them all together is rare
-- Rahul Gupta
Solutions too have problems
The most important source for problems are solutions.
- Herb Lin
-- Rahul Gupta
We make the tools and then tools make us
I sometimes think of the body and the world in our minds kind of creating a circuit. And so then, we introduce a tool into that circuit, and it's going to shape how we perceive the world, and it's going to shape how we interpret the world. And so the body is at the nexus of our experience of reality, and technology enters into that loop of perception in ways that can be benign, in ways that can be beneficial, in ways that can be detrimental. But it certainly changes it.
- L M Sacasas, quoted in Confessions of an information hoarder
Undress your life to the bare minimum to live free
The best things in life are free. The second best are very expensive.
The best colour in the world is the one that looks good on you.
Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.
The best colour in the world is the one that looks good on you.
Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.
Dress like you are going to meet your worst enemy today.
Feet Foundation Inc
You must find the courage to leave the table where respect is no longer being served.
Stop complaining about a situation that you have chosen to settle in
If you approach the mountain in fear, it will look bigger than it actually is.
There are only so many times you can roll a dice, before it lands on a six.
Your mind is your lead, inject it with positivity.
Your feet are your foundation, walk with purpose.
And your heart is your stamp, make it beautiful.
- Tene Edwards
Long live Ukraine
With patience, it is possible to dig a well with a teaspoon.
Luck always seems to be against the man who depends on it.
Work and you will be strong; sit and you will rot.
- Ukrainian Proverbs
To Russia
The usual contradictions of fascist rhetoric. We're superior, but victims. We're in charge, but our opposition is to blame for everything. We're winning, but be afraid all the time.
Learning machines
I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up...
- Charles T. Munger, Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway
- Charles T. Munger, Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway
Time’s not linear
There are decades where nothing happens, and then weeks where decades happen.
- Lenin
Disruption
The core characteristics of [social] disruption ... are that it:
1) stems from a loss of faith in a society's central institutions;
2) establishes a set of ideas from what was once the fringe of the intellectual world, placing them at the center of a revamped political order; and
3) involves a coherent leadership group committed to the change.
These disruptions are apparent in, but not synonymous with, some of the events commonly called revolutions.
Disruptions don't always change who is in charge – they are, in fact, sometimes necessary to preserve a government that is on the verge of failure. But they will at the very least change the way that a governing group thinks and acts.
1) stems from a loss of faith in a society's central institutions;
2) establishes a set of ideas from what was once the fringe of the intellectual world, placing them at the center of a revamped political order; and
3) involves a coherent leadership group committed to the change.
These disruptions are apparent in, but not synonymous with, some of the events commonly called revolutions.
Disruptions don't always change who is in charge – they are, in fact, sometimes necessary to preserve a government that is on the verge of failure. But they will at the very least change the way that a governing group thinks and acts.
Illusion: communication's biggest adversary
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
Listen to that little voice of hope
Hope is that little voice you hear, which keeps you walking and tries to whisper, 'Maybe' at a time when the entire world has accepted defeat on behalf of you.
- Bibhu Dutta Rout, Founder, Storymirror.com, Author, Wheels of Wish
Century of learning
In this century, it won't be about what you learnt in school or college, but what you learnt later in life. Just because you graduated and threw that cap up, that does not mean that's the last time you ever learned anything.
- Ronnie Screwvala, Moneycontrol interview
Beware of shepherds too
The sheep will spend its entire lifetime fearing the wolf, only to be eaten by the shepherd.
- African proverb
Intervention breeds intervention
One of the downsides of intervention is it breeds more intervention.
- Raghuram Rajan, ex-RBI governor
Failure to learn from failures is a bigger failure
Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.
- William Saroyan
Failure to learn from failures is a bigger failure.
- Rahul Gupta
Belief powers enthusiasm
One needs something to believe in, something for which one can have whole-hearted enthusiasm. One needs to feel that one's life has meaning, that one is needed in this world.
- Hannah Senesh
The Impossible Disguise of Opportunity
We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.
Expect no Expectations
I'm not in this world to live up to your expectations and you're not in this world to live up to mine.
economic indicators lag stock market
while the traditional economic indicators come with an information lag, stock market participants are constantly gauging the present, and what the future could hold for businesses, livelihoods, and recovery
- Nithin, The Ken
Harvest matters but so do seeds
Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
- Robert Stevenson
Habit is the beginning of an end
The evolution from happiness to habit is one of death's best weapons.
- Julio CortƔzar
Survival Instincts Inc
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects!
You're right till you can be
By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong.
- Charles Wadsworth
I fight so that you can too
I might disapprove with everything you say, but I'll fight till death for your right to say it.
- Voltaire or whatever quoteinvestigator points to
Intangibles are the only tangibles
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, not the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
In his world, intangibles are the only tangibles because anything tangible is vapor, it would vanish, its tangibility is momentary whereas intangibles last infinite lifetimes.
- Rahul Gupta
From the west to the east
It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.
- Dorothy Thompson
What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Bob Dylan
lone doesn't mean weak
Don't be afraid of being outnumbered. Eagles fly alone. Pigeons flock together.
- Unknown
shooting stars of C++
C++ is beautiful because every day I come across very different and elegant solutions to the same problem. It hurts because you are always a * away from shooting yourself in the foot.
- Quora answer, Rishabh Mukherjee
can we really count what counts?
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.
- unknown but effective quote writer
Covid-19 is nature's exponential maths
For us, the new age humans, events like epidemics and plagues look really out of place as we imagine them to be belonging to an Earth that was yet not controlled by humans. But the truth is, these events are extremely common in nature that has her pendulum swinging constantly and the momentum to it is provided by the exponential maths she uses.
- Samir Shukla, in a newspaper article
Law of the Jungle keeps it safe from deteriorating into actual one
William Roper: "So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!"
Sir Thomas More: "Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"
William Roper: "Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!"
Sir Thomas More: "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"
Sir Thomas More: "Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"
William Roper: "Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!"
Sir Thomas More: "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"
- Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons
Happen-ink
Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.
- Michael Jordan
Condition and Conditioned
"our air" conditioned
"our water" filtered
"our milk" bottled and pasteurised
"our floor" very very well sanitized
"our food" packaged
"our health" capsuled
when the climate changes
and the nature fails
we will be enjoying
our bottled gale
Times they are changin'
Times we are not
temperatures are climbing
to either flood or drought
"our water" filtered
"our milk" bottled and pasteurised
"our floor" very very well sanitized
"our food" packaged
"our health" capsuled
when the climate changes
and the nature fails
we will be enjoying
our bottled gale
Times they are changin'
Times we are not
temperatures are climbing
to either flood or drought
- Rahul Gupta
Thought about it
The thoughts that run in our nerves are dangerous than the blood that flows in our veins.
- Rahul Gupta
Time for a test, lessons later
In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson.
- Tom Bodett
Nature doesn't let go waste
Even adversities have hidden lessons. In nature, nothing goes waste.
- Rajan Singh,Founder, ConceptOwl
Nature, the visible God
Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he's destroying is this God he's worshipping.
Focus on consumption, not production :(
Products that are sustainable are those produced and consumed locally; when buyers are able to witness the production process, they will demand that it occur in line with their values. When it's out of sight, it's difficult to get enough of them to care. Changing that may require more than a little magic.
Turn to imagination when you are in dark
Turn your face to Sun and shadows will fall behind you.
- Walt Whitman/Hellen Keller
Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.
- Terry Pratchett
Brew served while I travelled
Ambition can be made of anything. - HSBC Ad
You don't own a patke bag. You take care of it for the next generation. - patke bag Ad
The Joy of being somewhere else on holiday is wonderful, but getting there is not so much fun. - Marc Newson, designer
We would know when we were old because we'd tell a story more than once. Relating a story more than once would reveal that not only were our life experiences ever diminishing, but also how bourgeois and middle-class we had become.
[At parties] Dinner is more challenging because you are sitting with people for a protracted length of time. This requires telling them more than one story apiece.
- Melinda Stevens, editor, conde nast traveller
Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.
- Daniel J Boorstin
Everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life.
- John F. Kennedy
Where Liberty is, there is my country.
- Benjamin Franklin
Freshly brewed
To be a chooser, you need to stop being a beggar.
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Everyone wants to take a picture with Santa but not with the person wearing the Santa's mask. Such is the world
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Anything real is complex.
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Construction of mind is the biggest creative adventure one must embark upon every once in a while
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Travelling tells you what moves the world
The shoes and the bags
The lines, deadlines and the airlines
The dresses and the tresses
And all that in between
The work and the network
Suddenly thirst arose and told her version
Of what "really" moves the world
The air and the water
Thethe sunlit day and the moonlit night
The dreams in open eyes
Love love love
Hot food cooked right
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Gaps, Gaps
they fill the streets
Gaps, gaps
they make a treat
Gaps, they create wars
they bring closer, people apart
Gaps, they trigger a talk
Sometimes over a wine,
Others over a lil walk
--------------------
Happiness, It has its way
way to tease, way to appease
way to make u say "give me please"
Just to get that little happiness, we become willing to make others unhappy
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Every generation should avoid settling their score via their next ones
- Rahul Gupta
King of a different kind
If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessities of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.
- Ohio Republican John Sherman said on the floor of Congress
Assumptions hold unlocked value
The harder we fight to hold on to a specific assumption, the more likely there is gold in letting go of them.
- John Seeley Brown
Software complexity address - tests/comments/QA/DB/code
The complexity goes somewhere. It's either into lots tests, or it's into something like shuttle style with lots of comments, or it's into a huge QA department, or it's into the type system / DB schema. It could even be going into the org structure! But something, somewhere is handling the complexity and it is doing so as a partial function to the economic importance of the software to the stakeholders of the software.
Look around, don't stare long
Sometimes we stare so long at the door that is closing that we see too late the one that is open.
- Alexander Graham Bell
La lumiĆØre de Lee
Those who are not aware they are walking in darkness will never seek the light.
- Bruce Lee
Identities, boundaries and violence
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
DNA of life with dreams
For someone who has a dream for the future, gossips, rumours, hardships and frustrations will always be part of your life.
- Jack Ma
Bullet Peace
He that desires peace prepares the bullet because not everyone wants it.
I like to say there's certain things you can't take back: One of them is 'I love you,' and one of them is bullets.
Man vs Nature - Principles of territorial hygiene
Man-made chemicals have become closer to our notion of "hygiene" than nature-made creatures. We are nature-friendly only till nature remains within its territory.
buy but not sell the world
Every time you spend money, you're casting a vote for the kind of world you want.
- Anna LappƩ
Desire, Ability and Worth
The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing.
Control d desire
Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.
- Robert A. Heinlein
Another definition
All failure is failure to adapt. All success is successful adaptation.
- Max McKeown, Author and Strategic Adviser
** I believe this quote needs to be seen in some context. Many a times, people infer being adaptive as in being less persistent on their goals.
Profound disease of thought
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence — whether much that is glorious—whether all that is profound—does not spring from disease of thought—from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
- Edgar Allan Poe
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