“‘What rules the world is ideas,’ Kristol once wrote, ‘because ideas define the way reality is perceived.'”
—Quoted in “Can the G.O.P. Be a Party of Ideas?” This is sort of true, but, alternately, idea producers and disseminators may want this to be true because it flatters them and raises their own status.
Kristol’s view is plausible but I remain unconvinced.
“One advantage of thinking about psychoanalysis as an art, instead of a science, is that you don’t have to believe in progress.”
—Adam Philips, “The Art of Nonfiction No. 7” in The Paris Review. Compare to “Politics repeats itself while science and art make it new.”
“All the best essays are epistemological journeys from ignorance or curiosity to knowledge.”
—Geoff Dyer, and the whole interview is great.
“They regarded art not as a quest for aesthetic perfection but a joyful inquiry into the inexhaustible variety of the world, closely allied with history, natural science and the arguments of everyday life.”
From Jonathan Rée’s “A Few Home Truths,” hidden alas behind a paywall.
“Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.”
—Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind.
“Houellebecq graduated as an agronomist in 1980, got married and had a son; then he divorced, became depressed and took up writing poetry.”
—According to his Wikipedia entry.
When founders are starting out, partnership inquiries sound really exciting. In theory, a successful partnership with a larger company could help your company get more customers. What you realize, though, is that partnerships are rarely a real thing. When you work with another company, either they are your customer or you are their customer. Anything other than that usually just eats up time and energy.
—From Brad Flora’s “I Sold My Startup for $25.5 Million: Here’s how I did it,” which is interesting throughout despite the sensationalist title.
At Seliger + Associates we’ve learned that anyone who talks about partnerships is wasting our time (and theirs). People who need a good or service and can pay for the good or service are usually prepared to move quickly. They don’t need much if any convincing from third parties. And they don’t need an intermediary between them and the good or service provider.
Think of it this way: if your friend knows you love Thai food and tells you that there’s a great Thai restaurant nearby, you’re not going to wait for your friend to take you there. You’re just going to go. By the same token, when existing clients make referrals, they often don’t even tell us. They just do it. The referral isn’t hard and it isn’t complex and it usually involves very little negotiation.
Being in business taught me that there are two factors that matter more than anything else: who is paying me money and who I am paying money to. “Partnerships” or “alliances” that don’t involve contracts and money and services or goods don’t mean anything.
“[Stefan] Zweig himself attributed his popularity to ‘a personal flaw’: radical impatience. In words that sound startlingly contemporary, Zweig expressed irritation at any work that didn’t maintain a breathless clip from beginning to end. Ninety percent of what he read, Zweig reported, struck him as padded arid, high-flown—just not thrilling enough.”
—George Prochnik, The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World; the book is not likely to be of general interest but its peaks are notable.
“If bookishness were just a niche pastime, like stamp collecting or waveboarding, none of this would really matter. But it’s more than that. It is the collective memory and accumulated wisdom of our species.
The rough-and-ready intellectual consensus of the mid-Twentieth Century is being pushed out by a New Superstition whose victims can find testimony on the Internet for anything they choose to believe. The only cure for it is reading books, and lots of them. When all things bookish are edited out of public discourse, strange things happen, or seem to. When our societal attention span becomes shorter than the lifetime of a steel bridge over a river, what appears to be a solid strip of highway can suddenly fall out from under us. Like a portent from the medieval world.”
—Neal Stephenson, from Some Remarks; see also “Twilight of the Books.”
That being said, I don’t think the Internet is only for “New Superstition,” and some of the “intellectual consensus” was and is wrong. Knowledge that people post and read on the Internet is neither right nor wrong, superstitious nor factual.
Luck is without a doubt an important ingredient in creative discoveries. A very successful artist, whose work sells well and hangs in the best museums and who can afford a large estate with horses and a swimming pool, once admitted ruefully that there could be at least a thousand artists as good as he is—yet they are unknown and their work is unappreciated. The one difference between him and the rest, he said, was that years back he met at a party a man with whom he had a few drinks. They hit it off and became friends. The man eventually became a successful art dealer who did his best to push his friend’s work. One thing led to another: A rich collector began to buy the artist’s work, critics started paying attention, a large museum added one of his works to its permanent collection. And once the artist became successful, the field discovered his creativity.
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention.
Should this be heartening or disheartening. Also: Compare it to “Photography and Tyler Cowen’s ‘Average is Over.’“
The Story's Story 