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The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel; Quotes

“A genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind.” —Napoleon

“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” —Sherlock Holmes

The premise of this book is that doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.

I love Voltaire’s observation that “History never repeats itself; man always does.” It applies so well to how we behave with money.

Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.

The challenge for us is that no amount of studying or open-mindedness can genuinely recreate the power of fear and uncertainty.

We all think we know how the world works. But we’ve all only experienced a tiny sliver of it. As investor Michael Batnick says, “some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.” We are all victims, in different ways, to that truth.

And that idea—“What you’re doing seems crazy but I kind of understand why you’re doing it.”—uncovers the root of many of our financial decisions.

Luck and risk are siblings. They are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort.

NYU professor Scott Galloway has a related idea that is so important to remember when judging success—both your own and others’: “Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.”

If you give luck and risk their proper respect, you realize that when judging people’s financial success—both your own and others’—it’s never as good or as bad as it seems.

The line between bold and reckless can be thin. When we don’t give risk and luck their proper billing it’s often invisible.

Be careful who you praise and admire. Be careful who you look down upon and wish to avoid becoming.

Some people are born into families that encourage education; others are against it. Some are born into flourishing economies encouraging of entrepreneurship; others are born into war and destitution. I want you to be successful, and I want you to earn it. But realize that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself.

Therefore, focus less on specific individuals and case studies and more on broad patterns.

Bill Gates once said, “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

Failure can be a lousy teacher, because it seduces smart people into thinking their decisions were terrible when sometimes they just reflect the unforgiving realities of risk. The trick when dealing with failure is arranging your financial life in a way that a bad investment here and a missed financial goal there won’t wipe you out so you can keep playing until the odds fall in your favor.

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.”

If you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you, it just does not make any sense.

There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need.

The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving.

Happiness, as it’s said, is just results minus expectations.

Social comparison is the problem here.

A friend of mine makes an annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas. One year he asked a dealer: What games do you play, and what casinos do you play in? The dealer, stone-cold serious, replied: “The only way to win in a Las Vegas casino is to exit as soon as you enter.” That’s exactly how the game of trying to keep up with other people’s wealth works, too.

“Enough” is not too little.

There are many things never worth risking, no matter the potential gain.

Reputation is invaluable. Freedom and independence are invaluable. Family and friends are invaluable. Being loved by those who you want to love you is invaluable. Happiness is invaluable. And your best shot at keeping these things is knowing when it’s time to stop taking risks that might harm them. Knowing when you have enough.

As glaciologist Gwen Schultz put it: “It is not necessarily the amount of snow that causes ice sheets but the fact that snow, however little, lasts.”

If something compounds—if a little growth serves as the fuel for future growth—a small starting base can lead to results so extraordinary they seem to defy logic.

There are a million ways to get wealthy, and plenty of books on how to do so. But there’s only one way to stay wealthy: some combination of frugality and paranoia.

Even if “wealthy” is not a word you’d apply to yourself, the lessons from that observation apply to everyone, at all income levels. Getting money is one thing. Keeping it is another.

There are two reasons why a survival mentality is so key with money. One is the obvious: few gains are so great that they’re worth wiping yourself out over. The other, as we saw in chapter 4, is the counterintuitive math of compounding.

More than I want big returns, I want to be financially unbreakable. And if I’m unbreakable I actually think I’ll get the biggest returns, because I’ll be able to stick around long enough for compounding to work wonders.

Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan.

A barbelled personality—optimistic about the future, but paranoid about what will prevent you from getting to the future—is vital.

The idea that something can gain over the long run while being a basketcase in the short run is not intuitive, but it’s how a lot of things work in life. By age 20 the average person can lose roughly half the synaptic connections they had in their brain at age two, as inefficient and redundant neural pathways are cleared out. But the average 20-year-old is much smarter than the average two-year-old. Destruction in the face of progress is not only possible, but an efficient way to get rid of excess.

“I’ve been banging away at this thing for 30 years. I think the simple math is, some projects work and some don’t. There’s no reason to belabor either one. Just get on to the next.” —Brad Pitt accepting a Screen Actors Guild Award

Napoleon’s definition of a military genius was, “The man who can do the average thing when all those around him are going crazy.” It’s the same in investing.

There is the old pilot quip that their jobs are “hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.” It’s the same in investing. Your success as an investor will be determined by how you respond to punctuated moments of terror, not the years spent on cruise control.

There are fields where you must be perfect every time. Flying a plane, for example. Then there are fields where you want to be at least pretty good nearly all the time. A restaurant chef, let’s say. Investing, business, and finance are just not like these fields.

The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”

The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend money pays.

Having a strong sense of controlling one’s life is a more dependable predictor of positive feelings of wellbeing than any of the objective conditions of life we have considered.

The hardest thing about this was that I loved the work. And I wanted to work hard. But doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate. There is a name for this feeling. Psychologists call it reactance. Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, summed it up well: People like to feel like they’re in control—in the drivers’ seat. When we try to get them to do something, they feel disempowered. Rather than feeling like they made the choice, they feel like we made it for them. So they say no or do something else, even when they might have originally been happy to go along.

John D. Rockefeller was one of the most successful businessmen of all time. He was also a recluse, spending most of his time by himself. He rarely spoke, deliberately making himself inaccessible and staying quiet when you caught his attention. A refinery worker who occasionally had Rockefeller’s ear once remarked: “He lets everybody else talk, while he sits back and says nothing.” When asked about his silence during meetings, Rockefeller often recited a poem: A wise old owl lived in an oak, The more he saw the less he spoke, The less he spoke, the more he heard, Why aren’t we all like that wise old bird?

Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.

When you see someone driving a nice car, you rarely think, “Wow, the guy driving that car is cool.” Instead, you think, “Wow, if I had that car people would think I’m cool.” Subconscious or not, this is how people think. There is a paradox here: people tend to want wealth to signal to others that they should be liked and admired. But in reality those other people often bypass admiring you, not because they don’t think wealth is admirable, but because they use your wealth as a benchmark for their own desire to be liked and admired.

The letter I wrote after my son was born said, “You might think you want an expensive car, a fancy watch, and a huge house. But I’m telling you, you don’t. What you want is respect and admiration from other people, and you think having expensive stuff will bring it. It almost never does—especially from the people you want to respect and admire you.”

It’s a subtle recognition that people generally aspire to be respected and admired by others, and using money to buy fancy things may bring less of it than you imagine. If respect and admiration are your goal, be careful how you seek it. Humility, kindness, and empathy will bring you more respect than horsepower ever will.

Exercise is like being rich. You think, “I did the work and I now deserve to treat myself to a big meal.” Wealth is turning down that treat meal and actually burning net calories. It’s hard, and requires self-control. But it creates a gap between what you could do and what you choose to do that accrues to you over time.

The first idea—simple, but easy to overlook—is that building wealth has little to do with your income or investment returns, and lots to do with your savings rate.

Personal savings and frugality—finance’s conservation and efficiency—are parts of the money equation that are more in your control and have a 100% chance of being as effective in the future as they are today. If you view building wealth as something that will require more money or big investment returns, you may become as pessimistic as the energy doomers were in the 1970s. The path forward looks hard and out of your control. If you view it as powered by your own frugality and efficiency, the destiny is clearer. Wealth is just the accumulated leftovers after you spend what you take in. And since you can build wealth without a high income, but have no chance of building wealth without a high savings rate, it’s clear which one matters more.

More importantly, the value of wealth is relative to what you need.

Past a certain level of income, what you need is just what sits below your ego.

And you don’t need a specific reason to save.

Saving is a hedge against life’s inevitable ability to surprise the hell out of you at the worst possible moment.

Everyone knows the tangible stuff money buys. The intangible stuff is harder to wrap your head around, so it tends to go unnoticed. But the intangible benefits of money can be far more valuable and capable of increasing your happiness than the tangible things that are obvious targets of our savings. Savings without a spending goal gives you options and flexibility, the ability to wait and the opportunity to pounce. It gives you time to think. It lets you change course on your own terms. Every bit of savings is like taking a point in the future that would have been owned by someone else and giving it back to yourself.

That flexibility and control over your time is an unseen return on wealth.

Intelligence is not a reliable advantage in a world that’s become as connected as ours has. But flexibility is.

In a world where intelligence is hyper-competitive and many previous technical skills have become automated, competitive advantages tilt toward nuanced and soft skills—like communication, empathy, and, perhaps most of all, flexibility. If you have flexibility you can wait for good opportunities, both in your career and for your investments. You’ll have a better chance of being able to learn a new skill when it’s necessary. You’ll feel less urgency to chase competitors who can do things you can’t, and have more leeway to find your passion and your niche at your own pace. You can find a new routine, a slower pace, and think about life with a different set of assumptions. The ability to do those things when most others can’t is one of the few things that will set you apart in a world where intelligence is no longer a sustainable advantage.

If fevers are beneficial, why do we fight them so universally? I don’t think it’s complicated: Fevers hurt. And people don’t want to hurt. That’s it. A doctor’s goal is not just to cure disease. It’s to cure disease within the confines of what’s reasonable and tolerable to the patient.

It may be rational to want a fever if you have an infection. But it’s not reasonable. That philosophy—aiming to be reasonable instead of rational—is one more people should consider when making decisions with their money.

Academic finance is devoted to finding the mathematically optimal investment strategies. My own theory is that, in the real world, people do not want the mathematically optimal strategy. They want the strategy that maximizes for how well they sleep at night.

What’s often overlooked in finance is that something can be technically true but contextually nonsense.

Day trading and picking individual stocks is not rational for most investors—the odds are heavily against your success. But they’re both reasonable in small amounts if they scratch an itch hard enough to leave the rest of your more diversified investments alone.

“We do some things for family reasons,” Bogle told The Wall Street Journal. “If it’s not consistent, well, life isn’t always consistent.”³⁹

Two dangerous things happen when you rely too heavily on investment history as a guide to what’s going to happen next. 1. You’ll likely miss the outlier events that move the needle the most.

The problem is that we often use events like the Great Depression and World War II to guide our views of things like worst-case scenarios when thinking about future investment returns. But those record-setting events had no precedent when they occurred. So the forecaster who assumes the worst (and best) events of the past will match the worst (and best) events of the future is not following history; they’re accidentally assuming that the history of unprecedented events doesn’t apply to the future.

This is not a failure of analysis. It’s a failure of imagination. Realizing the future might not look anything like the past is a special kind of skill that is not generally looked highly upon by the financial forecasting community.

The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising. Not that we should use past surprises as a guide to future boundaries; that we should use past surprises as an admission that we have no idea what might happen next.

History can be a misleading guide to the future of the economy and stock market because it doesn’t account for structural changes that are relevant to today’s world.

(…) there’s an important nuance: The further back in history you look, the more general your takeaways should be. General things like people’s relationship to greed and fear, how they behave under stress, and how they respond to incentives tend to be stable in time.

As a player, you bet more when the odds of getting a card you want are in your favor and less when they are against you. The mechanics of how this is done don’t matter here. What matters is that a blackjack card counter knows they are playing a game of odds, not certainties. In any particular hand they think they have a good chance of being right, but know there’s a decent chance they’re wrong. It might sound strange given their profession, but their strategy relies entirely on humility—humility that they don’t know, and cannot know exactly what’s going to happen next, so play their hand accordingly. The card counting system works because it tilts the odds ever so slightly from the house to the player. But bet too heavily even when the odds seem in your favor and, if you’re wrong, you might lose so much that you don’t have enough money to keep playing. There is never a moment when you’re so right that you can bet every chip in front of you. The world isn’t that kind to anyone—not consistently, anyways. You have to give yourself room for error. You have to plan on your plan not going according to plan.

History is littered with good ideas taken too far, which are indistinguishable from bad ideas. The wisdom in having room for error is acknowledging that uncertainty, randomness, and chance—“unknowns”—are an ever-present part of life. The only way to deal with them is by increasing the gap between what you think will happen and what can happen while still leaving you capable of fighting another day.

“the purpose of the margin of safety is to render the forecast unnecessary.”

Margin of safety—you can also call it room for error or redundancy—is the only effective way to safely navigate a world that is governed by odds, not certainties. And almost everything related to money exists in that kind of world.

Forecasting with precision is hard. (…)The best we can do is think about odds. Graham’s margin of safety is a simple suggestion that we don’t need to view the world in front of us as black or white, predictable or a crapshoot. The grey area—pursuing things where a range of potential outcomes are acceptable—is the smart way to proceed.

Two things cause us to avoid room for error. One is the idea that somebody must know what the future holds, driven by the uncomfortable feeling that comes from admitting the opposite. The second is that you’re therefore doing yourself harm by not taking actions that fully exploit an accurate view of that future coming true.

It’s often viewed as a conservative hedge, used by those who don’t want to take much risk or aren’t confident in their views. But when used appropriately, it’s quite the opposite. Room for error lets you endure a range of potential outcomes, and endurance lets you stick around long enough to let the odds of benefiting from a low-probability outcome fall in your favor. The biggest gains occur infrequently, either because they don’t happen often or because they take time to compound. So the person with enough room for error in part of their strategy (cash) to let them endure hardship in another (stocks) has an edge over the person who gets wiped out, game over, insert more tokens, when they’re wrong.

“When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night’s sleep for the chance of extra profits.”

(…) no margin of safety offers a 100% guarantee. A one-third buffer is enough to allow me to sleep well at night. And if the future does resemble the past, I’ll be pleasantly surprised. “The best way to achieve felicity is to aim low,” says Charlie Munger. Wonderful.

An important cousin of room for error is what I call optimism bias in risk-taking, or “Russian roulette should statistically work” syndrome: An attachment to favorable odds when the downside is unacceptable in any circumstances.

Nassim Taleb says, “You can be risk loving and yet completely averse to ruin.” And indeed, you should.

The idea is that you have to take risk to get ahead, but no risk that can wipe you out is ever worth taking.

Leverage—taking on debt to make your money go further—pushes routine risks into something capable of producing ruin. The danger is that rational optimism most of the time masks the odds of ruin some of the time.

But those with high leverage had a double wipeout: Not only were they left broke, but being wiped out erased every opportunity to get back in the game at the very moment opportunity was ripe.

The ability to do what you want, when you want, for as long as you want, has an infinite ROI.

Room for error does more than just widen the target around what you think might happen. It also helps protect you from things you’d never imagine, which can be the most troublesome events we face.

You can plan for every risk except the things that are too crazy to cross your mind. And those crazy things can do the most harm, because they happen more often than you think and you have no plan for how to deal with them.

Avoiding these kinds of unknown risks is, almost by definition, impossible. You can’t prepare for what you can’t envision. If there’s one way to guard against their damage, it’s avoiding single points of failure. A good rule of thumb for a lot of things in life is that everything that can break will eventually break. So if many things rely on one thing working, and that thing breaks, you are counting the days to catastrophe. That’s a single point of failure.

(…) the most important part of every plan is planning on your plan not going according to plan.

An underpinning of psychology is that people are poor forecasters of their future selves.

Long-term financial planning is essential. But things change—both the world around you, and your own goals and desires. It is one thing to say, “We don’t know what the future holds.” It’s another to admit that you, yourself, don’t know today what you will even want in the future. And the truth is, few of us do. It’s hard to make enduring long-term decisions when your view of what you’ll want in the future is likely to shift.

The End of History Illusion is what psychologists call the tendency for people to be keenly aware of how much they’ve changed in the past, but to underestimate how much their personalities, desires, and goals are likely to change in the future.

“All of us,” he said, “are walking around with an illusion—an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives.” We tend to never learn this lesson. Gilbert’s research shows people from age 18 to 68 underestimate how much they will change in the future.

We should avoid the extreme ends of financial planning. Assuming you’ll be happy with a very low income, or choosing to work endless hours in pursuit of a high one, increases the odds that you’ll one day find yourself at a point of regret. The fuel of the End of History Illusion is that people adapt to most circumstances, so the benefits of an extreme plan—the simplicity of having hardly anything, or the thrill of having almost everything—wear off. But the downsides of those extremes—not being able to afford retirement, or looking back at a life spent devoted to chasing dollars—become enduring regrets. Regrets are especially painful when you abandon a previous plan and feel like you have to run in the other direction twice as fast to make up for lost time.

Compounding works best when you can give a plan years or decades to grow. This is true for not only savings but careers and relationships. Endurance is key. And when you consider our tendency to change who we are over time, balance at every point in your life becomes a strategy to avoid future regret and encourage endurance.

We should also come to accept the reality of changing our minds. Some of the most miserable workers I’ve met are people who stay loyal to a career only because it’s the field they picked when deciding on a college major at age 18. When you accept the End of History Illusion, you realize that the odds of picking a job when you’re not old enough to drink that you will still enjoy when you’re old enough to qualify for Social Security are low. The trick is to accept the reality of change and move on as soon as possible.

Sunk costs—anchoring decisions to past efforts that can’t be refunded—are a devil in a world where people change over time. They make our future selves prisoners to our past, different, selves. It’s the equivalent of a stranger making major life decisions for you.

“Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it.” Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it because the challenges faced by someone in the arena are often invisible to those in the crowd.

“Hold stocks for the long run,” you’ll hear. It’s good advice. But do you know how hard it is to maintain a long-term outlook when stocks are collapsing? Like everything else worthwhile, successful investing demands a price. But its currency is not dollars and cents. It’s volatility, fear, doubt, uncertainty, and regret—all of which are easy to overlook until you’re dealing with them in real time.

It sounds trivial, but thinking of market volatility as a fee rather than a fine is an important part of developing the kind of mindset that lets you stick around long enough for investing gains to work in your favor. Few investors have the disposition to say, “I’m actually fine if I lose 20% of my money.” This is doubly true for new investors who have never experienced a 20% decline. But if you view volatility as a fee, things look different.

The trick is convincing yourself that the market’s fee is worth it. That’s the only way to properly deal with volatility and uncertainty—not just putting up with it, but realizing that it’s an admission fee worth paying. There’s no guarantee that it will be. Sometimes it rains at Disneyland. But if you view the admission fee as a fine, you’ll never enjoy the magic. Find the price, then pay it.

When investors have different goals and time horizons—and they do in every asset class—prices that look ridiculous to one person can make sense to another, because the factors those investors pay attention to are different.

An iron rule of finance is that money chases returns to the greatest extent that it can. If an asset has momentum—it’s been moving consistently up for a period of time—it’s not crazy for a group of short-term traders to assume it will keep moving up. Not indefinitely; just for the short period of time they need it to. Momentum attracts short-term traders in a reasonable way. Then it’s off to the races. Bubbles form when the momentum of short-term returns attracts enough money that the makeup of investors shifts from mostly long term to mostly short term.

Bubbles aren’t so much about valuations rising. That’s just a symptom of something else: time horizons shrinking as more short-term traders enter the playing field.

Many finance and investment decisions are rooted in watching what other people do and either copying them or betting against them. But when you don’t know why someone behaves like they do you won’t know how long they’ll continue acting that way, what will make them change their mind, or whether they’ll ever learn their lesson.

“For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell.” —Historian Deirdre McCloskey

Real optimists don’t believe that everything will be great. That’s complacency. Optimism is a belief that the odds of a good outcome are in your favor over time, even when there will be setbacks along the way.

There is an iron law in economics: extremely good and extremely bad circumstances rarely stay that way for long because supply and demand adapt in hard-to-predict ways.

Growth is driven by compounding, which always takes time. Destruction is driven by single points of failure, which can happen in seconds, and loss of confidence, which can happen in an instant.

In investing you must identify the price of success—volatility and loss amid the long backdrop of growth—and be willing to pay it.

Expecting things to be great means a best-case scenario that feels flat. Pessimism reduces expectations, narrowing the gap between possible outcomes and outcomes you feel great about. Maybe that’s why it’s so seductive. Expecting things to be bad is the best way to be pleasantly surprised when they’re not. Which, ironically, is something to be optimistic about.

The more you want something to be true, the more likely you are to believe a story that overestimates the odds of it being true.

The bigger the gap between what you want to be true and what you need to be true to have an acceptable outcome, the more you are protecting yourself from falling victim to an appealing financial fiction.

Everyone has an incomplete view of the world. But we form a complete narrative to fill in the gaps.

Daniel Kahneman once told me about the stories people tell themselves to make sense of the past. He said: Hindsight, the ability to explain the past, gives us the illusion that the world is understandable. It gives us the illusion that the world makes sense, even when it doesn’t make sense. That’s a big deal in producing mistakes in many fields.

Coming to terms with how much you don’t know means coming to terms with how much of what happens in the world is out of your control. And that can be hard to accept.

Carl Richards writes: “Risk is what’s left over when you think you’ve thought of everything.”

Psychologist Philip Tetlock once wrote: “We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need.” Satisfying that need is a great way to put it. Wanting to believe we are in control is an emotional itch that needs to be scratched, rather than an analytical problem to be calculated and solved. The illusion of control is more persuasive than the reality of uncertainty. So we cling to stories about outcomes being in our control.

But the alien circling over Earth? The one who’s confident he knows what’s happening based on what he sees but turns out to be completely wrong because he can’t know the stories going on inside everyone else’s head? He’s all of us.

Go out of your way to find humility when things are going right and forgiveness/compassion when they go wrong. Because it’s never as good or as bad as it looks. The world is big and complex. Luck and risk are both real and hard to identify. Do so when judging both yourself and others. Respect the power of luck and risk and you’ll have a better chance of focusing on things you can actually control. You’ll also have a better chance of finding the right role models. Less ego, more wealth. Saving money is the gap between your ego and your income, and wealth is what you don’t see. So wealth is created by suppressing what you could buy today in order to have more stuff or more options in the future. No matter how much you earn, you will never build wealth unless you can put a lid on how much fun you can have with your money right now, today. Manage your money in a way that helps you sleep at night. That’s different from saying you should aim to earn the highest returns or save a specific percentage of your income. Some people won’t sleep well unless they’re earning the highest returns; others will only get a good rest if they’re conservatively invested. To each their own. But the foundation of, “does this help me sleep at night?” is the best universal guidepost for all financial decisions. If you want to do better as an investor, the single most powerful thing you can do is increase your time horizon. Time is the most powerful force in investing. It makes little things grow big and big mistakes fade away. It can’t neutralize luck and risk, but it pushes results closer towards what people deserve. Become OK with a lot of things going wrong. You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune, because a small minority of things account for the majority of outcomes. No matter what you’re doing with your money you should be comfortable with a lot of stuff not working. That’s just how the world is. So you should always measure how you’ve done by looking at your full portfolio, rather than individual investments. It is fine to have a large chunk of poor investments and a few outstanding ones. That’s usually the best-case scenario. Judging how you’ve done by focusing on individual investments makes winners look more brilliant than they were, and losers appear more regrettable than they should. Use money to gain control over your time, because not having control of your time is such a powerful and universal drag on happiness. The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want to, pays the highest dividend that exists in finance. Be nicer and less flashy. No one is impressed with your possessions as much as you are. You might think you want a fancy car or a nice watch. But what you probably want is respect and admiration. And you’re more likely to gain those things through kindness and humility than horsepower and chrome.

Save. Just save. You don’t need a specific reason to save. It’s great to save for a car, or a downpayment, or a medical emergency. But saving for things that are impossible to predict or define is one of the best reasons to save. Everyone’s life is a continuous chain of surprises. Savings that aren’t earmarked for anything in particular is a hedge against life’s inevitable ability to surprise the hell out of you at the worst possible moment. Define the cost of success and be ready to pay it. Because nothing worthwhile is free. And remember that most financial costs don’t have visible price tags. Uncertainty, doubt, and regret are common costs in the finance world. They’re often worth paying. But you have to view them as fees (a price worth paying to get something nice in exchange) rather than fines (a penalty you should avoid). Worship room for error. A gap between what could happen in the future and what you need to happen in the future in order to do well is what gives you endurance, and endurance is what makes compounding magic over time. Room for error often looks like a conservative hedge, but if it keeps you in the game it can pay for itself many times over. Avoid the extreme ends of financial decisions. Everyone’s goals and desires will change over time, and the more extreme your past decisions were the more you may regret them as you evolve. You should like risk because it pays off over time. But you should be paranoid of ruinous risk because it prevents you from taking future risks that will pay off over time. Define the game you’re playing, and make sure your actions are not being influenced by people playing a different game. Respect the mess. Smart, informed, and reasonable people can disagree in finance, because people have vastly different goals and desires. There is no single right answer; just the answer that works for you.

Charlie Munger once said “I did not intend to get rich. I just wanted to get independent.”

Being able to wake up one morning and change what you’re doing, on your own terms, whenever you’re ready, seems like the grandmother of all financial goals. Independence, to me, doesn’t mean you’ll stop working. It means you only do the work you like with people you like at the times you want for as long as you want. And achieving some level of independence does not rely on earning a doctor’s income. It’s mostly a matter of keeping your expectations in check and living below your means. Independence, at any income level, is driven by your savings rate. And past a certain level of income your savings rate is driven by your ability to keep your lifestyle expectations from running away.

Nassim Taleb explained: “True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind.”

Good decisions aren’t always rational. At some point you have to choose between being happy or being “right.”

Charlie Munger put it well: “The first rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily.”

If I had to summarize my views on investing, it’s this: Every investor should pick a strategy that has the highest odds of successfully meeting their goals. And I think for most investors, dollar-cost averaging into a low-cost index fund will provide the highest odds of long-term success.

Everything in finance is data within the context of expectations.

#the psychology of money #Morgan housel #non-fiction #economics #investing #books #quotes

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kkintle · 2 years

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Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil

#quote #simone weil #attention #generosity #literature

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kkintle · 2 years

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Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Hannah Fry; Quotes

Because there is a tradition among all those who have ever learned to code – a rite of passage, almost. Your first task as a rookie is to program the computer to flash up a famous phrase on to the screen: ‘HELLO WORLD’

No object or algorithm is ever either good or evil in itself. It’s how they’re used that matters. GPS was invented to launch nuclear missiles and now helps deliver pizzas. Pop music, played on repeat, has been deployed as a torture device. And however beautifully made a garland of flowers might be, if I really wanted to I could strangle you with it.

Because the future doesn’t just happen. We create it.

Understanding our own flaws and weaknesses – as well as those of the machine – is the key to remaining in control.

There’s an almost uncountable number of different algorithms. Each has its own goals, its own idiosyncrasies, its clever quirks and drawbacks, and there is no consensus on how best to group them. But broadly speaking, it can be useful to think of the real-world tasks they perform in four main categories: 1. Prioritization: making an ordered list 2. Classification: picking a category 3. Association: finding links Association is all about finding and marking relationships between things. 4. Filtering: isolating what’s important. Algorithms often need to remove some information to focus on what’s important, to separate the signal from the noise.

‘When people are unaware they are being manipulated, they tend to believe they have adopted their new thinking voluntarily,’

If there’s anything we can learn from this story, it’s that the human element does seem to be a critical part of the process: that having a person with the power of veto in a position to review the suggestions of an algorithm before a decision is made is the only sensible way to avoid mistakes. After all, only humans will feel the weight of responsibility for their decisions.

The only problem with this conclusion is that humans aren’t always that reliable either.

If your task involves any kind of calculation, put your money on the algorithm every time: in making medical diagnoses or sales forecasts, predicting suicide attempts or career satisfaction, and assessing everything from fitness for military service to projected academic performance. The machine won’t be perfect, but giving a human a veto over the algorithm would just add more error.

Algorithm aversion. People are less tolerant of an algorithm’s mistakes than of their own – even if their own mistakes are bigger.

Intriguingly, a rare exception to the superiority of algorithmic performance comes from a selection of studies conducted in the late 1950s and 1960s into the ‘diagnosis’ (their words, not mine) of homosexuality. In those examples, the human judgement made far better predictions, outperforming anything the algorithm could manage – suggesting there are some things so intrinsically human that data and mathematical formulae will always struggle to describe them.

And yet, if you build more than one tree – everything can change. Rather than using all the data at once, there is a way to divide and conquer. In what is known as an ensemble, you first build thousands of smaller trees from random subsections of the data. Then, when presented with a new defendant, you simply ask every tree to vote on whether it thinks awarding bail is a good idea or not. The trees may not all agree, and on their own they might still make weak predictions, but just by taking the average of all their answers, you can dramatically improve the precision of your predictions.

This has nothing to do with the crime itself, or with the algorithm: it’s just a mathematical certainty. The outcome is biased because reality is biased. More men commit homicides, so more men will be falsely accused of having the potential to murder.

Unless the fraction of people who commit crimes is the same in every group of defendants, it is mathematically impossible to create a test which is equally accurate at prediction across the board and makes false positive and false negative mistakes at the same rate for every group of defendants.

Weber’s Law states that the smallest change in a stimulus that can be perceived, the so-called ‘Just Noticeable Difference’, is proportional to the initial stimulus.

An outcome like this can happen even if you’re not explicitly using gender as a factor within the algorithm. As long as the prediction is based on factors that correlate with one group more than another (like a defendant’s history of violent crime), this kind of unfairness can arise.

If a diagnostic machine capable of recommending treatments can be built, who should it serve? The individual or the population? Because there will be times where it may have to choose.

The case of medicine is certainly less fraught with tension than the examples from criminal justice. There is no defence and prosecution here. Everyone in the healthcare system is working towards the same goal – getting the patient better. But even here every party in the process has a subtly different set of objectives.

There’s certainly a great deal of valuable information to be had from a camera. A neural network can understand the colour, texture, even physical features of the scene ahead – things like lines, curves, edges and angles. The question is: what do you do with that information once you have it? You could tell the car: ‘Only drive on something that looks like tarmac.’ But that won’t be much good in the desert, where the roads are dusty paths. You could say: ‘Drive on the smoothest thing in the image’ – but, unfortunately, the smoothest thing is almost always the sky or a glass-fronted building. You could think in quite abstract terms about how to describe the shape of a road: ‘Look for an object with two vaguely straight borders. The lines should be wide apart at the bottom of the image and taper in towards each other at the top.’ That seems pretty sensible. Except, unfortunately, it’s also how a tree looks in a photograph.

‘Things that look like autonomous systems are actually systems in which the world is constrained to make them look autonomous.’

Resemblance and identity are not the same thing and never will be, however accurate the algorithms become.

It’s a phenomenon known to psychologists as social proof. Whenever we haven’t got enough information to make decisions for ourselves, we have a habit of copying the behaviour of those around us.

Conclusion: the market isn’t locked into a particular state. Both luck and quality have a role to play.

(…) we’re put off by the banal, but also hate the radically unfamiliar.

Can an algorithm be creative if its only sense of art is what happened in the past?

You may not agree (I’m not sure I do), but there is certainly an argument that much of human creativity – like the products of the ‘composing’ algorithms – is just a novel combination of pre-existing ideas. As Mark Twain says: There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.

‘Creativity is just finding an association between two things which ordinarily would not seem related.’

There are boundaries to the reach of algorithms. Limits to what can be quantified. Among all of the staggeringly impressive, mind-boggling things that data and statistics can tell me, how it feels to be human isn’t one of them.

I’d also thoroughly recommend looking up some of Cope’s music online. I think the orchestra piece in the style of Vivaldi is my favourite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kuY3BrmTfQ.

Imagine that, rather than exclusively focusing our attention on designing our algorithms to adhere to some impossible standard of perfect fairness, we instead designed them to facilitate redress when they inevitably erred; that we put as much time and effort into ensuring that automatic systems were as easy to challenge as they are to implement. Perhaps the answer is to build algorithms to be contestable from the ground up. Imagine that we designed them to support humans in their decisions, rather than instruct them. To be transparent about why they came to a particular decision, rather than just inform us of the result.

#Hannah fry #non-fiction #quotes #books #mathematics #algorithms #science #philosophy

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kkintle · 2 years

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#killing eve #killing eve season 4 #tv #villanelle #eve #villaneve #Youtube

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#juste la fin du monde #it's only the end of the world #film #French film #Youtube

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The Mathematics of Love by Hannah Fry; Quotes

Mathematics is the language of nature. It is the foundation stone upon which every major scientific and technological achievement of the modern era has been built. It is alive, and it is thriving. As the physicist and writer Paul Davies puts it: No one who is closed off from mathematics can ever grasp the full significance of the natural order that is woven so deeply into the fabric of physical reality.

Real science is about trying as hard as you can to disprove your own theories. The more you try, and fail, to prove yourself wrong, the more evidence there is to suggest that what you’re saying is right.

This setup is known as the “stable marriage problem,” and the process through which the friends picked their partners is called the Gale-Shapley algorithm. If we look into the math behind these couplings, some extraordinary results appear. Regardless of how many boys and girls there are, it turns out that whenever the boys do the approaching, there are four outcomes which will always be true: 1. Everyone will find a partner. 2. Once all partners are determined, no man and woman in different couples could both improve their happiness by running off together (for example, Phoebe might still have eyes for Ross, but he’s happy with Rachel). 3. Once all partners are determined, every man will have the best partner available to him. 4. Once all partners are determined, every woman will end up with the least bad of all the men who approach her. The last two points demonstrate a particularly surprising result: In short, the group who do the asking and risk continual rejection actually end up far better off than the group who sit back and accept a suitor’s advances.

But for all the extensions and examples, the message remains the same: If you can handle the occasional cringe-inducing rejection, ultimately, taking the initiative will see you rewarded. It is always better to do the approaching than to sit back and wait for people to come to you. So aim high, and aim frequently: The math says so.

The problem is that we don’t really know what we want until we find it.

This is all fine at the beginning, but as the auction (i.e., life) continues and the lots are won by the weaker bidders, a situation arises with only a few decent men left and a much larger number of beautiful and intelligent women all fishing in the same shrinking pool. The result is the eligible bachelor paradox, and it comes with a clear, if slightly harsh, take-home message: No matter how hot you are, if your goal is partnership, don’t get complacent.

Just by adding this one simple step to the algorithm, we increase our chances of finding the hub to four out of five. Much better odds. The same would be true of much larger networks. Imagine that, without being able to see any of the network or follower statistics of Twitter, we were trying to find Katy Perry—the biggest hub at the time of this writing. If we picked someone at random from the 500 million people on Twitter, we’d only have a one in 500 million chance of finding Katy. But, if we picked someone at random and asked them to point us to the most popular person they follow, it would take us to Katy a cool 57 million times. Suddenly the chances of finding Katy soar to around 10 percent, which is pretty impressive given how simple the algorithm is.

When dating is framed in this way, an area of mathematics called “optimal stopping theory” can offer the best possible strategy in your hunt for The One. And the conclusion is surprisingly sensible: Spend a bit of time playing the field when you’re young, rejecting everyone you meet as serious life-partner material until you’ve got a feel for the marketplace. Then, once that phase has passed, pick the next person who comes along who’s better than everyone you met before. But optimal stopping theory goes further. Because it turns out that your probability of stopping and settling down with the best person (denoted by P in the equation below) is linked to how many of your potential lovers (n) you reject (r), by a rather elegant formula: This formula, innocent as it seems, has the power to tell you exactly how many people to reject to give you the best possible chance of finding your perfect partner.

Thankfully, though, there is a second version of this problem that is much more suited to mere mortals like you and me, and it’s got an equally impressive result. Instead of knowing how many people you’ll date, the advanced problem only requires you to know how long you expect your dating life to be. The math in this example is much trickier,2 though the same simple rule as earlier crops up again—but this time, the 37 percent applies to time rather than people. Say you start dating when you are fifteen years old and would ideally like to settle down by the time you’re forty. In the first 37 percent of your dating window (until just after your twenty-fourth birthday), you should reject everyone; use this time to get a feel for the market and a realistic expectation of what you can expect in a life partner. Once this rejection phase has passed, pick the next person who comes along who is better than everyone who you have met before. Following this strategy will definitely give you the best possible chance of finding the number one partner on your imaginary list. But, a warning: Even this version of the problem has its flaws.

To decide on the best table plan, it’s important to first define what you mean by “best.”

#Hannah fry #the mathematics of love #love #mathematics #non-fiction #books #quotes

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kkintle · 2 years

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The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney; Quotes

We think that clouds are Nature’s poetry, and the most egalitarian of her displays, since everyone can have a fantastic view of them.

We say to all who’ll listen: Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds.

Cumulus is the Latin word for ‘heap’, which is simply to say that these clouds have a clumpy, stacked shape. The people who concern themselves with such things divide them into humilis, mediocris and congestus formations–these are known as ‘species’ of Cumulus. Humilis, meaning humble in Latin, are the smallest, being wider than they are tall; mediocris are as tall as they are wide, and congestus are taller still.

Attention all cloudspotters: ‘In the morning mountains, in the afternoon fountains.’

Cloudspotters will be pleased to see this most clearly demonstrated when sailing around a small island on a sunny day. The surface of the island is warmed by the sun’s radiation more readily than the sea around it, and a puffy, white Cumulus cloud can often be seen poised above it, fed by the thermal coming off the ground. South Sea Islanders would use Cumulus clouds as beacons, navigating toward an atoll well before the land itself became visible.

In fact, Cumulus clouds can form above fires. Known as pyrocumulus, these appear as Cumulus mounds atop the plumes of smoke from stubble burning or wildfires.

The darkness of a Cumulus cloud depends, firstly, on whether you are looking at the side in shadow and, secondly, on the brightness of the sky or other clouds behind it. But it also depends on the number of water droplets that the cloud contains, for it is these that scatter the sunlight and prevent some of it from passing through. The more laden with droplets a cloud is, the darker it will appear with the sun behind. Cloudspotters will note that as a Cumulus grows in size from its small humilis form, through the mediocris stage into a towering thick congestus, its base will appear darker and darker as the thickening cloud blocks out more and more sunlight.

CUMULONIMBUS The towering thunderclouds that scare us senseless

The classic shape of a mature Cumulonimbus is a huge vertical column, several miles across and extending up as high as 60,000ft (over 11 miles), which spreads out at the top to resemble a blacksmith’s anvil. This upper canopy is called the ‘incus’ (after the Latin for anvil) and consists of ice crystals, rather than the water droplets that make up the rest of the thundercloud. The anvil can stretch out over hundreds of miles, as it is spread by the strong winds high in the atmosphere. From a distance it can have a calm, majestic beauty.

Cloudspotters can distinguish a Cumulonimbus from its younger brother, the Cumulus congestus, by careful observation of its upper reaches. If the top of the cloud still has the sharp cauliflower mounds found on a fair-weather Cumulus, it is officially known as a Cumulus congestus. It only becomes a Cumulonimbus when the upper region becomes ‘glaciated’, which means that its water droplets have begun to freeze into solid ice particles. A Cumulonimbus anvil of ice crystals is brighter and has softer edges than the top of a towering Cumulus.

Whilst the Nimbostratus doesn’t have anything like the height of a Cumulonimbus, and often spreads out horizontally over hundreds of square miles, it can be hard to distinguish the two from underneath. The weather below a Cumulonimbus is what will give it away. If there is hail, thunder, lightning and strong, gusty winds, then cloudspotters can be confident that they are in the company of the King of Clouds.

From inception to dissipation, an individual Cumulonimbus might last up to an hour or so, leading to a relatively short-lived storm. But thunderstorms can often last much longer than this, since these villains of the cloud world do not always work alone. They have a tendency to form into gangs, which is when they are at their most destructive. As one Cumulonimbus is dissipating, another rises ahead of it. Collectively, they resonate in an enormous self-propagating system of extreme weather that lays waste to whatever is in its path.

Published in three languages, the book was called The International Cloud Atlas and contained numerous photographs to illustrate the ten cloud genera agreed by the committee. Number nine in the list was Cumulonimbus, the tallest of all the types. To be on cloud nine is therefore to be on the highest one.

Just as Cumulus clouds can occur in the different species of humilis, mediocris, congestus and fractus, the Cumulonimbus can be one of two possible species. These are called ‘calvus’ and ‘capillatus’ and they are distinguished by the appearance of the upper, ice-particle region. Cumulonimbus calvus is when the cloud’s anvil is smooth with soft edges. Cumulonimbus capillatus is characterised by an upper region that is fibrous and striated. It is named after the Latin for hair, and can look like the disorderly locks of a child who’s just been in a playground scrap.

(…) ‘fork’ or ‘sheet’ lightning. In actual fact, there is no difference between the two–sheet lightning is merely when the body of the cloud hides the fork lightning from view, and one sees a flickering illumination of the cloud as a whole.

STRATUS The low, misty blankets

(…) distractions occasionally become so profound and sustained that the yogis lose track of their spiritual path altogether. They call it a ‘storm of Maya’. It is one in which illusory ways of thinking and feeling block out the Supreme Light altogether. At times like these, he said, the yogis remind themselves that, beyond the clouds, the sun never stops shining.

WITHOUT THE STRATUS, I would never have experienced the peculiar joy of walking through a cloud. Being the lowest of all the types, whose base rarely forms above 1, 600ft, it is the only one that happily comes down to join us at ground level. Tethered to terra firma like this, Stratus is referred to as fog or mist.

WHEN IS EARTH-BOUND Stratus described as fog, and when is it mist? The official distinction relates to how far you can see through it. If you can see less than 1, 000 yards, then meteorologists call it fog. Visibility between 1, 000 and 2, 000 yards, and they call it mist. (If you can see less than a thousand yards and there is no Stratus, then you are just short-sighted.)

Advection and radiation are the most common types of fog, but they are certainly not the only ones. ‘Steam fog’ appears when cold air flows over warm water (the opposite of advection fog) and the vapour evaporating off the water’s surface instantly cools enough to form into droplets. The swirls of rising droplets are the evaporation process made visible, for water is constantly rising from the sea surface as vapour, but normally you can’t see it. This type of fog is at its most dramatic in polar regions, where it is known as ‘Arctic sea smoke’.

Stratus–at its best when viewed from the top of a mountain.

(…) words by the American poet, James Russell Lowell: Who knows whither the clouds have fled? In the unscarred heaven they leave no wake, And the eyes forget the tears they have shed, The heart forgets its sorrow and ache…

As with any of the cloud genera, a Stratocumulus does not have to be one of these recognised species: if it doesn’t fit one of the above descriptions, a patch of low clumpy clouds is just called Stratocumulus.

Of course, clouds pay little attention to the rules of behaviour we presumptuously ascribe to them. Chaotic to their misty core, they do their best to confound our attempts at classification. How can a body so nebulous, ephemeral and mutable ever be pigeon-holed? Cloudspotters will come to love the cloud’s rebelliousness–just when they think they have identified a formation, it will change and mock their attempt to pin it down.

Contemplating the heavens below, a cloudspotter can always escape–even if for just a few minutes–from the trials and pressures of life. Let others dream of escaping to a place in the sun. Cloudspotters know better.

ALTOCUMULUS The layers of bread rolls in the sky

A cloudspotter should hold up three fingers with an extended arm. If the individual elements of the layer are wider than all three fingers, the cloud is probably of the lower Stratocumulus genus. If they are smaller than the width of one finger, then it is more likely to be a high layer of cloudlets, called a Cirrocumulus. It is most likely to be an Altocumulus layer when the size of the cloudlets is somewhere between the two–smaller than three fingers and larger than one. However, the giving-the-cloud-the-fingers rule doesn’t work if cloudspotters are looking at clouds off in the distance. Their outstretched arm needs to be angled above 30° from the horizontal for it to apply.

The second rule of thumb for identifying Altocumulus has to do with the shading of its cloudlets. When the sky above is clear and the sun shines directly on to the cloud, Altocumulus will have noticeable shading on the sides away from the sun, though this will not be particularly heavy. With the lower Stratocumulus, the shaded parts are often quite dark, while the tiny cloudlets of the high Cirrocumulus show no shading at all.

CLOUDSPOTTERS MUST SURRENDER themselves to the gentle shifts of the clouds’ formations. If they cannot identify a particular cloud form, then so be it–they should just relax and watch it develop. Before long, a familiar formation will appear.

This is not how to look at clouds. Cloudspotters won’t find shapes in them by force of will, nor by searching with half a mind on what the person beside them sees. The best way to find shapes is to look up, empty your mind, and let them find you.

ALTOSTRATUS The mid-level layers, known as ‘the boring clouds’

NIMBOSTRATUS The thick, grey blankets that rain and rain and rain

But just as a Christmas tree actually has its branches pointing upwards, raindrops don’t fall in the shape of tears. Tiny cloud droplets may be pretty much perfect little spheres but, once they’ve grown large enough to fall fast, they are greatly distorted by air resistance and are not shaped like spheres–or indeed teardrops–at all. When they are a couple of millimeters or more across, raindrops actually look like the top half of hamburger buns.

In the words of St Basil the Great, from the fourth century: Many a man curses the rain that falls upon his head, and knows not that it brings abundance to drive away the hunger.

Or as John Updike, the American novelist, put it: ‘Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.’

CIRRUS The delicate streaks of falling ice crystals

Nevertheless, to look up at Cirrus clouds is to see snow–well, ice crystals, to be precise–falling too high to reach the ground. Cloudspotters may live in regions too warm for snow but, in the Cirrus clouds, they can still see how it looks from a few miles off.

That Cirrus can be harbingers of a ‘deterioration’ in the weather only adds to their fragile beauty–are not the most delicious things the ones we know can’t last?

THE ATMOSPHERE ITSELF is an ocean–one of air, rather than water. The relationship between the atmospheric ocean and the actual one is close, and of great relevance to the formation of clouds in general.

CIRROSTRATUS The high milky veils that most people barely notice

That first time I saw a cloud smile was on a London street, and no one else seemed to be paying the slightest bit of notice to the sky. I was transfixed, of course, but the passers-by all had other things on their minds. I felt as if I was the only one watching this particular smile. In fact, looking back on it, I can say that I most definitely was the only one. Even if others had been staring up, they would not have seen the same CZA as me. As sunlight passed through the countless crystals up in the cloud, it was being scattered in all directions. But it was only those crystals that sparkled light directly to my eyes that created the light effect for me. Some of them flashed a little red-looking light towards me, others a little blue. Say some of the bustling Londoners had turned out to be cloudspotters in disguise. Had they dropped their shopping and stood beside me to look up at the coloured arc too, the array of crystals sparkling directly into their eyes would have been different ones from mine. They would have seen a different circumzenithal arc. We would each have seen our own smiles.

Despite the stunning range of crystal forms, there is one theme that keeps appearing season after season –the number six. The arms of the stellar dendrites and the sectored plates, the edges of the hexagonal plates, the sides of the columns…when it comes to ice crystals, six, rather than three, is the magic number. This is due to the shape of water molecules, which determines that as they join to form crystals, they do so in a lattice formation of hexagons –a molecular honeycomb.

Even when you know the explanation for crepuscular rays, it is hard not to think of them as somehow divine in nature. In Hellenistic and Roman art, emperors were often depicted with a crown of rays, known as a ‘radiate’. This signified their association with the sun gods, Helios and Sol, and was also used as a sign of posthumous divinity. With the rise of Christianity, the symbol was dropped in place of a circular halo, called a ‘nimbus’. The rays of the radiate were felt to be too pagan in association.

Rainbows are most commonly seen in conjunction with the convection clouds like Cumulus congestus or Cumulonimbus. This is because those clouds are individual precipitating clouds, rather than expansive layers. With gaps in between, there is a fair chance of direct sunlight shining on to rainfall.

The rainbow that a cloudspotter sees standing in one position is never the same as that observed from another one. The droplets that are over in the direction of the arc–perhaps a half to one and a half miles away–each sparkle a bit of sunlight into his eyes. From the drops that fall through the sky off in some directions, it is the yellow-looking part of the spectrum that twinkles at the cloudspotter. From those in other directions, it is the violet, etc. This means that, should the observer change position, different raindrops will be the ones sparkling at him. Hopefully, this will help cloudspotters accept that it is a futile and, frankly, humiliating aspiration to seek the end of a rainbow. It is like driving a speedboat this way and that in an attempt to stop the line of glitters that the sun casts on the sea’s surface from pointing toward you.

Your rainbow is not my rainbow.

Rainbows may be the most familiar of the sky’s optical delights, but how many of us notice the finer points of their appearance? How many realise that the sky within the bow is brighter than that outside it? How many have spotted, on occasion, a secondary bow, outside the primary one, dimmer than it, and with the reverse order of colours? How many have seen ‘Alexander’s Dark Band’? This is not a goth group from Middlesbrough, but the name for the dark region between the primary and secondary rainbows.

THE OTHER CLOUDS The accessory clouds, supplementary features, and stratospheric and mesospheric clouds

CONTRAILS The lines of condensation that form behind high-altitude aircraft

MORNING GLORY The cloud that glider pilots surf

I learnt that the Morning Glory can stretch 600 miles–as long as Britain–and moves at speeds of up to 35mph. Moreover, a small group of intrepid glider pilots travel thousands of miles across Australia, each year, in the hope of encountering it. They wait around, during the springtime months of September and October, in the tiny settlement of Burketown, where the cloud usually forms, with one mission: to ‘soar’ the Morning Glory. It is considered to be one of the most amazing gliding experiences, and one that can only be described as cloud surfing.

#cloudspotting #cloudspotter's guide #books #non-fiction #quotes #Gavin pretor-pinney

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kkintle · 2 years

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Reminiscence (2021) by Lisa Joy; Film Script Quotes

Forgotten things can always be fished up and dusted off. But the lost? Those things people never took much notice of till they were gone. They’re defined by their absence. Can’t remember something that never made an impression.

But memories, even good ones, have a voracious appetite. If you’re not careful... they consume you...

Happiness is just the first step to loss. Someone always ends up in the tank.

NICK: Memory’s like perfume. Better in small doses. She traces her finger down a scar on his stomach. The remnants of a nasty war injury. MAE: Maybe you haven’t made the right memories.

Why grow old? When you can stay always on the verge of becoming the exact person you’d dreamt you’d be?

Ai. Real ai. Funny how love sounds like a cry of pain. But chinks were smart that way. They knew - you can’t have one without the other.

NICK: No such thing as a happy ending. All endings are sad. Especially if the story was happy. MAE: Then tell me a happy story and end it at the middle.

I should have known not to waste time talking to you. Men love their secrets. Hold onto ‘em tighter than their lovers, their money, their morals... Secrets are the one thing you actually can and do take with you when you go... (then) At least, they were.

People like us don’t fall in love. We plummet to places dark and deep. But love? Love is the thing we climb to. If we can just hold on. (then) I wish I could have held on longer, Nick.

#reminiscence #film quotes #quotes #movie #Lisa joy

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kkintle · 2 years

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The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand; Quotes

Romanticism is the conceptual school of art. It deals, not with the random trivia of the day, but with the timeless, fundamental, universal problems and values of human existence. It does not record or photograph; it creates and projects. It is concerned--in the words of Aristotle--not with things as they are, but with things as they might be and ought to be.

In a play I wrote in my early thirties, Ideal, the heroine, a screen star, speaks for me when she says: "I want to see, real, living, and in the hours of my own days, that glory I create as an illusion. I want it real. I want to know that there is someone, somewhere, who wants it, too. Or else what is the use of seeing it, and working, and burning oneself for an impossible vision? A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry."

I felt so profound an indignation at the state of "things as they are" that it seemed as if I would never regain the energy to move one step farther toward "things as they ought to be." Frank talked to me for hours, that night. He convinced me of why one cannot give up the world to those one despises.

The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man's highest potential and strive to actualize it. The man-haters are those who regard man as a helpless, depraved, contemptible creature--and struggle never to let him discover otherwise. It is important here to remember that the only direct, introspective knowledge of man anyone possesses is of himself.

"It is not the works, but the belief which is here decisive and determines the order of rank--to employ once more an old religious formula with a new and deeper meaning,--it is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost.--The noble soul has reverence for itself.--" (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.)

It is not in the nature of man--nor of any living entity--to start out by giving up, by spitting in one's own face and damning existence; that requires a process of corruption whose rapidity differs from man to man. Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it. Then all of these vanish in the vast swamp of their elders who tell them persistently that maturity consists of abandoning one's mind; security, of abandoning one's values; practicality, of losing self-esteem. Yet a few hold on and move on, knowing that that fire is not to be betrayed, learning how to give it shape, purpose and reality. But whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.

He stood looking at her. She knew that he did not see her. No, she thought, it was not that exactly. He always looked straight at people and his damnable eyes never missed a thing, it was only that he made people feel as if they did not exist.

"Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?" "Yes." "My dear fellow, who will let you?" "That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?"

"Rules?" said Roark. "Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn't borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it."

Every form has its own meaning. Every man creates his meaning and form and goal. Why is it so important--what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right--so long as it's not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic--and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else? There must be some reason. I don't know. I've never known it. I'd like to understand."

"If you want my advice, Peter," he said at last, "you've made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?" "You see, that's what I admire about you, Howard. You always know."

"But I mean it. How do you always manage to decide?" "How can you let others decide for you?"

'Choose the builder of your home as carefully as you choose the bride to inhabit it.'"

He demanded of all people the one thing he had never granted anybody: obedience.

Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake: he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost.

"It's the critic's job to interpret the artist, Mr. Francon, even to the artist himself.”

"But, you see, it's not what you do that matters really. It's only you." "Me what?" "Just you here. Or you in the city. Or you somewhere in the world. I don't know. Just that."

"It's all right, dear. I understand." "If you did, you'd call me the names I deserve and make me stop it." "No, Peter. I don't want to change you. I love you, Peter." "God help you!" "I know that." "You know that? And you say it like this? Like you'd say, 'Hello, it's a beautiful evening'?" "Well, why not? Why worry about it? I love you."

"When we gaze at the magnificence of an ancient monument and ascribe its achievement to one man, we are guilty of spiritual embezzlement. We forget the army of craftsmen, unknown and unsung, who preceded him in the darkness of the ages, who toiled humbly--all heroism is humble--each contributing his small share to the common treasure of his time. A great building is not the private invention of some genius or other. It is merely a condensation of the spirit of a people."

"You want to know why I'm doing it?" Roark smiled, without resentment or interest. "Is that it? I'll tell you, if you want to know. I don't give a damn where I work next. There's no architect in town that I'd want to work for. But I have to work somewhere, so it might as well be your Francon--if I can get what I want from you. I'm selling myself, and I'll play the game that way--for the time being."

"The public taste and the public heart are the final criteria of the artist. The genius is the one who knows how to express the general. The exception is to tap the unexceptional."

Roark knew what to expect of his job. He would never see his work erected, only pieces of it, which he preferred not to see; but he would be free to design as he wished and he would have the experience of solving actual problems. It was less than he wanted and more than he could expect. He accepted it at that.

RALSTON HOLCOMBE had no visible neck, but his chin took care of that.

"Is that what you really think of them?" "Not at all. But I don't like people who try to say only what they think I think."

That's the way everybody does it. You see?" "Yes." "Then you agree?" "No."

"Listen. Roark, won't you please listen?" "I'll listen if you want me to, Mr. Snyte. But I think I should tell you now that nothing you can say will make any difference. If you don't mind that, I don't mind listening."

"It doesn't say much. Only 'Howard Roark, Architect.' But it's like those mottoes men carved over the entrance of a castle and died for. It's a challenge in the face of something so vast and so dark, that all the pain on earth--and do you know how much suffering there is on earth?--all the pain comes from that thing you are going to face. I don't know what it is, I don't know why it should be unleashed against you. I know only that it will be. And I know that if you carry these words through to the end, it will be a victory, Howard, not just for you, but for something that should win, that moves the world--and never wins acknowledgment. It will vindicate so many who have fallen before you, who have suffered as you will suffer. May God bless you--or whoever it is that is alone to see the best, the highest possible to human hearts. You're on your way into hell, Howard."

"Mike, how did you get here? Why such a come-down?" He had never known Mike to bother with small private residences. "Don't play the sap. You know how I got here. You didn't think I'd miss it, your first house, did you? And you think it's a come-down? Well, maybe it is. And maybe it's the other way around." Roark extended his hand and Mike's grimy fingers closed about it ferociously, as if the smudges he left implanted in Roark's skin said everything he wanted to say. And because he was afraid that he might say it, Mike growled: "Run along, boss, run along. Don't clog up the works like that."

"They're true, though, both sides of it, aren't they?" "Oh, sure, but couldn't you have reversed the occasions when you chose to express them?" "There wouldn't have been any point in that." "Was there any in what you've done?" "No. None at all. But it amused me." "I can't figure you out, Dominique. You've done it before. You go along so beautifully, you do brilliant work and just when you're about to make a real step forward--you spoil it by pulling something like this. Why?" "Perhaps that is precisely why." "Will you tell me--as a friend, because I like you and I'm interested in you--what are you really after?" "I should think that's obvious. I'm after nothing at all." He spread his hands open, shrugging helplessly. She smiled gaily.

"You know, Alvah, it would be terrible if I had a job I really wanted." "Well, of all things! Well, of all fool things to say! What do you mean?" "Just that. That it would be terrible to have a job I enjoyed and did not want to lose." "Why?" "Because I would have to depend on you – (…)

"It's not only that, Alvah. It's not you alone. If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted--I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting, and we're pushed into it by one single desire. You want a thing and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you're afraid of them all. And you cringe and you crawl and you beg and you accept them--just so they'll let you keep it. And look at whom you come to accept." "If I'm correct in gathering that you're criticizing mankind in general..." "You know, it's such a peculiar thing--our idea of mankind in general. We all have a sort of vague, glowing picture when we say that, something solemn, big and important. But actually all we know of it is the people we meet in our lifetime. Look at them. Do you know any you'd feel big and solemn about?"

As a matter of fact, one can feel some respect for people when they suffer. They have a certain dignity. But have you ever looked at them when they're enjoying themselves? That's when you see the truth.Look at those who spend the money they've slaved for--at amusement parks and side shows. Look at those who're rich and have the whole world open to them. Observe what they pick out for enjoyment. Watch them in the smarter speak-easies. That's your mankind in general. I don't want to touch it." "But hell! That's not the way to look at it. That's not the whole picture. There's some good in the worst of us. There's always a redeeming feature." "So much the worse. Is it an inspiring sight to see a man commit a heroic gesture, and then learn that he goes to vaudeville shows for relaxation? Or see a man who's painted a magnificent canvas--and learn that he spends his time sleeping with every slut he meets?" "What do you want? Perfection?" "--or nothing. So, you see, I take the nothing." "That doesn't make sense." "I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom." "You call that freedom?" "To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing." "What if you found something you wanted?" "I won't find it. I won't choose to see it. It would be part of that lovely world of yours. I'd have to share it with all the rest of you--and I wouldn't. You know, I never open again any great book I've read and loved. It hurts me to think of the other eyes that have read it and of what they were. Things like that can't be shared. Not with people like that." "Dominique, it's abnormal to feel so strongly about anything." "That's the only way I can feel. Or not at all."

I had a terrible time getting it--it wasn't for sale, of course. I think I was in love with it, Alvah. I brought it home with me." "Where is it? I'd like to see something you like, for a change." "It's broken." "Broken? A museum piece? How did that happen?" "I broke it." "How?" "I threw it down the air shaft. There's a concrete floor below." "Are you totally crazy? Why?" "So that no one else would ever see it."

"I'm sorry, darling. I didn't want to shock you. I thought I could speak to you because you're the one person who's impervious to any sort of shock. I shouldn't have. It's no use, I guess."

"Pretty near the top? Is that what you think? If I can't be the very best, if I can't be the one architect of this country in my day--I don't want any damn part of it!" "Ah, but one doesn't get to that, Peter, by falling down on the job. One doesn't get to be first in anything without the strength to make some sacrifices." "But..." "Your life doesn't belong to you, Peter, if you're really aiming high.”

"You must learn how to handle people." "I can't." "Why?" "I don't know how. I was born without some one particular sense." "It's something one acquires." "I have no organ to acquire it with. I don't know whether it's something I lack, or something extra I have that stops me. Besides, I don't like people who have to be handled."

"That you didn't ask me to tell you what you are as I see you. Anybody else would have." "I'm sorry. It wasn't indifference. You're one of the few friends I want to keep. I just didn't think of asking." "I know you didn't. That's the point. You're a self-centered monster, Howard. The more monstrous because you're utterly innocent about it." "That's true." "You should show a little concern when you admit that." "Why?" "You know, there's a thing that stumps me. You're the coldest man I know. And I can't understand why--knowing that you're actually a fiend in your quiet sort of way--why I always feel, when I see you, that you're the most life-giving person I've ever met."

"Don't you see?" Roark was saying. "It's a monument you want to build, but not to yourself. Not to your own life or your own achievement. To other people. To their supremacy over you. You're not challenging that supremacy. You're immortalizing it. You haven't thrown it off--you're putting it up forever. Will you be happy if you seal yourself for the rest of your life in that borrowed shape? Or if you strike free, for once, and build a new house, your own? You don't want the Randolph place. You want what it stood for. But what it stood for is what you've fought all your life."

"but I guess that's what the public wants." "Why do you suppose they want it?" "I don't know." "Then why should you care what they want?" "You've got to consider the public." "Don't you know that most people take most things because that's what's given them, and they have no opinion whatever? Do you wish to be guided by what they expect you to think they think or by your own judgment?" "You can't force it down their throats." "You don't have to. You must only be patient. Because on your side you have reason--oh, I know, it's something no one really wants to have on his side--and against you, you have just a vague, fat, blind inertia." "Why do you think that I don't want reason on my side?" "It's not you, Mr. Janss. It's the way most people feel. They have to take a chance, everything they do is taking a chance, but they feel so much safer when they take it on something they know to be ugly, vain and stupid." "That's true, you know," said Mr. Janss.

Francon felt nothing but relief. "We knew he would, sooner or later," said Francon. "Why regret that he spared himself and all of us a prolonged agony?"

He understood that it was a confession, that answer of his, and a terrifying one. He did not know the nature of what he had confessed and he felt certain that Roark did not know it either. But the thing had been bared; they could not grasp it, but they felt its shape. And it made them sit silently, facing each other, in astonishment, in resignation. "Pull yourself together, Peter," said Roark gently, as to a comrade. "We'll never speak of that again."

Sometimes, not often, he sat up and did not move for a long time; then he smiled, the slow smile of an executioner watching a victim. He thought of his days going by, of the buildings he could have been doing, should have been doing and, perhaps, never would be doing again. He watched the pain's unsummoned appearance with a cold, detached curiosity; he said to himself: Well, here it is again. He waited to see how long it would last. It gave him a strange, hard pleasure to watch his fight against it, and he could forget that it was his own suffering; he could smile in contempt, not realizing that he smiled at his own agony. Such moments were rare. But when they came, he felt as he did in the quarry: that he had to drill through granite, that he had to drive a wedge and blast the thing within him which persisted in calling to his pity.

"I don't know what you're talking about." "If you didn't, you'd be much more astonished and much less angry, Miss Francon."

She had lost the freedom she loved. She knew that a continuous struggle against the compulsion of a single desire was compulsion also, but it was the form she preferred to accept. It was the only manner in which she could let him motivate her life. She found a dark satisfaction in pain--because that pain came from him.

He went to the quarry and he worked that day as usual. She did not come to the quarry and he did not expect her to come. But the thought of her remained. He watched it with curiosity. It was strange to be conscious of another person's existence, to feel it as a close, urgent necessity; a necessity without qualifications, neither pleasant nor painful, merely final like an ultimatum. It was important to know that she existed in the world; it was important to think of her, of how she had awakened this morning, of how she moved, with her body still his, now his forever, of what she thought.

She had not given him the one answer that would have saved her: an answer of simple revulsion--she had found joy in her revulsion, in her terror and in his strength. That was the degradation she had wanted and she hated him for it.

"Oh, not at all...." She walked away. She would not ask for his name. It was her last chance of freedom. She walked swiftly, easily, in sudden relief. She wondered why she had never noticed that she did not know his name and why she had never asked him. Perhaps because she had known everything she had to know about him from that first glance. She thought, one could not find some nameless worker in the city of New York. She was safe. If she knew his name, she would be on her way to New York now.

"If you must feel--no, not gratitude, gratitude is such an embarrassing word--but, shall we say, appreciation?"

When one makes enemies one knows that one's dangerous where it's necessary to be dangerous.

He could not identify the quality of the feeling; but he knew that part of it was a sense of shame. Once, he confessed it to Ellsworth Toohey. Toohey laughed. "That's good for you, Peter. One must never allow oneself to acquire an exaggerated sense of one's own importance. There's no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes."

"No. I don't fit, Ellsworth. Do I?" "I could, of course, ask: Into what? But supposing I don't ask it. Supposing I just say that people who don't fit have their uses also, as well as those who do? Would you like that better? Of course, the simplest thing to say is that I've always been a great admirer of yours and always will be." "That's not a compliment."

"Had I known that you were interested, I would have sent you a very special invitation." "But you didn't think I'd be interested?" "No, frankly, I..." "That was a mistake, Ellsworth. You discounted my newspaperwoman's instinct. Never miss a scoop. It's not often that one has the chance to witness the birth of a felony."

"Oh, I haven't been anywhere for a long time and I decided to start in with that. You know, when I go swimming I don't like to torture myself getting into cold water by degrees. I dive right in and it's a nasty shock, but after that the rest is not so hard to take."

"You did want me, Dominique?" "I thought I could never want anything and you suited that so well."

He did not think of Dominique often, but when he did, the thought was not a sudden recollection, it was the acknowledgment of a continuous presence that needed no acknowledgment.

"You're unpredictable enough even to be sensible at times.”

"Well, what a quaint idea! I don't know whether it's horrible or very wise indeed." "Both, Mrs. Gillespie. As all wisdom."

"You're wrong about Austen, Mr. Roark. He's very successful. In his profession and mine you're successful if it leaves you untouched." "How does one achieve that?" "In one of two ways: by not looking at people at all or by looking at everything about them."

"Which is preferable, Miss Francon?" "Whichever is hardest." "But a desire to choose the hardest might be a confession of weakness in itself." "Of course, Mr. Roark. But it's the least offensive form of confession." "If the weakness is there to be confessed at all."

There's nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we're not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge. Have you ever thought about the style of a soul, Kiki?"

“....I think, Kiki, that every human soul has a style of its own, also. Its one basic theme. You'll see it reflected in every thought, every act, every wish of that person. The one absolute, the one imperative in that living creature. Years of studying a man won't show it to you. His face will. You'd have to write volumes to describe a person. Think of his face. You need nothing else." "That sounds fantastic, Ellsworth. And unfair, if true. It would leave people naked before you." "It's worse than that. It also leaves you naked before them. You betray yourself by the manner in which you react to a certain face. To a certain kind of face....The style of your soul...There's nothing important on earth, except human beings. There's nothing as important about human beings as their relations to one another...."

"And that was the famous Toohey technique. Never place your punch at the beginning of a column nor at the end. Sneak it in where it's least expected. Fill a whole column with drivel, just to get in that one important line." He bowed courteously. "Quite. That's why I like to talk to you. It's such a waste to be subtle and vicious with people who don't even know that you're being subtle and vicious.”

“All things are simple when you reduce them to fundamentals. You'd be surprised if you knew how few fundamentals there are. Only two, perhaps. To explain all of us. It's the untangling, the reducing that's difficult--that's why people don't like to bother. I don't think they'd like the results, either."

"Roark, everything I've done all my life is because it's the kind of a world that made you work in a quarry last summer." "I know that."

We are glad to listen to the sublime, but it's not necessary to be too damn reverent about the sublime.

"What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Ellsworth asked: "Then in order to be truly wealthy, a man should collect souls?" The teacher was about to ask him what the hell did he mean, but controlled himself and asked what did he mean. Ellsworth would not elucidate.

He was polite, not in the manner of one seeking favor, but in the manner of one granting it.

“You're much too tense and passionate about it. A hysterical devotion to one's career does not make for happiness or success. It is wiser to select a profession about which you can be calm, sane and matter-of-fact. Yes, even if you hate it. It makes for down-to-earthness."

The young photographer glanced at Roark's face--and thought of something that had puzzled him for a long time: he had always wondered why the sensations one felt in dreams were so much more intense than anything one could experience in waking reality--why the horror was so total and the ecstasy so complete--and what was that extra quality which could never be recaptured afterward; the quality of what he felt when he walked down a path through tangled green leaves in a dream, in an air full of expectation, of causeless, utter rapture--and when he awakened he could not explain it, it had been just a path through some woods.The young photographer glanced at Roark's face--and thought of something that had puzzled him for a long time: he had always wondered why the sensations one felt in dreams were so much more intense than anything one could experience in waking reality--why the horror was so total and the ecstasy so complete--and what was that extra quality which could never be recaptured afterward; the quality of what he felt when he walked down a path through tangled green leaves in a dream, in an air full of expectation, of causeless, utter rapture--and when he awakened he could not explain it, it had been just a path through some woods.

"Of course I need you. I go insane when I see you. You can do almost anything you wish with me. Is that what you want to hear? Almost, Dominique. And the things you couldn't make me do--you could put me through hell if you demanded them and I had to refuse you, as I would. Through utter hell, Dominique. Does that please you? Why do you want to know whether you own me? It's so simple. Of course you do. All of me that can be owned. You'll never demand anything else. But you want to know whether you could make me suffer. You could. What of it?" The words did not sound like surrender, because they were not torn out of him, but admitted simply and willingly. She felt no thrill of conquest; she felt herself owned more than ever, by a man who could say these things, know of them to be true, and still remain controlled and controlling--as she wanted him to remain.

“Do you think integrity is the monopoly of the artist? And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor's pocket? No, it's not as easy as that. If that were all, I'd say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren't. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think. Thinking is something one doesn't borrow or pawn. And yet, if I were asked to choose a symbol for humanity as we know it, I wouldn't choose a cross nor an eagle nor a lion and unicorn. I'd choose three gilded balls."

"Don't worry. They're all against me. But I have one advantage: they don't know what they want. I do."

The point I wish to make is only that one must mistrust one's most personal impulses. What one desires is actually of so little importance! One can't expect to find happiness until one realizes this completely.

"You said something yesterday about a first law. A law demanding that man seek the best....It was funny....The unrecognized genius--that's an old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one--the genius recognized too well?...That a great many men are poor fools who can't see the best--that's nothing. One can't get angry at that. But do you understand about the men who see it and don't want it?"

You'll say it doesn't make sense? Of course it doesn't. That's why it works. Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don't have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy. But if you can make it become your ally--ah, my dear!...

Don't you find it interesting to see a huge, complicated piece of machinery, such as our society, all levers and belts and interlocking gears, the kind that looks as if one would need an army to operate it--and you find that by pressing your little finger against one spot, the one vital spot, the center of all its gravity, you can make the thing crumble into a worthless heap of scrap iron? It can be done, my dear. But it takes a long time.

Hell, what's the use of accomplishing a skillful piece of work if nobody knows that you've accomplished it? Had you been your old self, you'd tell me, at this point, that that is the psychology of a murderer who's committed the perfect crime and then confesses because he can't bear the idea that nobody knows it's a perfect crime. And I'd answer that you're right. I want an audience. That's the trouble with victims--they don't even know they're victims, which is as it should be, but it does become monotonous and takes half the fun away. You're such a rare treat--a victim who can appreciate the artistry of its own execution....

He wouldn't even give you that, not even understanding, not even enough to...respect you a little just the same. I don't see what's so wrong with trying to please people. I don't see what's wrong with wanting to be friendly and liked and popular. Why is that a crime? Why should anyone sneer at you for that, sneer all the time, all the time, day and night, not giving you a moment's peace, like the Chinese water torture, you know where they drop water on your skull drop by drop?"

“When you see a man casting pearls without getting even a pork chop in return--it is not against the swine that you feel indignation. It is against the man who valued his pearls so little that he was willing to fling them into the muck and to let them become the occasion for a whole concert of grunting, transcribed by the court stenographer."

“Ask anything of men. Ask them to achieve wealth, fame, love, brutality, murder, self-sacrifice. But don't ask them to achieve self-respect. They will hate your soul. Well, they know best. They must have their reasons. They won't say, of course, that they hate you. They will say that you hate them. It's near enough, I suppose. They know the emotion involved. Such are men as they are. So what is the use of being a martyr to the impossible? What is the use of building for a world that does not exist?"

Let us destroy, but don't let us pretend that we are committing an act of virtue. Let us say that we are moles and we object to mountain peaks. Or, perhaps, that we are lemmings, the animals who cannot help swimming out to self-destruction. I realize fully that at this moment I am as futile as Howard Roark. This is my Stoddard Temple--my first and my last." She inclined her head to the judge. "That is all, Your Honor."

“Remembering that you attach such great importance to not being beaten except by your own hand, I thought you would enjoy this."

"So you people made a martyr out of me, after all. And that is the one thing I've tried all my life not to be. It's so graceless, being a martyr. It's honoring your adversaries too much. But I'll tell you this, Alvah--I'll tell it to you, because I couldn't find a less appropriate person to hear it: nothing that you do to me--or to him--will be worse than what I'll do myself. If you think I can't take the Stoddard Temple, wait till you see what I can take."

"I've been so busy...No, that's not quite true. I've had the time, but when I came home I just couldn't make myself do anything, I just fell in bed and went to sleep. Uncle Ellsworth, do people sleep a lot because they're tired or because they want to escape from something?"

“....But the poor don't hate us, as they should. They only despise us....You know, it's funny: it's the masters who despise the slaves, and the slaves who hate the masters. I don't know who is which. Maybe it doesn't fit here. Maybe it does. I don't know..."

"Don't you see how selfish you have been? You chose a noble career, not for the good you could accomplish, but for the personal happiness you expected to find in it." "But I really wanted to help people." "Because you thought you'd be good and virtuous doing it." "Why--yes. Because I thought it was right. Is it vicious to want to do right?" "Yes, if it's your chief concern. Don't you see how egotistical it is? To hell with everybody so long as I'm virtuous." "But if you have no...no self-respect, how can you be anything?" "Why must you be anything?" She spread her hands out, bewildered. "If your first concern is for what you are or think or feel or have or haven't got--you're still a common egotist." "But I can't jump out of my own body." "No. But you can jump out of your narrow soul." "You mean, I must want to be unhappy?" "No. You must stop wanting anything. You must forget how important Miss Catherine Halsey is. Because, you see, she isn't. Men are important only in relation to other men, in their usefulness, in the service they render. Unless you understand that completely, you can expect nothing but one form of misery or another. Why make such a cosmic tragedy out of the fact that you've found yourself feeling cruel toward people? So what? It's just growing pains. One can't jump from a state of animal brutality into a state of spiritual living without certain transitions. And some of them may seem evil. A beautiful woman is usually a gawky adolescent first. All growth demands destruction. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You must be willing to suffer, to be cruel, to be dishonest, to be unclean--anything, my dear, anything to kill the most stubborn of roots, the ego. And only when it is dead, when you care no longer, when you have lost your identity and forgotten the name of your soul--only then will you know the kind of happiness I spoke about, and the gates of spiritual grandeur will fall open before you."

They stood silently before each other for a moment, and she thought that the most beautiful words were those which were not needed.

"Roark, before I met you, I had always been afraid of seeing someone like you, because I knew that I'd also have to see what I saw on the witness stand and I'd have to do what I did in that courtroom. I hated doing it, because it was an insult to you to defend you--and it was an insult to myself that you had to be defended....Roark, I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the halfway, the almost, the just-about, the in-between. They may have their justifications. I don't know. I don't care to inquire. I know that it is the one thing not given me to understand. When I think of what you are, I can't accept any reality except a world of your kind. Or at least a world in which you have a fighting chance and a fight on your own terms. That does not exist. And I can't live a life torn between that which exists--and you. It would mean to struggle against things and men who don't deserve to be your opponents. Your fight, using their methods--and that's too horrible a desecration. It would mean doing for you what I did for Peter Keating: lie, flatter, evade, compromise, pander to every ineptitude--in order to beg of them a chance for you, beg them to let you live, to let you function, to beg them, Roark, not to laugh at them, but to tremble because they hold the power to hurt you. Am I too weak because I can't do this? I don't know which is the greater strength: to accept all this for you--or to love you so much that the rest is beyond acceptance. I don't know. I love you too much."

This is--for the time when we won't be together. I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breathe air. I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival. I've given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need. This is the only way you can wish to be loved. This is the only way I can want you to love me. If you married me now, I would become your whole existence. But I would not want you then. You would not want yourself--and so you would not love me long. To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I.' The kind of surrender I could have from you now would give me nothing but an empty hulk. If I demanded it, I'd destroy you. That's why I won't stop you. I'll let you go to your husband. I don't know how I'll live through tonight, but I will. I want you whole, as I am, as you'll remain in the battle you've chosen. A battle is never selfless."

"You must learn not to be afraid of the world. Not to be held by it as you are now. Never to be hurt by it as you were in that courtroom. I must let you learn it. I can't help you. You must find your own way. When you have, you'll come back to me. They won't destroy me, Dominique. And they won't destroy you. You'll win, because you've chosen the hardest way of fighting for your freedom from the world. I'll wait for you. I love you. I'm saying this now for all the years we'll have to wait. I love you, Dominique." Then he kissed her and let her go.

"They say three's a crowd," laughed Keating. "But that's bosh. Two are better than one, and sometimes three are better than two, it all depends." "The only thing wrong with that old cliché," said Toohey, "is the erroneous implication that 'a crowd' is a term of opprobrium. It is quite the opposite. As you are so merrily discovering. Three, I might add, is a mystic key number. As for instance, the Holy Trinity. Or the triangle, without which we would have no movie industry. There are so many variations upon the triangle, not necessarily unhappy. Like the three of us--with me serving as understudy for the hypotenuse, quite an appropriate substitution, since I'm replacing my antipode, don't you think so, Dominique?"

Mallory had tried to object. "Shut up, Steve," Roark had said. "I'm not doing it for you. At a time like this I owe myself a few luxuries. So I'm simply buying the most valuable thing that can be bought--your time. I'm competing with a whole country--and that's quite a luxury, isn't it? They want you to do baby plaques and I don't, and I like having my way against theirs." "What do you want me to work on, Howard?" "I want you to work without asking anyone what he wants you to work on."

Roark had never seen the reconstructed Stoddard Temple. On an evening in November he went to see it. He did not know whether it was surrender to pain or victory over the fear of seeing it.

People always speak of a black death or a red death, he thought; yours, Gail Wynand, will be a gray death. Why hasn't anyone ever said that this is the ultimate horror? Not screams, pleas or convulsions. Not the indifference of a clean emptiness, disinfected by the fire of some great disaster. But this--a mean, smutty little horror, impotent even to frighten. You can't do it like that, he told himself, smiling coldly; it would be in such bad taste.

He was alone now. The curtains were open. He stood looking at the city. It was late and the great riot of lights below him was beginning to die down. He thought that he did not mind having to look at the city for many more years and he did not mind never seeing it again.

If Toohey's eyes had not been fixed insolently on Wynand's, he would have been ordered out of the office at once. But the glance told Wynand that Toohey knew to what extent he had been plagued by people recommending architects and how hard he had tried to avoid them; and that Toohey had outwitted him by obtaining this interview for a purpose Wynand had not expected. The impertinence of it amused Wynand, as Toohey had known it would.

That, Mr. Wynand, is my sincere opinion." "I quite believe you." "You do?" "Of course. But, Mr. Toohey, why should I consider your opinion?"

"Really, Mr. Toohey, I owe you an apology, if, by allowing my tastes to become so well known, I caused you to be so crude. But I had no idea that among your many other humanitarian activities you were also a pimp."

Nothing had happened to him--a happening is a positive reality, and no reality could ever make him helpless; this was some enormous negative--as if everything had been wiped out, leaving a senseless emptiness, faintly indecent because it seemed so ordinary, so unexciting, like murder wearing a homey smile. Nothing was gone--except desire; no, more than that--the root, the desire to desire. He thought that a man who loses his eyes still retains the concept of sight; but he had heard of a ghastlier blindness--if the brain centre’s controlling vision are destroyed, one loses even the memory of visual perception.

It was the lack of shock, when he thought he would kill himself, that convinced him he should. The thought seemed so simple, like an argument not worth contesting. Like a bromide. Now he stood at the glass wall, stopped by that very simplicity. One could make a bromide of one's life, he thought; but not of one's death.

It was like using a steamroller to press handkerchiefs. But he set his teeth and stuck to it.

The girl with whom he fell in love had an exquisite beauty, a beauty to be worshipped, not desired. She was fragile and silent. Her face told of the lovely mysteries within her, left unexpressed.

His decision contradicted every rule he had laid down for his career. But he did not think. It was one of the rare explosions that hit him at times, throwing him beyond caution, making of him a creature possessed by the single impulse to have his way, because the rightness of his way was so blindingly total.

The public asked for crime, scandal and sentiment. Gail Wynand provided it. He gave people what they wanted, plus a justification for indulging the tastes of which they had been ashamed.

"If you make people perform a noble duty, it bores them," said Wynand. "If you make them indulge themselves, it shames them. But combine the two--and you've got them."

"It is not my function," said Wynand, "to help people preserve a self-respect they haven't got. You give them what they profess to like in public. I give them what they really like. Honesty is the best policy, gentlemen, though not quite in the sense you were taught to believe."

Every man on earth has a soul of his own that nobody can stare at.

He moved his hand, weighing the gun. He smiled, a faint smile of derision. No, he thought, that's not for you. Not yet. You still have the sense of not wanting to die senselessly. You were stopped by that. Even that is a remnant--of something.

"Are you making fun of me, Dominique?" "Have you given me reason to?"

You wanted a mirror. People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they're reflecting too. You know, like the senseless infinity you get from two mirrors facing each other across a narrow passage. Usually in the more vulgar kind of hotels. Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose.

“before--you took something I had..." "No. I took something you never had. I grant you that's worse." "What?" "It's said that the worst thing one can do to a man is to kill his self-respect. But that's not true. Self-respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it."

"Most people go to very to very great lengths in order to convince themselves of their self-respect." "Yes." "And, of course, a quest for self-respect is proof of its lack." "Yes." "Do you see the meaning of a quest for self-contempt?" "That I lack it?" "And that you'll never achieve it." "I didn't expect you to understand that either." "I won't say anything else--or I'll stop being the person before last in the world and I'll become unsuitable to your purpose." He rose. "Shall I tell you formally that I accept your offer?" She inclined her head in agreement.

"Shall I tell you the difference between you and your statue?" "No." "But I want to. It's startling to see the same elements used in two compositions with opposite themes. Everything about you in that statue is the theme of exaltation. But your own theme is suffering." "Suffering? I'm not conscious of having shown that." "You haven't. That's what I meant. No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain."

Dominique looked at the gold letters--I Do--on the delicate white bow. "What does that name mean?" she asked. "It's an answer," said Wynand, "to people long since dead. Though perhaps they are the only immortal ones. You see, the sentence I heard most often in my childhood was 'You don't run things around here.'"

"Yes, of course. Forgive me for implying any weakness in you. I know better. By the way, you haven't asked me where we're going." "That, too, would be weakness." "True. I'm glad you don't care. Because I never have any definite destination. This ship is not for going to places, but for getting away from them. When I stop at a port, it's only for the sheer pleasure of leaving it. I always think: Here's one more spot that can't hold me." "I used to travel a great deal. I always felt just like that. I've been told it's because I'm a hater of mankind." "You're not foolish enough to believe that, are you?" "I don't know."

As a matter of fact, the person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him."

"I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window--no, I don't feel how small I am--but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body."

"It's interesting to speculate on the reasons that make men so anxious to debase themselves. As in that idea of feeling small before nature. It's not a bromide, it's practically an institution. Have you noticed how self-righteous a man sounds when he tells you about it? Look, he seems to say, I'm so glad to be a pygmy, that's how virtuous I am. Have you heard with what delight people quote some great celebrity who's proclaimed that he's not so great when he looks at Niagara Falls? It's as if they were smacking their lips in sheer glee that their best is dust before the brute force of an earthquake. As if they were sprawling on all fours, rubbing their foreheads in the mud to the majesty of a hurricane. But that's not the spirit that leashed fire, steam, electricity, that crossed oceans in sailing sloops, that built airplanes and dams...and skyscrapers. What is it they fear? What is they hate so much, those who love to crawl? And why?" "When I find the answer to that," she said, "I'll make my peace with the world."

"I often think that he's the only one of us who's achieved immortality. I don't mean in the sense of fame and I don't mean that he won't die some day. But he's living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they're not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict--and they call it growth. At the end there's nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they have never held for a single moment? But Howard--one can imagine him existing forever."

"You understand. Nobody else does. And you like me." "Devotedly. Whenever I have the time." "Ah?"

She thought that they had not greeted each other and that it was right. This was not a reunion, but just one moment out of something that had never been interrupted. She thought how strange it would be if she ever said "Hello" to him; one did not greet oneself each morning.

"Roark, try to understand, please try to understand. I can't bear to see what they're doing to you, what they're going to do. It's too great--you and building and what you feel about it. You can't go on like that for long. It won't last. They won't let you. You're moving to some terrible kind of disaster. It can't end any other way. Give it up. Take some meaningless job--like the quarry. We'll live here. We'll have little and we'll give nothing. We'll live only for what we are and for what we know." He laughed. She heard, in the sound of it, a surprising touch of consideration for her--the attempt not to laugh; but he couldn't stop it. "Dominique." The way he pronounced the name remained with her and made it easier to hear the words that followed: "I wish I could tell you that it was a temptation, at least for a moment. But it wasn't." He added: "If I were very cruel, I'd accept it. Just to see how soon you'd beg me to go back to building." "Yes...Probably..."

"Until--when, Roark?" His hand moved over the streets. "Until you stop hating all this, stop being afraid of it, learn not to notice it."

He bowed, his manner unchanged, his calm still holding the same peculiar quality made of two things: the mature control of a man so certain of his capacity for control that it could seem casual, and a childlike simplicity of accepting events as if they were subject to no possible change.

"What's got into him?" "It's nothing that got into him, Alvah. It's something that got out at last."

She saw no apology, no regret, no resentment as he looked at her. It was a strange glance; she had noticed it before; a glance of simple worship. And it made her realize that there is a stage of worship which makes the worshiper himself an object of reverence.

"Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I'm not the Gail Wynand you'd heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you'd want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, because that's the impossible, the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you'd want to offer the man you loved. But it wouldn't be easy for you." "If that's true, then you..." "Then I become gentle and humble--to your great astonishment--because I'm the worst scoundrel living."

"I don't want to. But I like to be honest. That has been my only private luxury. Don't change your mind about me. Go on seeing me as you saw me before we met." "Gail, that's not what you want." "It doesn't matter what I want. I don't want anything--except to own you. Without any answer from you. It has to be without answer. If you begin to look at me too closely, you'll see things you won't like at all." "What things?" "You're so beautiful, Dominique. It's such a lovely accident on God's part that there's one person who matches inside and out." "What things, Gail?" "Do you know what you're actually in love with? Integrity. The impossible. The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art. That's the only field where it can be found--art. But you want it in the flesh. You're in love with it. Well, you see, I've never had any integrity."

"All right, Gail. Let's go in. It's too cold for you here without an overcoat." He chuckled softly--it was the kind of concern she had never shown for him before. He took her hand and kissed her palm, holding it against his face. # For many weeks, when left alone together, they spoke little and never about each other. But it was not a silence of resentment; it was the silence of an understanding too delicate to limit by words. They would be in a room together in the evening, saying nothing, content to feel each other's presence. They would look at each other suddenly--and both would smile, the smile like hands clasped.

"Gail," she said gently, "some day I'll have to ask your forgiveness for having married you." He shook his head slowly, smiling. She said: "I wanted you to be my chain to the world. You've become my defense, instead. And that makes my marriage dishonest." "No. I told you I would accept any reason you chose." "But you've changed everything for me. Or was it I that changed it? I don't know. We've done something strange to each other. I've given you what I wanted to lose. That special sense of living I thought this marriage would destroy for me. The sense of life as exaltation. And you--you've done all the things I would have done. Do you know how much alike we are?" "I knew that from the first." "But it should have been impossible. Gail, I want to remain with you now--for another reason. To wait for an answer. I think when I learn to understand what you are, I'll understand myself. There is an answer. There is a name for the thing we have in common. I don't know it. I know it's very important." "Probably. I suppose I should want to understand it. But I don't. I can't care about anything now. I can't even be afraid." She looked up at him and said very calmly: "I am afraid, Gail." "Of what, dearest?" "Of what I'm doing to you." "Why?" "I don't love you, Gail." "I can't care even about that." She dropped her head and he looked down at the hair that was like a pale helmet of polished metal. "Dominique." She raised her face to him obediently. "I love you, Dominique. I love you so much that nothing can matter to me--not even you. Can you understand that? Only my love--not your answer. Not even your indifference. I've never taken much from the world. I haven't wanted much. I've never really wanted anything. Not in the total, undivided way, not with the kind of desire that becomes an ultimatum, 'yes' or 'no,' and one can't accept the 'no' without ceasing to exist. That's what you are to me. But when one reaches that stage, it's not the object that matters, it's the desire. Not you, but I. The ability to desire like that. Nothing less is worth feeling or honoring. And I've never felt that before. Dominique, I've never known how to say 'mine' about anything. Not in the sense I say it about you. Mine. Did you call it a sense of life as exaltation? You said that. You understand. I can't be afraid. I love you, Dominique--I love you--you're letting me say it now--I love you."

Men have not found the words for it nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don't help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don't work for my happiness, my brothers--show me yours--show me that it is possible--show me your achievement--and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.

Music, he thought, the promise of the music he had invoked, the sense of it made real--there it was before his eyes--he did not see it--he heard it in chords--he thought that there was a common language of thought, sight and sound--was it mathematics?--the discipline of reason--music was mathematics--and architecture was music in stone--he knew he was dizzy because this place below him could not be real.

And then he saw Mr. Bradley come to visit the site, to smile blandly and depart again. Then Mallory felt anger without reason--and fear. "Howard," Mallory said one night, when they sat together at a fire of dry branches on the hillside over the camp, "it's the Stoddard Temple again." "Yes," said Roark. "I think so. But I can't figure out in just what way or what they're after." He rolled over on his stomach and looked down at the panes of glass scattered through the darkness below; they caught reflections from somewhere and looked like phosphorescent, self-generated springs of light rising out of the ground. He said: "It doesn't matter, Steve, does it? Not what they do about it nor who comes to live here. Only that we've made it. Would you have missed this, no matter what price they make you pay for it afterward?" "No," said Mallory.

But the root of evil--my drooling beast--it's there. Howard, in that story. In that--and in the souls of the smug bastards who'll read it and say: 'Oh well, genius must always struggle, it's good for 'em'--and then go and look for some village idiot to help, to teach him how to weave baskets. That's the drooling beast in action.

It takes two to make a very great career: the man who is great, and the man--almost rarer--who is great enough to see greatness and say so."

"Most people build as they live--as a matter of routine and senseless accident. But a few understand that building is a great symbol. We live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life. If he doesn't build, when he has the means, it's because his life has not been what he wanted."

"I never meet the men whose work I love. The work means too much to me. I don't want the men to spoil it. They usually do. They're an anticlimax to their own talent. You're not. I don't mind talking to you. I told you this only because I want you to know that I respect very little in life, but I respect the things in my gallery, and your buildings, and man's capacity to produce work like that. Maybe it's the only religion I've ever had." He shrugged.

"I want it to be a palace--only I don't think palaces are very luxurious. They're so big, so promiscuously public. A small house is the true luxury. A residence for two people only--for my wife and me. It won't be necessary to allow for a family, we don't intend to have children. Nor for visitors, we don't intend to entertain. One guest room--in case we should need it--but not more than that. Living room, dining room, library, two studies, one bedroom. Servants' quarters, garage. That's the general idea.

"I can't pretend an anger I don't feel," said Roark. "It's not pity. It's much more cruel than anything I could do. Only I'm not doing it in order to be cruel. If I slapped your face, you'd forgive me for the Stoddard Temple." "Is it you who should seek forgiveness?" "No. You wish I did. You know that there's an act of forgiveness involved. You're not clear about the actors. You wish I would forgive you--or demand payment, which is the same thing--and you believe that that would close the record. But, you see, I have nothing to do with it. I'm not one of the actors. It doesn't matter what I do or feel about it now. You're not thinking of me. I can't help you. I'm not the person you're afraid of just now." "Who is?" "Yourself." "Who gave you the right to say all this?" "You did." "Well, go on." "Do you wish the rest?" "Go on." "I think it hurts you to know that you've made me suffer. You wish you hadn't. And yet there's something that frightens you more. The knowledge that I haven't suffered at all." "Go on." "The knowledge that I'm neither kind nor generous now, but simply indifferent. It frightens you, because you know that things like the Stoddard Temple always require payment--and you see that I'm not paying for it. You were astonished that I accepted this commission. Do you think my acceptance required courage? You needed far greater courage to hire me. You see, this is what I think of the Stoddard Temple. I'm through with it. You're not." Wynand let his fingers fall open, palms out. His shoulders sagged a little, relaxing. He said very simply: "All right. It's true. All of it."

Did you want to scream, when you were a child, seeing nothing but fat ineptitude around you, knowing how many things could be done and done so well, but having no power to do them? Having no power to blast the empty skulls around you? Having to take orders--and that's bad enough--but to take orders from your inferiors! Have you felt that?" "Yes." "Did you drive the anger back inside of you, and store it, and decide to let yourself be torn to pieces if necessary, but reach the day when you'd rule those people and all people and everything around you?" "No." "You didn't? You let yourself forget?" "No. I hate incompetence. I think it's probably the only thing I do hate. But it didn't make me want to rule people. Nor to teach them anything. It made me want to do my own work in my own way and let myself be torn to pieces if necessary."

"What you feel in the presence of a thing you admire is just one word--'Yes.' The affirmation, the acceptance, the sign of admittance. And that 'Yes' is more than an answer to one thing, it's a kind of 'Amen' to life, to the earth that holds this thing, to the thought that created it, to yourself for being able to see it. But the ability to say 'Yes' or 'No' is the essence of all ownership. It's your ownership of your own ego. Your soul, if you wish. Your soul has a single basic function--the act of valuing. 'Yes' or 'No,' 'I wish' or 'I do not wish.' You can't say 'Yes' without saying 'I.' There's no affirmation without the one who affirms. In this sense, everything to which you grant your love is yours." "In this sense, you share things with others?" "No. It's not sharing. When I listen to a symphony I love, I don't get from it what the composer got. His 'Yes' was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience. I'm alone when I design a house, Gail, and you can never know the way in which I own it. But if you said you own 'Amen' to it--it's also yours. And I'm glad it's yours."

"You told them you don't co-operate or collaborate." "But it wasn't a gesture, Gail. It was plain common sense. One can't collaborate on one's own job. I can co-operate, if that's what they call it, with the workers who erect my buildings. But I can't help them to lay bricks and they can't help me to design the house."

He leaned against the filing cabinet, letting his feet slide forward, his arms crossed, and he spoke softly: "Howard I had a kitten once. The damn thing attached itself to me--a flea-bitten little beast from the gutter, just fur, mud and bones--followed me home, I fed it and kicked it out, but the next day there it was again, and finally I kept it. I was seventeen then, working for the Gazette, just learning to work in the special way I had to learn for life. I could take it all right, but not all of it. There were times when it was pretty bad. Evenings, usually. Once I wanted to kill myself. Not anger--anger made me work harder. Not fear. But disgust, Howard. The kind of disgust that made it seem as if the whole world were under water and the water stood still, water that had backed up out of the sewers and ate into everything, even the sky, even my brain. And then I looked at that kitten. And I thought that it didn't know the things I loathed, it could never know. It was clean--clean in the absolute sense, because it had no capacity to conceive of the world's ugliness. I can't tell you what relief there was in trying to imagine the state of consciousness inside that little brain, trying to share it, a living consciousness, but clean and free. I would lie down on the floor and put my face on that cat's belly, and hear the beast purring. And then I would feel better....There, Howard. I've called your office a rotting wharf and yourself an alley cat. That's my way of paying homage." Roark smiled. Wynand saw that the smile was grateful.

But it hurts me, he thought. It hurts me every time I think of him. It makes everything easier--the people, the editorials, the contracts--but easier because it hurts so much. Pain is a stimulant also. I think I hate that name. I will go on repeating it. It is a pain I wish to bear.

Structure, thought Wynand, is a solved problem of tension, of balance, of security in counterthrusts.

"I was thinking of people who say that happiness is impossible on earth. Look how hard they all try to find some joy in life. Look how they struggle for it. Why should any living creature exist in pain? By what conceivable right can anyone demand that a human being exist for anything but his own joy? Every one of them wants it. Every part of him wants it. But they never find it. I wonder why. They whine and say they don't understand the meaning of life. There's a particular kind of people that I despise. Those who seek some sort of a higher purpose or 'universal goal,' who don't know what to live for, who moan that they must 'find themselves.' You hear it all around us. That seems to be the official bromide of our century. Every book you open. Every drooling self-confession. It seems to be the noble thing to confess. I'd think it would be the most shameful one." "Look, Gail." Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. "Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That's the meaning of life." "Your strength?" "Your work." He tossed the branch aside. "The material the earth offers you and what you make of it...What are you thinking of, Gail?" "The photograph on the wall of my office."

If you want something to grow, you don't nurture each seed separately. You just spread a certain fertilizer. Nature will do the rest.

"What do you mean?" "Nothing that you could possibly grasp. And I must not overtax your strength. You don't look as if you had much to spare."

You can devote your life to pulling out each single weed as it comes up--and then ten lifetimes won't be enough for the job. Or you can prepare your soil in such a manner--by spreading a certain chemical, let us say--that it will be impossible for weeds to grow. This last is faster.

"Ellsworth, I don't know what you're talking about." "But of course you don't. That's my advantage I say these things publicly every single day--and nobody knows what I'm talking about."

"You want to do it?" "I might. If you offer me enough." "Howard--anything you ask. Anything. I'd sell my soul..." "That's the sort of thing I want you to understand. To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul--would you understand why that's much harder?" "Yes...Yes, I think so."

I worked because I can't look at any material without thinking: What could be done with it? And the moment I think that, I've got to do it. To find the answer, to break the thing. I've worked on it for years. I loved it. I worked because it was a problem I wanted to solve.

You see, I'm never concerned with my clients, only with their architectural requirements. I consider these as part of my building's theme and problem, as my building's material--just as I consider bricks and steel. Bricks and steel are not my motive. Neither are the clients. Both are only the means of my work. Peter, before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people. Your own action, not any possible object of your charity. I'll be glad if people who need it find a better manner of living in a house I designed. But that's not the motive of my work. Nor my reason. Nor my reward."

Well, I've told you all the things in which I don't believe, so that you'll understand what I want and what right I have to want it. I don't believe in government housing. I don't want to hear anything about its noble purposes. I don't think they're noble. But that, too, doesn't matter. That's not my first concern. Not who lives in the house nor who orders it built. Only the house itself. If it has to be built, it might as well be built right."

The only thing that matters, my goal, my reward, my beginning, my end is the work itself. My work done my way. Peter, there's nothing in the world that you can offer me, except this. Offer me this and you can have anything I've got to give. My work done my way. A private, personal, selfish, egotistical motivation. That's the only way I function. That's all I am."

"What are you talking about?" "Nothing. Don't pay any attention. I'm half asleep." She thought: This is the tribute to Gail, the confidence of surrender--he relaxes like a cat--and cats don't relax except with people they like.

You and he as inseparable friends upsets every rational concept I've ever held. After all, there are distinct classes of humanity--no, I'm not talking Toohey's language--but there are certain boundary lines among men which cannot be crossed." "Yes, there are. But nobody has ever given the proper statement of where they must be drawn."

"You see how stupid those things sound. It's natural for you to be a little contrite--a normal reflex--but we must look at it objectively, we're grownup, rational people, nothing is too serious, we can't really help what we do, we're conditioned that way, we just charge it off to experience and go on from there."

"Katie...for six years...I thought of how I'd ask your forgiveness some day. And now I have the chance, but I won't ask it. It seems...it seems beside the point. I know it's horrible to say that, but that's how it seems to me. It was the worst thing I ever did in my life--but not because I hurt you. I did hurt you, Katie, and maybe more than you know yourself. But that's not my worst guilt....Katie, I wanted to marry you. It was the only thing I ever really wanted. And that's the sin that can't be forgiven--that I hadn't done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because there's no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain--and wasted pain....Katie, why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want. As I wanted to marry you. Not as I want to sleep with some woman or get drunk or get my name in the papers. Those things--they're not even desires--they're things people do to escape from desires--because it's such a big responsibility, really to want something."

Katie?...People always regret that the past is so final, that nothing can change it--but I'm glad it's so. We can't spoil it. We can think of the past, can't we? Why shouldn't we? I mean, as you said, like grownup people, not fooling ourselves, not trying to hope, but only to look back at it....

"I'm not running away from my work, if that's what surprises you. I know when to stop--and I can't stop, unless it's completely. I know I've overdone it. I've been wasting too much paper lately and doing awful stuff." "Do you ever do awful stuff?" "Probably more of it than any other architect and with less excuse. The only distinction I can claim is that my botches end up in my own wastebasket."

"You made a mistake on the Stoddard Temple, Howard. That statue should have been, not of Dominique, but of you." "No. I'm too egotistical for that." "Egotistical? An egotist would have loved it. You use words in the strangest way." "In the exact way. I don't wish to be the symbol of anything. I'm only myself."

"I erased my ego out of existence in a way never achieved by any saint in a cloister. Yet people call me corrupt. Why? The saint in a cloister sacrifices only material things. It's a small price to pay for the glory of his soul. He hoards his soul and gives up the world. But I--I took automobiles, silk pyjamas, a penthouse, and gave the world my soul in exchange. Who's sacrificed more--if sacrifice is the test of virtue? Who's the actual saint?"

“What else can one do if one must serve the people? If one must live for others? Either pander to everybody's wishes and be called corrupt; or impose on everybody by force your own idea of everybody's good. Can you think of any other way?" "No."

"The thing that is destroying the world. The thing you were talking about. Actual selflessness." "The ideal which they say does not exist?" "They're wrong. It does exist--though not in the way they imagine. It's what I couldn't understand about people for a long time. They have no self. They live within others. They live second-hand. Look at Peter Keating." "You look at him. I hate his guts." "I've looked at him--at what's left of him--and it's helped me to understand. He's paying the price and wondering for what sin and telling himself that he's been too selfish. In what act or thought of his has there ever been a self? What was his aim in life? Greatness--in other people's eyes. Fame, admiration, envy--all that which comes from others. Others dictated his convictions, which he did not hold, but he was satisfied that others believed he held them. Others were his motive power and his prime concern. He didn't want to be great, but to be thought great. He didn't want to build, but to be admired as a builder. He borrowed from others in order to make an impression on others. There's your actual selflessness. It's his ego he's betrayed and given up. But everybody calls him selfish." "That's the pattern most people follow." "Yes! And isn't that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he's honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he's great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison. The man whose sole aim is to make money. Now I don't see anything evil in a desire to make money. But money is only a means to some end. If a man wants it for a personal purpose--to invest in his industry, to create, to study, to travel, to enjoy luxury--he's completely moral. But the men who place money first go much beyond that. Personal luxury is a limited endeavor. What they want is ostentation: to show, to stun, to entertain, to impress others. They're second-handers. Look at our so-called cultural endeavors. A lecturer who spouts some borrowed rehash of nothing at all that means nothing at all to him--and the people who listen and don't give a damn, but sit there in order to tell their friends that they have attended a lecture by a famous name. All second-handers." "If I were Ellsworth Toohey, I'd say: aren't you making out a case against selfishness? Aren't they all acting on a selfish motive--to be noticed, liked, admired?" "--by others. At the price of their own self-respect. In the realm of greatest importance--the realm of values, of judgment, of spirit, of thought--they place others above self, in the exact manner which altruism demands. A truly selfish man cannot be affected by the approval of others. He doesn't need it."

When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life. Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation--anchored to nothing. That's the emptiness I couldn't understand in people. That's what stopped me whenever I faced a committee. Men without an ego. Opinion without a rational process. Motion without brakes or motor. Power without responsibility. The second-hander acts, but the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person. It's everywhere and nowhere and you can't reason with him. He's not open to reason. You can't speak to him--he can't hear. You're tried by an empty bench. A blind mass running amuck, to crush you without sense or purpose. Steve Mallory couldn't define the monster, but he knew. That's the drooling beast he fears. The second-hander."

“By seeking self-esteem through others. By living second-hand. And it has opened the way for every kind of horror. It has become the dreadful form of selfishness which a truly selfish man couldn't have conceived. And now, to cure a world perishing from selflessness, we're asked to destroy the self. Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion--prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can't say about a single thing: 'This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me.' Then he wonders why he's unhappy. Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched. The things which are sacred or precious to us are the things we withdraw from promiscuous sharing. But now we are taught to throw everything within us into public light and common pawing. To seek joy in meeting halls. We haven't even got a word for the quality I mean--for the self-sufficiency of man's spirit. It's difficult to call it selfishness or egotism, the words have been perverted, they've come to mean Peter Keating. Gail, I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once--and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that. Now I know what it is. A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters." "I'm glad you admit that you have friends." "I even admit that I love them. But I couldn't love them if they were my chief reason for living. Do you notice that Peter Keating hasn't a single friend left? Do you see why? If one doesn't respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others."

Roark smiled. "Gail, if this boat were sinking, I'd give my life to save you. Not because it's any kind of duty. Only because I like you, for reasons and standards of my own. I could die for you. But I couldn't and wouldn't live for you."

"It's I who've destroyed you, Peter. From the beginning. By helping you. There are matters in which one must not ask for help nor give it. I shouldn't have done your projects at Stanton. I shouldn't have done the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. Nor Cortlandt. I loaded you with more than you could carry. It's like an electric current too strong for the circuit. It blows the fuse. Now we'll both pay for it. It will be hard on you, but it will be harder on me."

"Howard! They didn't do it on purpose." "That's what makes it worse."

She felt no moment of shock, only the memory of one, a shock in the past tense, the thought: I must have been shocked when I saw him, but not now. Now, by the time she was standing before him, it seemed very simple. She thought: The most important never has to be said between us. It has always been said like this. He did not want to see me alone. Now he's here. I waited and I'm ready. "Good evening, Dominique." She heard the name pronounced to fill the space of five years. She said quietly: "Good evening, Roark."

He had not wanted to name it; he had wanted her to understand and show no fear. She had not been able to accept the Stoddard trial, she had run from the dread of seeing him hurt by the world, but she had agreed to help him in this. Had agreed in complete serenity. She was free and he knew it.

(…) and some woman had said: "Dominique, I didn't know you could be so wonderful!" and she had answered: "I haven't a care in the world."

She knew the doctor had told him she would not survive, that first night. She had wanted to tell them all that she would, that she had no choice now but to live; only it did not seem important to tell people anything, ever.

"You'll be acquitted." "That's not what I want to hear you say." "If they convict you--if they lock you in jail or put you in a chain gang--if they smear your name in every filthy headline--if they never let you design another building--if they never let me see you again--it will not matter. Not too much. Only down to a certain point." "That's what I've waited to hear for seven years, Dominique." He took her hand, he raised it and held it to his lips (…)

This was solidarity. The debutante having her toenails pedicured--the housewife buying carrots from a pushcart--the bookkeeper who had wanted to be a pianist, but had the excuse of a sister to support--the businessman who hated his business--the worker who hated his work--the intellectual who hated everybody--all were united as brothers in the luxury of common anger that cured boredom and took them out of themselves, and they knew well enough what a blessing it was to be taken out of themselves.

"We have never made an effort to understand what is greatness in man and how to recognize it," said another Wynand editorial. "We have come to hold, in a kind of mawkish stupor, that greatness is to be gauged by self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, we drool, is the ultimate virtue. Let's stop and think for a moment. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feelings? The independence of his thought? But these are a man's supreme possessions. Anything he gives up for them is not a sacrifice but an easy bargain. They, however, are above sacrificing to any cause or consideration whatsoever. Should we not, then, stop preaching dangerous and vicious nonsense? Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. It is the unsacrificed self that we must respect in man above all."

"There are occasions, Alvah, when the issues at stake are not the ostensible facts at all. And the public reaction seems out of all proportion, but isn't.”

“It's only a matter of discovering the lever. If you learn how to rule one single man's soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It's the soul, Peter, the soul. Not whips or swords or fire or guns. That's why the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons were fools and did not last. We will. The soul, Peter, is that which can't be ruled. It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it--and the man is yours. You won't need a whip--he'll bring it to you and ask to be whipped. Set him in reverse--and his own mechanism will do your work for you. Use him against himself. Want to know how it's done? See if I ever lied to you. See if you haven't heard all this for years, but didn't want to hear, and the fault is yours, not mine. There are many ways. Here's one. Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity. That's difficult. The worst among you gropes for an ideal in his own twisted way. Kill integrity by internal corruption. Use it against itself. Direct it toward a goal destructive of all integrity. Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. Tell men that altruism is the ideal. Not a single one of them has ever achieved it and not a single one ever will. His every living instinct screams against it. But don't you see what you accomplish? Man realizes that he's incapable of what he's accepted as the noblest virtue--and it gives him a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness. Since the supreme ideal is beyond his grasp, he gives up eventually all ideals, all aspiration, all sense of his personal value. He feels himself obliged to preach what he can't practice. But one can't be good halfway or honest approximately. To preserve one's integrity is a hard battle. Why preserve that which one knows to be corrupt already? His soul gives up its self-respect. You've got him. He'll obey. He'll be glad to obey--because he can't trust himself, he feels uncertain, he feels unclean. That's one way. Here's another. Kill man's sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognize greatness or to achieve it. Great men can't be ruled. We don't want any great men. Don't deny the conception of greatness. Destroy it from within. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept--and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. Laugh at Roark and hold Peter Keating as a great architect. You've destroyed architecture. Build up Lois Cook and you've destroyed literature. Hail Ike and you've destroyed the theater. Glorify Lancelot Clokey and you've destroyed the press. Don't set out to raze all shrines--you'll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity--and the shrines are razed. Then there's another way. Kill by laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction. Turn it into a sneer. It's simple. Tell them to laugh at everything. Tell them that a sense of humor is an unlimited virtue. Don't let anything remain sacred in a man's soul--and his soul won't be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in man. One doesn't reverence with a giggle. He'll obey and he'll set no limits to his obedience--anything goes--nothing is too serious. Here's another way. This is most important. Don't allow men to be happy. Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men. So kill their joy in living. Take away from them whatever is dear or important to them. Never let them have what they want. Make them feel that the mere fact of a personal desire is evil. Bring them to a state where saying I want' is no longer a natural right, but a shameful admission. Altruism is of great help in this. Unhappy men will come to you. They'll need you. They'll come for consolation, for support, for escape. Nature allows no vacuum. Empty man's soul--and the space is yours to fill. I don't see why you should look so shocked, Peter. This is the oldest one

of all. Look back at history. Look at any great system of ethics, from the Orient up. Didn't they all preach the sacrifice of personal joy? Under all the complications of verbiage, haven't they all had a single leitmotif: sacrifice, renunciation, self-denial? Haven't you been able to catch their theme song--'Give up, give up, give up, give up'? Look at the moral atmosphere of today. Everything enjoyable, from cigarettes to sex to ambition to the profit motive, is considered depraved or sinful. Just prove that a thing makes men happy--and you've damned it. That's how far we've come. We've tied happiness to guilt. And we've got mankind by the throat. Throw your first-born into a sacrificial furnace--lie on a bed of nails--go into the desert to mortify the flesh--don't dance--don't go to the movies on Sunday--don't try to get rich--don't smoke--don't drink. It's all the same line. The great line. Fools think that taboos of this nature are just nonsense. Something left over, old-fashioned. But there's always a purpose in nonsense. Don't bother to examine a folly--ask yourself only what it accomplishes. Every system of ethics that preached sacrifice grew into a world power and ruled millions of men. Of course, you must dress it up. You must tell people that they'll achieve a superior kind of happiness by giving up everything that makes them happy. You don't have to be too clear about it. Use big vague words. 'Universal Harmony'--'Eternal Spirit'--'Divine Purpose'--'Nirvana'--'Paradise'--'Racial Supremacy'--'The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.' Internal corruption, Peter. That's the oldest one of all. The farce has been going on for centuries and men still fall for it. Yet the test should be so simple: just listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice--run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it's your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself--that will be the man who's not after your soul. That will be the man who has nothing to gain from you. But let him come and you'll scream your empty heads off, howling that he's a selfish monster. So the racket is safe for many, many centuries. But here you might have noticed something. I said, 'It stands to reason.' Do you see? Men have a weapon against you. Reason. So you must be very sure to take it away from them. Cut the props from under it. But be careful. Don't deny outright. Never deny anything outright, you give your hand away. Don't say reason is evil--though some have gone that far and with astonishing success. Just say that reason is limited. That there's something above it. What? You don't have to be too clear about it either. The field's inexhaustible. 'Instinct'--'Feeling'--'Revelation'--'Divine Intuition'--'Dialectic Materialism.' If you get caught at some crucial point and somebody tells you that your doctrine doesn't make sense--you're ready for him. You tell him that there's something above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel. He must believe. Suspend reason and you play it deuces wild. Anything goes in any manner you wish whenever you need it. You've got him. Can you rule a thinking man? We don't want any thinking men."

Vox populi. The average, the common, the general. Do you know the proper antonym for Ego? Bromide, Peter. The rule of the bromide. But even the trite has to be originated by someone at some time.

Everything that can't be ruled, must go. And if freaks persist in being born occasionally, they will not survive beyond their twelfth year. When their brain begins to function, it will feel the pressure and it will explode. The pressure gauged to a vacuum. Do you know the fate of deep-sea creatures brought out to sunlight? So much for future Roarks. The rest of you will smile and obey. Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles? Man's first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought. But we'll have neither God nor thought.

“Practical men deal in bank accounts, real estate, advertising contracts and gilt-edged securities. They leave to the impractical intellectuals, like me, the amusements of putting the gilt edges through a chemical analysis to learn a few things about the nature and the source of gold. They hang on to Kream-O Pudding, and leave us such trivia as the theater, the movies, the radio, the schools, the book reviews and the criticism of architecture. Just a sop to keep us quiet if we care to waste our time playing with the inconsequentials of life, while you're making money. Money is power. Is it, Mr. Wynand? So you were after power, Mr. Wynand? Power over men? You poor amateur! You never discovered the nature of your own ambition or you'd have known that you weren't fit for it. You couldn't use the methods required and you wouldn't want the results. You've never been enough of a scoundrel. I don't mind handing you that, because I don't know which is worse: to be a great scoundrel or a gigantic fool. That's why I'll be back. And when I am, I'll run this paper."

Once he found her, broom in hand, sweeping an office; the maintenance department had fallen apart, charwomen appeared and disappeared, no one had time to notice. "Is that what I'm paying you for?" he asked. "Well, we can't work in a pigsty. I haven't asked you what you're paying me, but I want a raise." "Drop this thing, for God's sake! It's ridiculous." "What's ridiculous? It's clean now. It didn't take me long. Is it a good job?" "It's a good job." She leaned on the broom handle and laughed. "I believe you thought, like everybody else, that I'm just a kind of luxury object, a high-class type of kept woman, didn't you, Gail?" "Is this the way you can keep going when you want to?" "This is the way I've wanted to keep going all my life--if I could find a reason for it."

"Good evening, Gail," Roark said calmly when he came in. "I don't know what's a more conspicuous form of bad discipline," said Wynand, throwing his hat down on a table by the door, "to blurt things right out or to ignore them blatantly. I look like hell. Say it."

"I don't expect you to save me. I think I have a chance to win. The strike won't make it better or worse. Don't worry about me. And don't give in. If you stick to the end--you won't need me any longer."

There is a net--longer than the cables that coil through the walls of this city, larger than the mesh of pipes that carry water, gas and refuse--there is another hidden net around you; it is strapped to you, and the wires lead to every hand in the city. They jerked the wires and you moved. You were a ruler of men. You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends.

"You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated..."

I never got out of here. I never got out. I surrendered to the grocery man--to the deck hands on the ferryboat--to the owner of the poolroom. You don't run things around here. You don't run things around here. You've never run things anywhere, Gail Wynand. You've only added yourself to the things they ran.

Anything may be betrayed, anyone may be forgiven. But not those who lack the courage of their own greatness.

"You can wait for 'One Small Voice' another month or so, can't you? I've filed suit with the labor board today, to be reinstated in my job on the Banner. There are more ways than one to skin a cat, Lance. The skinning isn't important once you've broken its spine."

Roark wrote him a long letter: "...Gail, I know. I hoped you could escape it, but since it had to happen, start again from where you are. I know what you're doing to yourself. You're not doing it for my sake, it's not up to me, but if this will help you I want to say that I'm repeating, now, everything I've ever said to you. Nothing has changed for me. You're still what you were. I'm not saying that I forgive you, because there can be no such question between us. But if you can't forgive yourself, will you let me do it? Let me say that it doesn't matter, it's not the final verdict on you. Give me the right to let you forget it. Go on just on my faith until you've recovered. I know it's something no man can do for another, but if I am what I've been to you, you'll accept it. Call it a blood transfusion. You need it. Take it. It's harder than fighting that strike. Do it for my sake, if that will help you. But do it. Come back. There will be another chance. What you think you've lost can neither be lost nor found. Don't let it go."

Dominique lay stretched out on the shore of the lake. She looked at the house on the hill, at the tree branches above her. Flat on her back, hands crossed under her head, she studied the motion of leaves against the sky. It was an earnest occupation, giving her full contentment. She thought, it's a lovely kind of green, there's a difference between the color of plants and the color of objects, this has light in it, this is not just green, but also the living force of the tree made visible, I don't have to look down, I can see the branches, the trunk, the roots just by looking at that color. That fire around the edges is the sun, I don't have to see it, I can tell what the whole countryside looks like today. The spots of light weaving in circles--that's the lake, the special kind of light that comes refracted from water, the lake is beautiful today, and it's better not to see it, just to guess by these spots. I have never been able to enjoy it before, the sight of the earth, it's such great background, but it has no meaning except as a background, and I thought of those who owned it and then it hurt me too much. I can love it now. They don't own it. They own nothing. They've never won. I have seen the life of Gail Wynand, and now I know. One cannot hate the earth in their name. The earth is beautiful. And it is a background, but not theirs.

She knew what she had to do. But she would give herself a few days. She thought, I've learned to bear anything except happiness. I must learn how to carry it. How not to break under it. It's the only discipline I'll need from now on.

He knew that this was to be the solemnity of the moment--that it needed no solemnity; it was not to be stressed and set apart, it was not this particular evening, but the completed meaning of seven years behind them.

"When you came that night and told me about Cortlandt, I didn't try to stop you. I knew you had to do it, it was your time to set the terms on which you could go on. This is my time. My Cortlandt explosion. You must let me do it my way. Don't question me. Don't protect me. No matter what I do." "I know what you'll do." "You know that I have to?" "Yes." She bent one arm from the elbow, fingers lifted, in a short, backward jolt, as if tossing the subject over her shoulder. It was settled and not to be discussed.

She slipped down, to sit on the floor, her elbows propped on his knees, she looked up at him and smiled, she knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.

"Howard...willingly, completely, and always...without reservations, without fear of anything they can do to you or me...in any way you wish...as your wife or your mistress, secretly or openly...here, or in a furnished room I'll take in some town near a jail where I'll see you through a wire net...it won't matter....Howard, if you win the trial--even that won't matter too much. You've won long ago....I'll remain what I am, and I'll remain with you--now and ever--in any way you want...." He held her hands in his, she saw his shoulders sagging down to her, she saw him helpless, surrendered to this moment, as she was--and she knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness, yet they could let each other see it without need of protection.

Don't comment on this. Don't say anything about self-sacrifice or I'll break and...and I'm not quite as strong as that sheriff is probably thinking. I didn't do it for you. I've made it worse for you--I've added scandal to everything else they'll throw at you. But, Howard, now we stand together--against all of them. You'll be a convict and I'll be an adulteress. Howard, do you remember that I was afraid to share you with lunch wagons and strangers' windows? Now I'm not afraid to have this past night smeared all over their newspapers. My darling, do you see why I'm happy and why I'm free?" He said: "I'll never remind you afterward that you're crying, Dominique."

He turned to leave. "God damn you!" she cried. "If you can take it like this, you had no right to become what you became!" "That's why I'm taking it." He walked out of the room. He closed the door softly.

The people had come to witness a sensational case, to see celebrities, to get material for conversation, to be seen, to kill time. They would return to unwanted jobs, unloved families, unchosen friends, to drawing rooms, evening clothes, cocktail glasses and movies, to unadmitted pain, murdered hope, desire left unreached, left hanging silently over a path on which no step was taken, to days of effort not to think, not to say, to forget and give in and give up. But each of them had known some unforgotten moment--a morning when nothing had happened, a piece of music heard suddenly and never heard in the same way again, a stranger's face seen in a bus--a moment when each had known a different sense of living. And each remembered other moments, on a sleepless night, on an afternoon of steady rain, in a church, in an empty street at sunset, when each had wondered why there was so much suffering and ugliness in the world. They had not tried to find the answer and they had gone on living as if no answer were necessary. But each had known a moment when, in lonely, naked honesty, he had felt the need of an answer.

The audience looked at him. They felt he had no chance. They could drop the nameless resentment, the sense of insecurity which he aroused in most people. And so, for the first time, they could see him as he was: a man totally innocent of fear. The fear of which they thought was not the normal kind, not a response to a tangible danger, but the chronic, unconfessed fear in which they all lived. They remembered the misery of the moments when, in loneliness, a man thinks of the bright words he could have said, but had not found, and hates those who robbed him of his courage. The misery of knowing how strong and able one is in one's own mind, the radiant picture never to be made real. Dreams? Self-delusion? Or a murdered reality, unborn, killed by that corroding emotion without name--fear--need--dependence--hatred? Roark stood before them as each man stands in the innocence of his own mind. But Roark stood like that before a hostile crowd--and they knew suddenly that no hatred was possible to him. For the flash of an instant, they grasped the manner of his consciousness. Each asked himself: do I need anyone's approval?--does it matter?--am I tied? And for that instant, each man was free--free enough to feel benevolence for every other man in the room. It was only a moment; the moment of silence when Roark was about to speak.

"That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning. Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures--because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer--because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that that one paid for his courage. "Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received--hatred. The great creators--the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors--stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won. "No creator was prompted by a desire to serve his brothers, for his brothers rejected the gift he offered and that gift destroyed the slothful routine of their lives. His truth was his only motive. His own truth, and his own work to achieve it in his own way. A symphony, a book, an engine, a philosophy, an airplane or a building--that was his goal and his life. Not those who heard, read, operated, believed, flew or inhabited the thing he had created. The creation, not its users. The creation, not the benefits others derived from it. The creation which gave form to his truth. He held his truth above all things and against all men. "His vision, his strength, his courage came from his own spirit. A man's spirit, however, is his self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego. "The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power--that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover. The creator served nothing and no one. He had lived for himself. "And only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement.”

"Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons--a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man--the function of his reasoning mind. "But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act--the process of reason--must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred. "We inherit the products of the thought of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make a cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane. But all through the process what we receive from others is only the end product of their thinking. The moving force is the creative faculty which takes this product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator. Men learn from one another. But all learning is only the exchange of material. No man can give another the capacity to think. Yet that capacity is our only means of survival. "Nothing is given to man on earth. Everything he needs has to be produced. And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways--by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows. The creator faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary. "The creator's concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite's concern is the conquest of men. "The creator lives for his work. He needs no other men. His primary goal is within himself. The parasite lives second-hand. He needs others. Others become his prime motive. "The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary. "The basic need of the second-hander is to secure his ties with men in order to be fed. He places relations first. He declares that man exists in order to serve others. He preaches altruism. "Altruism is the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self. "No man can live for another. He cannot share his spirit just as he cannot share his body. But the second-hander has used altruism as a weapon of exploitation and reversed the base of mankind's moral principles. Men have been taught every precept that destroys the creator. Men have been taught dependence as a virtue. "The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption. It is impossible in concept. The nearest approach to it in reality--the man who lives to serve others--is the slave. If physical slavery is repulsive, how much more repulsive is the concept of servility of the spirit? The conquered slave has a vestige of honor. He has the merit of having resisted and of considering his condition evil. But the man who enslaves himself voluntarily in the name of love is the basest of creatures. He degrades the dignity of man

and he degrades the conception of love. But this is the essence of altruism. "Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. Creation comes before distribution--or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement. "Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the suffering of others. But suffering is a disease. Should one come upon it, one tries to give relief and assistance. To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then man must wish to see others suffer--in order that he may be virtuous. Such is the nature of altruism. The creator is not concerned with disease, but with life. Yet the work of the creators has eliminated one form of disease after another, in man's body and spirit, and brought more relief from suffering than any altruist could ever conceive. "Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone. "Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egotist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge, or act. These are functions of the self. "Here the basic reversal is most deadly. The issue has been perverted and man has been left no alternative--and no freedom. As poles of good and evil, he was offered two conceptions: egotism and altruism. Egotism was held to mean the sacrifice of others to self. Altruism--the sacrifice of self to others. This tied man irrevocably to other men and left him nothing but a choice of pain: his own pain borne for the sake of others or pain inflicted upon others for the sake of self. When it was added that man must find joy in self-immolation, the trap was closed. Man was forced to accept masochism as his ideal--under the threat that sadism was his only alternative. This was the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on mankind. "This was the device by which dependence and suffering were perpetuated as fundamentals of life. "The choice is not self-sacrifice or domination. The choice is independence or dependence. The code of the creator or the code of the second-hander. This is the basic issue. It rests upon the alternative of life or death. The code of the creator is built on the needs of the reasoning mind which allows man to survive. The code of the second-hander is built on the needs of a mind incapable of survival. All that which proceeds from man's independent ego is good. All that which proceeds from man's dependence upon men is evil. "The egotist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He does not exist for any other man--and he asks no other man to exist for him. This is the only form of brotherhood and mutual respect possible between men. "Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man's independence, initiative and personal love for his work determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn't done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence. "In all proper relationships

there is no sacrifice of anyone to anyone. An architect needs clients, but he does not subordinate his work to their wishes. They need him, but they do not order a house just to give him a commission. Men exchange their work by free, mutual consent to mutual advantage when their personal interests agree and they both desire the exchange. If they do not desire it, they are not forced to deal with each other. They seek further. This is the only possible form of relationship between equals. Anything else is a relation of slave to master, or victim to executioner. "No work is ever done collectively, by a majority decision. Every creative job is achieved under the guidance of a single individual thought. An architect requires a great many men to erect his building. But he does not ask them to vote on his design. They work together by free agreement and each is free in his proper function. An architect uses steel, glass, concrete, produced by others. But the materials remain just so much steel, glass and concrete until he touches them. What he does with them is his individual product and his individual property. This is the only pattern for proper co-operation among men. "The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men. This includes the whole sphere of his creative faculty, his thinking, his work. But it does not include the sphere of the gangster, the altruist and the dictator. "A man thinks and works alone. A man cannot rob, exploit or rule--alone. Robbery, exploitation and ruling presuppose victims. They imply dependence. They are the province of the second-hander. "Rulers of men are not egotists. They create nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of others. Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving. They are as dependent as the beggar, the social worker and the bandit. The form of dependence does not matter. "But men were taught to regard second-handers--tyrants, emperors, dictators--as exponents of egotism. By this fraud they were made to destroy the ego, themselves and others. The purpose of the fraud was to destroy the creators. Or to harness them. Which is a synonym. "From the beginning of history, the two antagonists have stood face to face: the creator and the second-hander. When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander responded. He invented altruism. "The creator--denied, opposed, persecuted, exploited--went on, moved forward and carried all humanity along on his energy. The second-hander contributed nothing to the process except the impediments. The contest has another name: the individual against the collective. "The 'common good' of a collective--a race, a class, a state--was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism? Does the fault lie in men's hypocrisy or in the nature of the principle? The most dreadful butchers were the most sincere. They believed in the perfect society reached through the guillotine and the firing squad. Nobody questioned their right to murder since they were murdering for an altruistic purpose. It was accepted that man must be sacrificed for other men. Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with declarations of love for mankind and ends with a sea of blood. It goes on and will go on so long as men believe that an action is good if it is unselfish. That permits the altruist to act and forces his victims to bear it. The leaders of collectivist movements ask nothing for themselves. But observe the results. "The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is--Hands off! "Now observe the results of a society built on the principle of

individualism. This, our country. The noblest country in the history of men. The country of greatest achievement, greatest prosperity, greatest freedom. This country was not based on selfless service, sacrifice, renunciation or any precept of altruism. It was based on a man's right to the pursuit of happiness. His own happiness. Not anyone else's. A private, personal, selfish motive. Look at the results. Look into your own conscience. "It is an ancient conflict. Men have come close to the truth, but it was destroyed each time and one civilization fell after another. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

"It is said that I have destroyed the home of the destitute. It is forgotten that but for me the destitute could not have had this particular home. Those who were concerned with the poor had to come to me, who have never been concerned, in order to help the poor. It is believed that the poverty of the future tenants gave them a right to my work. That their need constituted a claim on my life. That it was my duty to contribute anything demanded of me. This is the second-hander's credo now swallowing the world. "I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need. "I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others. "It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing. "I wished to come here and say that the integrity of a man's creative work is of greater importance than any charitable endeavor. Those of you who do not understand this are the men who're destroying the world. "I wished to come here and state my terms. I do not care to exist on any others. "I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society. To my country, I wish to give the ten years which I will spend in jail if my country exists no longer. I will spend them in memory and in gratitude for what my country has been. It will be my act of loyalty, my refusal to live or work in what has taken its place. "My act of loyalty to every creator who ever lived and was made to suffer by the force responsible for the Cortlandt I dynamited. To every tortured hour of loneliness, denial, frustration, abuse he was made to spend--and to the battles he won. To every creator whose name is known--and to every creator who lived, struggled and perished unrecognized before he could achieve. To every creator who was destroyed in body or in spirit. To Henry Cameron. To Steven Mallory. To a man who doesn't want to be named, but who is sitting in this courtroom and knows that I am speaking of him."

"But Mr. Talbot as a man?" asked Ellsworth Toohey. "What's his particular god? What would he go to pieces without?"

When he entered Wynand's office, he knew that he had to accept that pain and carry it forever, mat there was to be no cure and no hope. Wynand sat behind his desk and rose when he entered, looking straight at him. Wynand's face was more than the face of a stranger: a stranger's face is an unapproached potentiality, to be opened if one makes the choice and effort; this was a face known, closed and never to be reached again. A face that held no pain of renunciation, but the stamp of the next step, when even pain is renounced. A face remote and quiet, with a dignity of its own, not a living attribute, but the dignity of a figure on a medieval tomb that speaks of past greatness and forbids a hand to reach out for the remains.

"Mr. Roark, this interview is necessary, but very difficult for me. Please act accordingly." Roark knew that the last act of kindness he could offer was to claim no bond.

"Mankind will never destroy itself, Mr. Wynand. Nor should it think of itself as destroyed. Not so long as it does things such as this." "As what?" "As the Wynand Building." "That is up to you. Dead things--such as the Banner--are only the financial fertilizer that will make it possible. It is their proper function."

"I told you once that this building was to be a monument to my life. There is nothing to commemorate now. The Wynand Building will have nothing--except what you give it." He rose to his feet, indicating that the interview was ended. Roark got up and inclined his head in parting. He held his head down a moment longer than a formal bow required. At the door he stopped and turned. Wynand stood behind his desk without moving. They looked at each other. Wynand said: "Build it as a monument to that spirit which is yours...and could have been mine."

She stopped. She saw an object she had never noticed before. The sight was like the touch of a hand on her forehead, the hand of those figures in legend who had the power to heal. She had not known Henry Cameron and she had not heard him say it, but what she felt now was as if she were hearing it: "And I know that if you carry these words through to the end, it will be a victory, Howard, not just for you, but for something that should win, that moves the world--and never wins acknowledgment. It will vindicate so many who have fallen before you, who have suffered as you will suffer." She saw, on the fence surrounding New York's greatest building, a small tin plate bearing the words: # "Howard Roark, Architect"

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Atomic Habits by James Clear; Quotes

We all face challenges in life. This injury was one of mine, and the experience taught me a critical lesson: changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years. We all deal with setbacks but in the long run, the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits. With the same habits, you’ll end up with the same results. But with better habits, anything is possible.

The backbone of this book is my four-step model of habits—cue, craving, response, and reward—and the four laws of behavior change that evolve out of these steps.

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.

Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations. That said, it doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.

Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change.

If you find yourself struggling to build a good habit or break a bad one, it is not because you have lost your ability to improve. It is often because you have not yet crossed the Plateau of Latent Potential.

When you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will call it an overnight success. The outside world only sees the most dramatic event rather than all that preceded it. But you know that it’s the work you did long ago—when it seemed that you weren’t making any progress—that makes the jump today possible.

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.”

FORGET ABOUT GOALS, FOCUS ON SYSTEMS INSTEAD

The goal in any sport is to finish with the best score, but it would be ridiculous to spend the whole game staring at the scoreboard. The only way to actually win is to get better each day. In the words of three-time Super Bowl winner Bill Walsh, “The score takes care of itself.” The same is true for other areas of life. If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.

The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.

Small changes often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold. The most powerful outcomes of any compounding process are delayed. You need to be patient.

The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this. The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it.

Research has shown that once a person believes in a particular aspect of their identity, they are more likely to act in alignment with that belief.

The biggest barrier to positive change at any level—individual, team, society—is identity conflict. Good habits can make rational sense, but if they conflict with your identity, you will fail to put them into action.

Your identity emerges out of your habits. You are not born with preset beliefs. Every belief, including those about yourself, is learned and conditioned through experience.

(...) the word identity was originally derived from the Latin words essentitas, which means being, and identidem, which means repeatedly. Your identity is literally your “repeated beingness.”

We change bit by bit, day by day, habit by habit. We are continually undergoing microevolutions of the self. Each habit is like a suggestion: “Hey, maybe this is who I am.”

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it actually is big. That’s the paradox of making small improvements.

Of course, it works the opposite way, too. Every time you choose to perform a bad habit, it’s a vote for that identity. The good news is that you don’t need to be perfect. In any election, there are going to be votes for both sides. You don’t need a unanimous vote to win an election; you just need a majority. It doesn’t matter if you cast a few votes for a bad behavior or an unproductive habit. Your goal is simply to win the majority of the time.

It is a simple two-step process: Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins.

The concept of identity-based habits is our first introduction to another key theme in this book: feedback loops. Your habits shape your identity, and your identity shapes your habits. It’s a two-way street. The formation of all habits is a feedback loop (a concept we will explore in depth in the next chapter), but it’s important to let your values, principles, and identity drive the loop rather than your results. The focus should always be on becoming that type of person, not getting a particular outcome.

This is the feedback loop behind all human behavior: try, fail, learn, try differently. With practice, the useless movements fade away and the useful actions get reinforced. That’s a habit forming.

Habits are mental shortcuts learned from experience.

Without some level of motivation or desire—without craving a change—we have no reason to act. What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers.

Cues are meaningless until they are interpreted. The thoughts, feelings, and emotions of the observer are what transform a cue into a craving.

The 1st law (Cue): Make it obvious. The 2nd law (Craving): Make it attractive. The 3rd law (Response): Make it easy. The 4th law (Reward): Make it satisfying. We can invert these laws to learn how to break a bad habit. How to Break a Bad Habit Inversion of the 1st law (Cue): Make it invisible. Inversion of the 2nd law (Craving): Make it unattractive. Inversion of the 3rd law (Response): Make it difficult. Inversion of the 4th law (Reward): Make it unsatisfying.

If a habit remains mindless, you can’t expect to improve it. As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action. Some people spend their entire lives waiting for the time to be right to make an improvement. Once an implementation intention has been set, you don’t have to wait for inspiration to strike.

(...) the tendency for one purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.

No behavior happens in isolation. Each action becomes a cue that triggers the next behavior.

When it comes to building new habits, you can use the connectedness of behavior to your advantage. One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking. Habit stacking is a special form of an implementation intention. Rather than pairing your new habit with a particular time and location, you pair it with a current habit.

Consider when you are most likely to be successful. Don’t ask yourself to do a habit when you’re likely to be occupied with something else.

Your cue should also have the same frequency as your desired habit.

Every habit is context dependent.

In 1952, the economist Hawkins Stern described a phenomenon he called Suggestion Impulse Buying, which “is triggered when a shopper sees a product for the first time and visualizes a need for it.” In other words, customers will occasionally buy products not because they want them but because of how they are presented to them.

You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.

It is easier to associate a new habit with a new context than to build a new habit in the face of competing cues.

Whenever possible, avoid mixing the context of one habit with another. When you start mixing contexts, you’ll start mixing habits—and the easier ones will usually win out.

(...) addictions could spontaneously dissolve if there was a radical change in the environment.

Recent research, however, shows something different. When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations.

The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least. It’s easier to practice self-restraint when you don’t have to use it very often. So, yes, perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.

Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself.

Researchers refer to this phenomenon as “cue-induced wanting”: an external trigger causes a compulsive craving to repeat a bad habit. Once you notice something, you begin to want it. This process is happening all the time—often without us realizing it.

Here’s the punch line: You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it. Once the mental grooves of habit have been carved into your brain, they are nearly impossible to remove entirely—even if they go unused for quite a while. And that means that simply resisting temptation is an ineffective strategy. It is hard to maintain a Zen attitude in a life filled with interruptions. It takes too much energy. In the short-run, you can choose to overpower temptation. In the long-run, we become a product of the environment that we live in.

One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.

Instead of summoning a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do the right thing, your energy would be better spent optimizing your environment. This is the secret to self-control. Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.

Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop.

When it comes to habits, the key takeaway is this: dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it.

Whenever you predict that an opportunity will be rewarding, your levels of dopamine spike in anticipation. And whenever dopamine rises, so does your motivation to act. It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action.

Interestingly, the reward system that is activated in the brain when you receive a reward is the same system that is activated when you anticipate a reward. This is one reason the anticipation of an experience can often feel better than the attainment of it.

Scientists refer to this as the difference between “wanting” and “liking.”

Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them.

Desire is the engine that drives behavior. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it. It is the craving that leads to the response.

You’re more likely to find a behavior attractive if you get to do one of your favorite things at the same time.

Temptation bundling is one way to apply a psychology theory known as Premack’s Principle. Named after the work of professor David Premack, the principle states that “more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors.” In other words, even if you don’t really want to process overdue work emails, you’ll become conditioned to do it if it means you get to do something you really want to do along the way.

“The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.”

We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them.

We imitate the habits of three groups in particular: The close. The many. The powerful.

As a general rule, the closer we are to someone, the more likely we are to imitate some of their habits.

Whenever we are unsure how to act, we look to the group to guide our behavior. We are constantly scanning our environment and wondering, “What is everyone else doing?” We check reviews on Amazon or Yelp or TripAdvisor because we want to imitate the “best” buying, eating, and travel habits. It’s usually a smart strategy. There is evidence in numbers. But there can be a downside. The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual. For example, one study found that when a chimpanzee learns an effective way to crack nuts open as a member of one group and then switches to a new group that uses a less effective strategy, it will avoid using the superior nut cracking method just to blend in with the rest of the chimps.

Running against the grain of your culture requires extra effort. When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.

One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group.

Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires. New versions of old vices. The underlying motives behind human behavior remain the same. The specific habits we perform differ based on the period of history. Here’s the powerful part: there are many different ways to address the same underlying motive.

Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face; they are just the methods you learned to use.

Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive. All day long, you are making your best guess of how to act given what you’ve just seen and what has worked for you in the past. You are endlessly predicting what will happen in the next moment.

A craving is the sense that something is missing. It is the desire to change your internal state.

Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be in the future. Even the tiniest action is tinged with the motivation to feel differently than you do in the moment. When you binge-eat or light up or browse social media, what you really want is not a potato chip or a cigarette or a bunch of likes. What you really want is to feel different.

Neurologists have discovered that when emotions and feelings are impaired, we actually lose the ability to make decisions. We have no signal of what to pursue and what to avoid. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explains, “It is emotion that allows you to mark things as good, bad, or indifferent.”

The key point is that both versions of reality are true. You have to do those things, and you also get to do them. We can find evidence for whatever mind-set we choose.

Reframing your habits to highlight their benefits rather than their drawbacks is a fast and lightweight way to reprogram your mind and make a habit seem more attractive.

You can adapt this strategy for nearly any purpose. Say you want to feel happier in general. Find something that makes you truly happy—like petting your dog or taking a bubble bath—and then create a short routine that you perform every time before you do the thing you love. Maybe you take three deep breaths and smile. Three deep breaths. Smile. Pet the dog. Repeat. Eventually, you’ll begin to associate this breathe-and-smile routine with being in a good mood. It becomes a cue that means feeling happy. Once established, you can break it out anytime you need to change your emotional state. Stressed at work? Take three deep breaths and smile. Sad about life? Three deep breaths and smile. Once a habit has been built, the cue can prompt a craving, even if it has little to do with the original situation. The key to finding and fixing the causes of your bad habits is to reframe the associations you have about them. It’s not easy, but if you can reprogram your predictions, you can transform a hard habit into an attractive one.

Every behavior has a surface level craving and a deeper underlying motive.

HOW TO CREATE A GOOD HABIT The 1st Law: Make It Obvious 1.1: Fill out the Habits Scorecard. Write down your current habits to become aware of them. 1.2: Use implementation intentions: “I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].” 1.3: Use habit stacking: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].” 1.4: Design your environment. Make the cues of good habits obvious and visible. The 2nd Law: Make It Attractive 2.1: Use temptation bundling. Pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do. 2.2: Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. 2.3: Create a motivation ritual. Do something you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit. The 3rd Law: Make It Easy The 4th Law: Make It Satisfying HOW TO BREAK A BAD HABIT Inversion of the 1st Law: Make It Invisible 1.5: Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment. Inversion of the 2nd Law: Make It Unattractive 2.4: Reframe your mind-set. Highlight the benefits of avoiding your bad habits. Inversion of the 3rd Law: Make It Difficult Inversion of the 4th Law: Make It Unsatisfying

You can download a printable version of this habits cheat sheet at: atomichabits.com/cheatsheet

As Voltaire once wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.”

But more often than not, we do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure.

Hebb’s Law: “Neurons that fire together wire together.”

All habits follow a similar trajectory from effortful practice to automatic behavior, a process known as automaticity. Automaticity is the ability to perform a behavior without thinking about each step, which occurs when the nonconscious mind takes over.

(...) habits form based on frequency, not time.

The primary axis of Europe and Asia is east-west. The primary axis of the Americas and Africa is north-south. This leads to a wider range of climates up-and-down the Americas than across Europe and Asia. As a result, agriculture spread nearly twice as fast across Europe and Asia than it did elsewhere.

Conventional wisdom holds that motivation is the key to habit change. Maybe if you really wanted it, you’d actually do it. But the truth is, our real motivation is to be lazy and to do what is convenient. And despite what the latest productivity best seller will tell you, this is a smart strategy, not a dumb one.

It is human nature to follow the Law of Least Effort, which states that when deciding between two similar options, people will naturally gravitate toward the option that requires the least amount of work.

In a sense, every habit is just an obstacle to getting what you really want. Dieting is an obstacle to getting fit. Meditation is an obstacle to feeling calm. Journaling is an obstacle to thinking clearly. You don’t actually want the habit itself. What you really want is the outcome the habit delivers. The greater the obstacle—that is, the more difficult the habit—the more friction there is between you and your desired end state. This is why it is crucial to make your habits so easy that you’ll do them even when you don’t feel like it. If you can make your good habits more convenient, you’ll be more likely to follow through on them.

The less friction you face, the easier it is for your stronger self to emerge. The idea behind make it easy is not to only do easy things. The idea is to make it as easy as possible in the moment to do things that payoff in the long run.

“Japanese firms emphasized what came to be known as ‘lean production,’ relentlessly looking to remove waste of all kinds from the production process, down to redesigning workspaces, so workers didn’t have to waste time twisting and turning to reach their tools.

addition by subtraction.

(…) when we remove the points of friction that sap our time and energy, we can achieve more with less effort. (This is one reason tidying up can feel so good: we are simultaneously moving forward and lightening the cognitive load our environment places on us.)

Business is a never-ending quest to deliver the same result in an easier fashion.

The central idea is to create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible. Much of the battle of building better habits comes down to finding ways to reduce the friction associated with our good habits and increase the friction associated with our bad ones.

The purpose of resetting each room is not simply to clean up after the last action, but to prepare for the next action. “When I walk into a room everything is in its right place,” Nuckols wrote. “Because I do this every day in every room, stuff always stays in good shape. . . . People think I work hard but I’m actually really lazy. I’m just proactively lazy. It gives you so much time back.”

“How can we design a world where it’s easy to do what’s right?” Redesign your life so the actions that matter most are also the actions that are easiest to do.

Yes, a habit can be completed in just a few seconds, but it can also shape the actions that you take for minutes or hours afterward.

Every day, there are a handful of moments that deliver an outsized impact. I refer to these little choices as decisive moments.

Habits are the entry point, not the end point. They are the cab, not the gym.

Even when you know you should start small, it’s easy to start too big. When you dream about making a change, excitement inevitably takes over and you end up trying to do too much too soon. The most effective way I know to counteract this tendency is to use the Two-Minute Rule, which states, “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”

A new habit should not feel like a challenge. The actions that follow can be challenging, but the first two minutes should be easy. What you want is a “gateway habit” that naturally leads you down a more productive path.

The point is to master the habit of showing up. The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved. If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, then you have little hope of mastering the finer details. Instead of trying to engineer a perfect habit from the start, do the easy thing on a more consistent basis. You have to standardize before you can optimize.

As you master the art of showing up, the first two minutes simply become a ritual at the beginning of a larger routine.

As you master the art of showing up, the first two minutes simply become a ritual at the beginning of a larger routine. This is not merely a hack to make habits easier but actually the ideal way to master a difficult skill. The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things.

You may not be able to automate the whole process, but you can make the first action mindless. Make it easy to start and the rest will follow.

The secret is to always stay below the point where it feels like work.

“The best way is to always stop when you are going good,” he said.

Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard.

A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future. It is a way to lock in future behavior, bind you to good habits, and restrict you from bad ones.

The key is to change the task such that it requires more work to get out of the good habit than to get started on it.

As mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”

Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided. You learn what to do in the future based on what you were rewarded for doing (or punished for doing) in the past. Positive emotions cultivate habits. Negative emotions destroy them.

The fourth law of behavior change—make it satisfying—increases the odds that a behavior will be repeated next time. It completes the habit loop. But there is a trick. We are not looking for just any type of satisfaction. We are looking for immediate satisfaction.

As a general rule, the more immediate pleasure you get from an action, the more strongly you should question whether it aligns with your long-term goals.

(…) let’s update the Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.

The road less traveled is the road of delayed gratification. If you’re willing to wait for the rewards, you’ll face less competition and often get a bigger payoff. As the saying goes, the last mile is always the least crowded.

Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit. That said, it takes time for the evidence to accumulate and a new identity to emerge. Immediate reinforcement helps maintain motivation in the short term while you’re waiting for the long-term rewards to arrive.

Habit tracking is powerful because it leverages multiple Laws of Behavior Change. It simultaneously makes a behavior obvious, attractive, and satisfying.

In summary, habit tracking (1) creates a visual cue that can remind you to act, (2) is inherently motivating because you see the progress you are making and don’t want to lose it, and (3) feels satisfying whenever you record another successful instance of your habit.

I can’t be perfect, but I can avoid a second lapse. As soon as one streak ends, I get started on the next one. The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.

Anyone can have a bad performance, a bad workout, or a bad day at work. But when successful people fail, they rebound quickly. The breaking of a habit doesn’t matter if the reclaiming of it is fast.

As Charlie Munger says, “The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily.”

The dark side of tracking a particular behavior is that we become driven by the number rather than the purpose behind it.

This is sometimes referred to as Goodhart’s Law. Named after the economist Charles Goodhart, the principle states, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Measurement is only useful when it guides you and adds context to a larger picture, not when it consumes you. Each number is simply one piece of feedback in the overall system.

The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition. This is just as true with habit change as it is with sports and business. Habits are easier to perform, and more satisfying to stick with, when they align with your natural inclinations and abilities.

In short: genes do not determine your destiny. They determine your areas of opportunity. As physician Gabor Mate notes, “Genes can predispose, but they don’t predetermine.” The areas where you are genetically predisposed to success are the areas where habits are more likely to be satisfying. The key is to direct your effort toward areas that both excite you and match your natural skills, to align your ambition with your ability.

Our habits are not solely determined by our personalities, but there is no doubt that our genes nudge us in a certain direction. Our deeply rooted preferences make certain behaviors easier for some people than for others. You don’t have to apologize for these differences or feel guilty about them, but you do have to work with them.

There is a version of every habit that can bring you joy and satisfaction. Find it. Habits need to be enjoyable if they are going to stick.

In theory, you can enjoy almost anything. In practice, you are more likely to enjoy the things that come easily to you. People who are talented in a particular area tend to be more competent at that task and are then praised for doing a good job. They stay energized because they are making progress where others have failed, and because they get rewarded with better pay and bigger opportunities, which not only makes them happier but also propels them to produce even higher-quality work. It’s a virtuous cycle. Pick the right habit and progress is easy. Pick the wrong habit and life is a struggle.

After this initial period of exploration, shift your focus to the best solution you’ve found—but keep experimenting occasionally. The proper balance depends on whether you’re winning or losing. If you are currently winning, you exploit, exploit, exploit. If you are currently losing, you continue to explore, explore, explore.

The optimal approach also depends on how much time you have. If you have a lot of time—like someone at the beginning of their career—it makes more sense to explore because once you find the right thing, you still have a good amount of time to exploit it. If you’re pressed for time—say, as you come up on the deadline for a project—you should implement the best solution you’ve found so far and get some results.

(…) there are a series of questions you can ask yourself to continually narrow in on the habits and areas that will be most satisfying to you: What feels like fun to me, but work to others? The mark of whether you are made for a task is not whether you love it but whether you can handle the pain of the task easier than most people. When are you enjoying yourself while other people are complaining? The work that hurts you less than it hurts others is the work you were made to do. What makes me lose track of time? Flow is the mental state you enter when you are so focused on the task at hand that the rest of the world fades away. This blend of happiness and peak performance is what athletes and performers experience when they are “in the zone.” It is nearly impossible to experience a flow state and not find the task satisfying at least to some degree. Where do I get greater returns than the average person? We are continually comparing ourselves to those around us, and a behavior is more likely to be satisfying when the comparison is in our favor. When I started writing at jamesclear.com, my email list grew very quickly. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing well, but I knew that results seemed to be coming faster for me than for some of my colleagues, which motivated me to keep writing. What comes naturally to me? For just a moment, ignore what you have been taught. Ignore what society has told you. Ignore what others expect of you. Look inside yourself and ask, “What feels natural to me? When have I felt alive? When have I felt like the real me?” No internal judgments or people-pleasing. No second-guessing or self-criticism. Just feelings of engagement and enjoyment. Whenever you feel authentic and genuine, you are headed in the right direction.

When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different. By combining your skills, you reduce the level of competition, which makes it easier to stand out. You can shortcut the need for a genetic advantage (or for years of practice) by rewriting the rules. A good player works hard to win the game everyone else is playing. A great player creates a new game that favors their strengths and avoids their weaknesses.

Our genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They clarify it. They tell us what to work hard on. Once we realize our strengths, we know where to spend our time and energy. We know which types of opportunities to look for and which types of challenges to avoid. The better we understand our nature, the better our strategy can be.

Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck.

The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone of difficulty.

The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.

Maximum motivation occurs when facing a challenge of just manageable difficulty. In psychology research this is known as the Yerkes–Dodson law, which describes the optimal level of arousal as the midpoint between boredom and anxiety.

As Machiavelli noted, “Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.”

Variable rewards or not, no habit will stay interesting forever. At some point, everyone faces the same challenge on the journey of self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.

The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.

Each chunk of information that is memorized opens up the mental space for more effortful thinking. This is true for any endeavor. When you know the simple movements so well that you can perform them without thinking, you are free to pay attention to more advanced details. In this way, habits are the backbone of any pursuit of excellence. However, the benefits of habits come at a cost. At first, each repetition develops fluency, speed, and skill. But then, as a habit becomes automatic, you become less sensitive to feedback. You fall into mindless repetition. It becomes easier to let mistakes slide. When you can do it “good enough” on autopilot, you stop thinking about how to do it better.

Habits are necessary, but not sufficient for mastery. What you need is a combination of automatic habits and deliberate practice. Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery

Although habits are powerful, what you need is a way to remain conscious of your performance over time, so you can continue to refine and improve. It is precisely at the moment when you begin to feel like you have mastered a skill—right when things are starting to feel automatic and you are becoming comfortable—that you must avoid slipping into the trap of complacency. The solution? Establish a system for reflection and review.

“Sustaining an effort is the most important thing for any enterprise. The way to be successful is to learn how to do things right, then do them the same way every time.”

The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it. One solution is to avoid making any single aspect of your identity an overwhelming portion of who you are.

In the words of investor Paul Graham, “keep your identity small.” The more you let a single belief define you, the less capable you are of adapting when life challenges you.

Men are born soft and supple; dead, they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail. —LAO TZU

The holy grail of habit change is not a single 1 percent improvement, but a thousand of them. It’s a bunch of atomic habits stacking up, each one a fundamental unit of the overall system.

You want to push your good habits toward the left side of the spectrum by making them obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. Meanwhile, you want to cluster your bad habits toward the right side by making them invisible, unattractive, hard, and unsatisfying.

Happiness is simply the absence of desire. When you observe a cue, but do not desire to change your state, you are content with the current situation. Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure (which is joy or satisfaction), but about the lack of desire. It arrives when you have no urge to feel differently.

It is the idea of pleasure that we chase.

This is what the Austrian neurologist Victor Frankl meant when he said that happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue. Desire is pursued. Pleasure ensues from action.

Peace occurs when you don’t turn your observations into problems. The first step in any behavior is observation. You notice a cue, a bit of information, an event. If you do not desire to act on what you observe, then you are at peace.

With a big enough why you can overcome any how. Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and poet, famously wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

Being curious is better than being smart. Being motivated and curious counts for more than being smart because it leads to action. Being smart will never deliver results on its own because it doesn’t get you to act. It is desire, not intelligence, that prompts behavior. As Naval Ravikant says, “The trick to doing anything is first cultivating a desire for it.”

We can only be rational and logical after we have been emotional. The primary mode of the brain is to feel; the secondary mode is to think.

Your response tends to follow your emotions. Our thoughts and actions are rooted in what we find attractive, not necessarily in what is logical.

Suffering drives progress. The source of all suffering is the desire for a change in state. This is also the source of all progress. The desire to change your state is what powers you to take action. It is wanting more that pushes humanity to seek improvements, develop new technologies, and reach for a higher level. With craving, we are dissatisfied but driven. Without craving, we are satisfied but lack ambition.

Your actions reveal how badly you want something. If you keep saying something is a priority but you never act on it, then you don’t really want it. It’s time to have an honest conversation with yourself. Your actions reveal your true motivations.

Reward is on the other side of sacrifice.

Self-control is difficult because it is not satisfying.

Our expectations determine our satisfaction. The gap between our cravings and our rewards determines how satisfied we feel after taking action. If the mismatch between expectations and outcomes is positive (surprise and delight), then we are more likely to repeat a behavior in the future. If the mismatch is negative (disappointment and frustration), then we are less likely to do so.

Seneca’s famous quote, “Being poor is not having too little, it is wanting more.” If your wants outpace your likes, you’ll always be unsatisfied.

The pain of failure correlates to the height of expectation. When desire is high, it hurts to not like the outcome.

Feelings come both before and after the behavior. Before acting, there is a feeling that motivates you to act—the craving. After acting, there is a feeling that teaches you to repeat the action in the future—the reward. Cue > Craving (Feeling) > Response > Reward (Feeling)

Desire initiates. Pleasure sustains. Wanting and liking are the two drivers of behavior. If it’s not desirable, you have no reason to do it. Desire and craving are what initiate a behavior. But if it’s not enjoyable, you have no reason to repeat it. Pleasure and satisfaction are what sustain a behavior. Feeling motivated gets you to act. Feeling successful gets you to repeat.

Hope declines with experience and is replaced by acceptance. The first time an opportunity arises, there is hope of what could be. Your expectation (cravings) is based solely on promise. The second time around, your expectation is grounded in reality. You begin to understand how the process works and your hope is gradually traded for a more accurate prediction and acceptance of the likely outcome.

As Aristotle noted, “Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.” Perhaps this can be revised to “Youth is easily deceived because it only hopes.” There is no experience to root the expectation in. In the beginning, hope is all you have.

#atomic habits #James clear #non-fiction #books #quotes

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kkintle · 2 years

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Thank You for Being Late by Thomas L. Friedman; Quotes

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

“When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings they start,” argues my friend and teacher Dov Seidman, CEO of LRN, which advises global businesses on ethics and leadership. “You start to reflect, you start to rethink your assumptions, you start to reimagine what is possible and, most importantly, you start to reconnect with your most deeply held beliefs. Once you’ve done that, you can begin to reimagine a better path.” But what matters most “is what you do in the pause,” he added. “Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best: ‘In each pause I hear the call.’

As the editor and writer Leon Wieseltier said to me once: technologists want us to think that patience became a virtue only because in the past “we had no choice”—we had to wait longer for things because our modems were too slow or our broadband hadn’t been installed, or because we hadn’t upgraded to the iPhone 7. “And so now that we have made waiting technologically obsolete,” added Wieseltier, “their attitude is: ‘Who needs patience anymore?’ But the ancients believed that there was wisdom in patience and that wisdom comes from patience … Patience wasn’t just the absence of speed. It was space for reflection and thought.” We are generating more information and knowledge than ever today, “but knowledge is only good if you can reflect on it.”

That is why, I explained to Bojia, as a columnist, “I am either in the heating business or the lighting business.” Every column or blog has to either turn on a lightbulb in your reader’s head—illuminate an issue in a way that will inspire them to look at it anew—or stoke an emotion in your reader’s heart that prompts them to feel or act more intensely or differently about an issue. The ideal column does both.

It is okay to change your mind as an opinion writer; what is not okay is to have no mind—to stand for nothing, or for everything, or only for easy and safe things.

the Talmudic saying “What comes from the heart enters the heart.”

Indeed, as the world becomes more interdependent and complex, it becomes more vital than ever to widen your aperture and to synthesize more perspectives.

Wells describes three ways of thinking about a problem: “inside the box,” “outside the box,” and “where there is no box.” The only sustainable approach to thinking today about problems, he argues, “is thinking without a box.” Of course, that doesn’t mean having no opinion. Rather, it means having no limits on your curiosity or the different disciplines you might draw on to appreciate how the Machine works.

The time of static stability has passed us by, he added. That does not mean we can’t have a new kind of stability, “but the new kind of stability has to be dynamic stability. There are some ways of being, like riding a bicycle, where you cannot stand still, but once you are moving it is actually easier. It is not our natural state. But humanity has to learn to exist in this state.”

Lives are changed when people connect. Life is changed when everything is connected. —Qualcomm motto

We need to keep a close eye on the monopoly power that big data can create for big companies. It is not just how they can dominate a market with their products now, but how they can reinforce that domination with all the data they can collect.

When the world is flat you can put all the tools out there for everyone, but the system is still full of friction. But the world is fast when the tools disappear, and all you are thinking about is the project.

There is something wonderfully human about the open-source community. At heart, it’s driven by a deep human desire for collaboration and a deep human desire for recognition and affirmation of work well done—not financial reward. It is amazing how much value you can create with the words “Hey, what you added is really cool. Nice job. Way to go!” Millions of hours of free labor are being unlocked by tapping into people’s innate desires to innovate, share, and be recognized for it.

People say that in hockey you don’t go where the puck is, you go where the puck is going (…)

“Mobility gives you mass market, broadband gives you access to the information digitally, and the cloud stores all the software applications so you can use them anytime anywhere and the cost is zero—it changed everything,” said Hans Vestberg, former CEO of the Ericsson Group.

As a result, the motto in Silicon Valley today is: everything that is analog is now being digitized, everything that is being digitized is now being stored, everything that is being stored is now being analyzed by software on these more powerful computing systems, and all the learning is being immediately applied to make old things work better, to make new things possible, and to do old things in fundamentally new ways.

Think of the historic problem with wind-generated electricity. Because the wind blows intermittently and the electricity it generates cannot be stored at scale, and thus a utility could never be totally assured of sufficient supply, the ability of wind to replace coal-fired power has always been limited. But now, weather-prediction software using big data analytics has become so intelligent it can tell you the exact hour when the wind will blow or the rain will come or the temperature will rise. And so a utility in a city such as Houston can know twenty-four hours in advance that the next day is going to be a particularly hot day and demand for air-conditioning will spike in those exact hours, meaning that demand for wind-generated electricity could exceed supply. That utility can now notify buildings in Houston to automatically turn up their air-conditioning between 6:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m., before employees arrive, and when the wind is generating the most electricity. Buildings are good storehouses of cooling. So that stored cooling keeps the building comfortable most of the day. As a result, the amount of wind power that utility generates, rather than being insufficient, perfectly matches the demand—without having to worry about storing it on batteries or needing to call in coal-generated power. An incredibly complex demand-response challenge was solved at a cost of … zero—just by bringing intelligence to all the machines and optimizing the whole system. All the complexity was abstracted away by the software, and it is starting to happen everywhere today.

The system does not answer our questions because it ‘knows.’ Rather, it is designed to evaluate and weigh information from multiple sources, and then offer suggestions for consideration. And it assigns a confidence level to each response. In the case of “Final Jeopardy!,” Watson’s confidence level was quite low: 14 percent, Watson’s way of saying: ‘Don’t trust this answer.’ In a sense, it knew what it didn’t know.”

“In the twenty-first century, knowing all the answers won’t distinguish someone’s intelligence—rather, the ability to ask all the right questions will be the mark of true genius.”

“You know how the mirror on your car says ‘Objects in your rearview mirror are closer than they appear’?” Well, he said, “that now applies to what’s in your front windshield, because now it’s the future that is much closer than you think.”

Indeed, these digital flows have become so rich and powerful they are to the twenty-first century what rivers running off mountains were to civilization and cities in days of old. Back then, you wanted to build your town or your factory along a rushing river—such as the Amazon—and let it flow through you. That river would give you power, mobility, nourishment, and access to neighbors and their ideas. So it is with these digital flows into and out of the supernova.

It turns out, Corbat explained, that a person’s voiceprint is actually more accurate than their fingerprint, iris scan, or any other means of identification. And as more consumers use their smartphones to pay for things, access data, and check on their accounts, passwords and PINs are less workable. So your unique voice now becomes the key that opens all doors.

“The principal factor promoting historically significant social change is contact with strangers possessing new and unfamiliar skills.” The corollary of that proposition, he argued, is that centers of high skill (i.e., civilizations) tend to upset their neighbors by exposing them to attractive novelties. Less-skilled peoples round about are then impelled to try to make those novelties their own so as to attain for themselves the wealth, power, truth, and beauty that civilized skills confer on their possessors. Yet such efforts provoke a painful ambivalence between the drive to imitate and an equally fervent desire to preserve the customs and institutions that distinguish the would-be borrowers from the corruptions and injustices that also inhere in civilized life.

Warning: in the age of accelerations, if a society doesn’t build floors under people, many will reach for a wall—no matter how self-defeating that would be.

God always forgives. Man often forgives. Nature never forgives. —Saying

We are wickedly bad at dealing with the implications of compound math. —Jeremy Grantham, investor

A “black elephant,” it was explained to me by the London-based investor and environmentalist Adam Sweidan, is a cross between a “black swan”—a rare, low-probability, unanticipated event with enormous ramifications—and “the elephant in the room: a problem that is widely visible to everyone, yet that no one wants to address, even though we absolutely know that one day it will have vast, black-swan-like consequences.”

People forget, noted Rockström, that it is impossible to regulate the climate without biodiversity. If you don’t have pollinators in the air and microrganisms in the soil and birds and other animals depositing seeds for new trees through their waste, you don’t have a forest. If you don’t have a forest, you don’t have trees to soak up the carbon. If you don’t have trees to soak up the carbon, it goes into the atmosphere and intensifies global warming or into the oceans and changes their composition.

When you mix CO2 with water you get carbonic acid, which dissolves the calcium carbonate that is the essential building block for all marine organisms, particularly those with shells, and for coral reefs. When that happens, “oceans, instead of playing host to marine organisms, break them down,” said Rockström. “We can only ruin so much calcium carbonate before the marine system turns over and cannot host fish and coral reef as it did throughout the entire Holocene epoch before now.”

As the singer Joni Mitchell once put it in her song “Big Yellow Taxi,” “They paved paradise / And put up a parking lot.”

(...) mankind has become large enough in numbers and empowered enough by the supernova to be both a force of nature and a forcing function on nature.

I have said it before and I will keep saying it as long as I have the breath: we are the first generation for whom “later” will be the time when all of Mother Nature’s buffers, spare tires, tricks of the trade, and tools for adapting and bouncing back will be exhausted or breached. If we don’t act quickly together to mitigate these trends, we will be the first generation of humans for whom later will be too late.

We’re entering an age of acceleration. The models underlying society at every level, which are largely based on a linear model of change, are going to have to be redefined. Because of the explosive power of exponential growth, the twenty-first century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress; organizations have to be able to redefine themselves at a faster and faster pace. —Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google

My other vehicle is unmanned. —Bumper sticker on a car in Silicon Valley

Suddenly, I understood what the organizational consultant Warren Bennis meant when he once famously observed that 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.” And then I stopped laughing at even that joke. This was getting serious and starting to get way too close to home.

Her post was entitled “Why ‘Keep Your Paddle in the Water’ Is Bad Advice for Beginners.” Have you ever stopped to consider what the phrase “keep your paddle in the water” actually means? If you did you wouldn’t ever recommend it to a beginner whitewater paddler. The paddlers and instructors who give this advice are well intended and what they are really expressing is: “Keep paddling to maintain your stability through rapids.” When beginners hear “keep your paddle in the water,” they end up doing a bad version of a rudder dragging their paddle in the water back by their stern while using their blade to steer. This is a really bad position to be in … To enhance stability in rapids it’s important to move as fast or faster than the current. Every time you rudder or drag your paddle in the water to steer you lose momentum and that makes you more vulnerable to flipping over. And so it is with governing today. The only way to steer is to paddle as fast as or faster than the rate of change in technology, globalization, and the environment. The only way to thrive is by maintaining dynamic stability—that bike-riding trick that Astro Teller talked about.

Social technologies are how we organize to capture the benefits of cooperation—non-zero-sum games. Physical technologies and social technologies coevolve. Physical technology innovations make new social technologies possible, like fossil fuel technologies made mass production possible, smartphones make the sharing economy possible. And vice versa, social technologies make new physical technologies possible—Steve Jobs couldn’t have made the smartphone without a global supply chain. But there is one big difference between these two forms of technology, he added: Physical technologies evolve at the pace of science—fast and getting exponentially faster, while social technologies evolve at the pace at which humans can change—much slower. While physical technology change creates new marvels, new gadgets, better medicine, social technology change often creates huge social stresses and turmoil, like the Arab Spring countries trying to go from tribal autocracies to rule of law democracies. Also, our physical technologies can get way ahead of the ability of our social technologies to manage them—nuclear proliferation, bioterrorism, cyber crime—some of which is happening around us right now. Our physical technologies won’t slow down—Moore’s law will win—so we’re in a race for our social technologies to keep up. We need to more deeply understand how individual psychology, organizations, institutions, and societies work and find ways to accelerate their adaptability and evolution.

Today’s American dream is now more of a journey than a fixed destination—and one that increasingly feels like walking up a down escalator. You can do it. We all did it as kids—but you do have to walk faster than the escalator, meaning that you need to work harder, regularly reinvent yourself, obtain at least some form of postsecondary education, make sure that you’re engaged in lifelong learning, and play by the new rules while also reinventing some of them. Then you can be in the middle class.

Like everything else in the age of accelerations, securing and holding a job requires dynamic stability—you need to keep pedaling (or paddling) all the time.

For more than a decade after the Internet emerged in the mid-1990s, there was much lamenting about the “digital divide”—New York City had Internet and upstate New York didn’t. America had it and Mexico didn’t. South Africa had it and Niger didn’t. That really mattered because it limited what you could learn, how and where you could do business, and with whom you could collaborate. Within the next decade that digital divide will largely disappear. And when that happens only one divide will matter, says Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future, and that is “the motivational divide.” The future will belong to those who have the self-motivation to take advantage of all the free and cheap tools and flows coming out of the supernova.

Using government data, Bessen studied the impact of computers, software, and automation on 317 occupations from 1980 through 2013. In a research paper he published on November 13, 2015, he concluded: “Employment grows significantly faster in occupations that use computers more.”

This is a broad trend in the workplace, as Bessen noted: the skilled part of each job requires more skill and rewards more skill, and the routine, repetitive part, which can much more easily be automated, will pay minimum wages or just be given over to a bot.

The new social contracts we need between government, business, the social sector, and workers will be far more feasible if we find creative ways—to borrow a phrase from Nest Labs’ founder, Tony Fadell—to turn “AI into IA.” In my rendering, that would be to turn artificial intelligence into intelligent assistance, intelligent assistants, and intelligent algorithms.

The new social contract, Donovan added, is that you can be a lifelong employee if you are ready to be a lifelong learner.

“for all the jobs that machines can now do—whether performing surgery, driving cars or serving food—they still lack one distinctly human trait. They have no social skills.

“if it’s just technical skill, there’s a reasonable chance it can be automated, and if it’s just being empathetic or flexible, there’s an infinite supply of people, so a job won’t be well paid. It’s the interaction of both that is virtuous.”

As Warren Buffett says, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”

The human being is just a more intelligent animal, and if [he or she] is pushed to the extreme, the animal instinct will come out to survive.”

“‘Freedom from’ happens quickly, violently, and dramatically,” notes Seidman. “‘Freedom to’ takes time.

Ghonim sees five critical challenges facing today’s social media in the political arena: First, we don’t know how to deal with rumors. Rumors that confirm people’s biases are now believed and spread among millions of people. Second, we create our own echo chambers. We tend to only communicate with people that we agree with, and thanks to social media, we can mute, unfollow, and block everybody else. Third, online discussions quickly descend into angry mobs. All of us probably know that. It’s as if we forget that the people behind screens are actually real people and not just avatars. And fourth, it became really hard to change our opinions. Because of the speed and brevity of social media, we are forced to jump to conclusions and write sharp opinions in one hundred forty characters about complex world affairs. And once we do that, it lives forever on the Internet, and we are less motivated to change these views, even when new evidence arises. Fifth—and in my point of view, this is the most critical—today, our social media experiences are designed in a way that favors broadcasting over engagements, posts over discussions, shallow comments over deep conversations. It’s as if we agreed that we are here to talk at each other instead of talking with each other.

“Some ants go out and look for food and some stay home and take care of the young, and that enables those who look for food to cover bigger areas. Specialized ant colonies have foragers and nest-keepers. This, too, is an adaptation, a learned behavior. It is not in their DNA. You cannot sequence such differentiated behaviors, but you can observe and mimic them, and doing so over time can become so powerful and advantageous that the organisms that do it dominate everyone else in their niche, just as we do as mammals.”

To put it in human terms, Mother Nature believes in lifelong learning; species that don’t keep learning and adapting disappear.

Mother Nature is the opposite of dogmatic—she is constantly agile, heterodox, hybrid, entrepreneurial, and experimental in her thinking. “Nature is restless, always exploring, inventing, trying, and failing,” adds Tom Lovejoy, university professor in environmental science at George Mason University. “Each ecosystem, and each organism, is an answer to a set of problems.

Still, that ecosystem and its balance have to be reproduced and defended every day; species rise and fall, and compete with one another, every second. Which is another of Mother Nature’s killer apps—she never confuses stability with stasis. She understands that stability is produced by endless acts of dynamism. She would tell us that there is nothing static about stability. In nature a system that looks stable and seems to be in equilibrium is not static. A system that looks static and is static is a system that’s about to die. Mother Nature knows that to remain stable you have to be open to constant change, and no plant or animal can take its position in the system for granted—just as a durable economy, says the University of Maryland’s Herman Daly, is macro-stable but micro-variable.

In systems with healthy interdependencies, explains Seidman, “all the component parts rise together. In an interdependent system that is unhealthy, they all fall together.”

While there is much we humans can learn from Mother Nature, “one should never idealize nature,” argued Mittermeier. “Nature is brutal. It is a system of conflict, stresses, and adaptation, where different species of plants and animals are beating the hell out of each other 24/7/365 in a dynamic struggle to reproduce themselves.

Ronald Heifetz, who says the role of a leader is “to help people face reality and to mobilize them to make change” as their environment changes to ensure the security and prosperity of their community.

There are people who are constantly cursing their luck, and there are people who will play the ball as best they can from wherever it lies and see it as a challenge. They know that the one thing they can control is not the bounce of the ball but their own attitude toward hitting it. In that context self-confidence and optimism are powers unto themselves. There are cultures that, when faced with adversity or a major external challenge, tend to collectively say, “I am behind, what is wrong with me? Let me learn from the best to fix it.” And they learn to adapt to change. And there are those that say, “I am behind, what did you do to me? It is your fault.”

When someone assumes ownership, it is difficult to ask more of them than they ask of themselves.

Kshirsagar once remarked to me, if you want to solve a big problem, “you need to go from taking credit to sharing credit to multiplying credit. The systems that all work, multiply credit.” Multiplying credit is just another way of making everyone in the system feel ownership, and the by-product is both resilience and propulsion.

Mother Nature would not be for telling anyone what to eat, but she would be for making sure they are fully aware of the consequences of excess.

There has never ever been a time when the human being was capable of doing something and yet, eventually, that something did not happen. That means one of three things: 1) the human psyche is going to change fundamentally (good luck with that!); 2) the worldwide social contract changes so that the “angry men” can no longer be “empowered” (good luck with that too!); or 3) boom! —Garrett Andrews, online comment on my October 21, 2015, column on NYTimes.com

Love does not win unless we start loving each other enough to fix our [expletive] problems. —Comedian Samantha Bee, commenting on the Orlando massacre on her TBS show, Full Frontal, June 13, 2016

As Rabbi Marx put it, “In the postbiblical Jewish view of the world, you cannot be moral unless you are totally free. If you are not free, you are really not empowered, and if you are not empowered the choices that you make are not entirely your own.

If there was ever a time to pause for moral reflection, it is now. “Every technology is used before it is completely understood,” Leon Wieseltier wrote in The New York Times Book Review on January 11, 2015. “There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences. We are living in that lag, and it is the right time to keep our heads and reflect. We have much to gain and much to lose.”

When I think of this challenge on a global scale, my own short prescription is that we need to find a way to get more people to practice the Golden Rule. And it doesn’t matter which version you were taught. It can be “Do unto others as you would wish they would do unto you,” or its variant from the Babylonian Talmud, where the great Jewish teacher Rabbi Hillel famously said, “That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow. This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn it.” Or any other variant enshrined by your faith.

What is so special about the Golden Rule is that while it is the simplest of all moral guides, “it produces the most complex of all behaviors—it’s ever adaptive, it applies to every imaginable situation in a way that no rulebook ever could,” argues Gautam Mukunda, a professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School. When the world is already complex, you don’t want to make it more complicated. Make it simple. And no moral edict packs more punch simply than the Golden Rule—everything else really is commentary.

Gorbis is right that we are wired to be tribal, but we are not hardwired to view our tribe in the narrowest way possible. Unlike animals, we can adapt, and we can learn that in order to survive we have to widen the circle of the campfire.

A rabbi once asked his students: “How do we know when the night has ended and the day has begun?” The students thought they grasped the importance of this question. There are, after all, prayers and rites and rituals that can only be done at nighttime. And there are prayers and rites and rituals that belong only to the day. So, it is important to know how we can tell when night has ended and day has begun. So the first and brightest of the students offered an answer: “Rabbi, when I look out at the fields and I can distinguish between my field and the field of my neighbor, that’s when the night has ended and the day has begun.” A second student offered his answer: “Rabbi, when I look from the fields and I see a house, and I can tell that it’s my house and not the house of my neighbor, that’s when the night has ended and the day has begun.” A third student offered another answer: “Rabbi, when I see an animal in the distance, and I can tell what kind of animal it is, whether a cow or a horse or a sheep, that’s when the night has ended and the day has begun.” Then a fourth student offered yet another answer: “Rabbi, when I see a flower and I can make out the colors of the flower, whether they are red or yellow or blue, that’s when night has ended and day has begun. Each answer brought a sadder, more severe frown to the rabbi’s face. Until finally he shouted, “No! None of you understands! You only divide! You divide your house from the house of your neighbor, your field from your neighbor’s field, you distinguish one kind of animal from another, you separate one color from all the others. Is that all we can do—dividing, separating, splitting the world into pieces? Isn’t the world broken enough? Isn’t the world split into enough fragments? Is that what Torah is for? No, my dear students, it’s not that way, not that way at all!” The shocked students looked into the sad face of their rabbi. “Then, Rabbi, tell us: How do we know that night has ended and day has begun?” The rabbi stared back into the faces of his students, and with a voice suddenly gentle and imploring, he responded: “When you look into the face of the person who is beside you, and you can see that person is your brother or your sister, then finally the night has ended and the day has begun.”

Anyone who has grown up in the hills or used to sit by the spring to drink, or played outdoors in the neighborhood square; going back to these places is a chance to recover something of their true selves. —Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change, “Laudato Si’,” May 24, 2015

When people trust each other, they can be much more adaptable and open to all forms of pluralism. When people trust each other, they can think long-term. When there is trust in the room, people are more inclined to collaborate and experiment—to open themselves up to others, to new ideas, and to novel approaches—and to extending the Golden Rule. They also don’t waste energy investigating every mistake; they feel free to fail and try again and fail again and try again.

“Collaboration moves at the speed of trust,”

Where trust is prevalent, he explained, groups and societies can move and adapt quickly through many informal contracts. “By contrast, people who do not trust one another will end up cooperating only under a system of formal rules and regulations, which have to be negotiated, agreed to, litigated, and enforced, sometimes by coercive means,” wrote Fukuyama.

The heart pumps in two cycles—systole, when it contracts, and diastole, when it relaxes. And one of the things we often think is that contraction is the most important phase, because that is what gets the blood pushed out everywhere around your body. But you realize when you study medicine that it’s in diastole—when the heart relaxes—that the coronary blood vessels fill and supply the heart muscle with the lifesaving, sustaining oxygen that it needs. So without diastole there can be no systole—without relaxation there can be no contraction.

It was a powerful lesson in community for me: When you are in a real one, never, ever say to someone in need: “Call me if you need help.” If you want to help someone, just do it.

“Littering has two parents—the guy who dropped it and the guy who walked past it.

‘I just can’t support this. I don’t think it will work.’ And he said something that I will never forget as long as I live. He said: ‘We robustly debated it. I want you guys to know I am not going to support it. I just want you all to know that until this passes, I will be against it. But once it passes I will be 110 percent for it, because I don’t want it to fail. [Afterward], he was the last guy in the world to say ‘I told you so.’”

“Too bad your idea didn’t work. I know you meant well for the country. What should we try next?”

We should not just shrug off the loss of $535 million, but venture investing isn’t called “venture” for nothing; some projects are going to fail. The larger point is that in Washington, D.C.—no matter what the issue or the party—you are guilty today until proven innocent. In a healthy community, you are innocent until proven guilty, and even then people will cut you slack if they think you made a good-faith effort.

But government also has to do the little things well, added Jacobs, “because they are not little—the stop signs, the curbs, the sidewalks, mowing the parks—[they are] what make people feel like they are living in a community … We have only one stock in trade—it is not building sidewalks or plowing the streets—it is trust, and if you lose that, you have nothing.”

The transition will not be easy. But human beings have made transitions like this before and I believe they can again. “Can” doesn’t mean “will,” but it also sure doesn’t mean “can’t.”

#quotes #thank you for being late #non-fiction #books #Thomas friedman

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