Bogdan > Bogdan's Quotes

“going to sleep looks as if you are turning something off. Previously the person was active and mobile and now he or she is unconscious. Actually, going to sleep is very much a process of turning something on.”
― Anthony T. Galie, Take Control of Your Subconscious Mind

“take a moment to see how much you can remember from your last drive into work. It may have been a thirty-minute drive or longer, but most people would be lucky if they could recall any more than four or five minutes of the total drive. That happens because most of the time that you are driving you are in a trancelike state.”
― Anthony T. Galie, Take Control of Your Subconscious Mind

“A Florida state trooper said he was always able to tell which accidents were the "highway hypnosis" cases because there were no skid marks on the road. Do not practice self-hypnosis when you drive!”
― Anthony T. Galie, Take Control of Your Subconscious Mind

“Have you ever purchased a new automobile, and all of the sudden it looks like the world is filled with exactly the same car you bought? You buy a new can and it looks like everybody and their brother is driving around in the same vehicle.”
― Anthony T. Galie, Take Control of Your Subconscious Mind

“According to Buddhism, the root of suffering is neither the feeling of pain nor of sadness nor even of meaninglessness. Rather, the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction. Due to this pursuit, the mind is never satisfied. Even when experiencing pleasure, it is not content, because it fears this feeling might soon disappear, and craves that this feeling should stay and intensify. People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. In meditation, you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realise how pointless it is to pursue them. When the pursuit stops, the mind becomes very relaxed, clear and satisfied. All kinds of feelings go on arising and passing – joy, anger, boredom, lust – but once you stop craving particular feelings, you can just accept them for what they are. You live in the present moment instead of fantasising about what might have been. The resulting serenity is so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it. It is like a man standing for decades on the seashore, embracing certain ‘good’ waves and trying to prevent them from disintegrating, while simultaneously pushing back ‘bad’ waves to prevent them from getting near him. Day in, day out, the man stands on the beach, driving himself crazy with this fruitless exercise. Eventually, he sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please. How peaceful!”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Look for people who have lots of great questions. Smart people are the ones who ask the most thoughtful questions, as opposed to thinking they have all the answers. Great questions are a much better indicator of future success than great answers.”
― Ray Dalio, Principles: Life and Work

“I saw that to do exceptionally well you have to push your limits and that, if you push your limits, you will crash and it will hurt a lot. You will think you have failed—but that won’t be true unless you give up.”
― Ray Dalio, Principles: Life and Work

“For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed.

The riddle does not exist.

If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Who is going to invest in a company that shows you what’s going on quarterly, compared to one that shows you what’s going on all the time?”
― Don Tapscott, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World

“Creating a complete picture of a company financial health, by looking at periodic financial statements, is like turning a hamburger into a cow”
― Don Tapscott, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World

“Morgan Stanley or the U.S. federal government. Every ten minutes, like the heartbeat of the bitcoin network, all the transactions conducted are verified, cleared, and stored in a block which is linked to the preceding block, thereby creating a chain. Each block must refer to the preceding block to be valid. This structure permanently time-stamps and stores exchanges of value, preventing anyone from altering the ledger. If you wanted to steal a bitcoin, you’d have to rewrite the coin’s entire history on the blockchain in broad daylight. That’s practically impossible. So the blockchain is a distributed ledger representing a network consensus of every transaction that has ever occurred. Like the World Wide Web of information, it’s the World Wide Ledger of value—a distributed ledger that everyone can download and run on their personal computer.”
― Don Tapscott, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin and Other Cryptocurrencies is Changing the World

“If it moves tax it. If it keeps moving regulate it. If it stops moving subsidize it.”
― George Gilder, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

“Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion, and we are admonished not to call it “fake news” in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath). Note, however, that I am not denying the effectiveness or potential benevolence of religion. Just the opposite. For better or worse, fiction is among the most effective tools in humanity’s tool kit. By bringing people together, religious creeds make large-scale human cooperation possible. They inspire people to build hospitals, schools, and bridges in addition to armies and prisons. Adam and Eve never existed, but Chartres Cathedral is still beautiful.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“People fear that being trapped inside a box, they will miss out on all the wonders of the world. As long as Neo is stuck inside the matrix, and Truman is stuck inside the TV studio, they will never visit Fiji, or Paris, or Machu Picchu. But in truth, everything you will ever experience in life is within your own body and your own mind. Breaking out of the matrix or travelling to Fiji won’t make any difference. It’s not that somewhere in your mind there is an iron chest with a big red warning sign ‘Open only in Fiji!’ and when you finally travel to the South Pacific you get to open the chest, and out come all kinds of special emotions and feelings that you can have only in Fiji. And if you never visit Fiji in your life, then you missed these special feelings for ever. No. Whatever you can feel in Fiji, you can feel anywhere in the world; even inside the matrix.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“In some ways, programming is like painting. You start with a blank canvas and certain basic raw materials. You use a combination of science, art, and craft to determine what to do with them. You sketch out an overall shape, paint the underlying environment, then fill in the details. You constantly step back with a critical eye to view what you've done. Every now and then you'll throw a canvas away and start again. But artists will tell you that all the hard work is ruined if you don't know when to stop. If you add layer upon layer, detail over detail, the painting becomes lost in the paint.”
― Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer

“By coding at a higher level of abstraction, you are free to concentrate on solving domain problems, and can ignore petty implementation details.”
― Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer

“Make the present moment your friend rather than your enemy. Because many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment. And imagine living your whole life like that, where always this moment is never quite right, not good enough because you need to get to the next one. That is continuous stress.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“What mindfulness does is create some space in your head so you can, as the Buddhists say, “respond” rather than simply “react.” In the Buddhist view, you can’t control what comes up in your head; it all arises out of a mysterious void. We spend a lot of time judging ourselves harshly for feelings that we had no role in summoning. The only thing you can control is how you handle it.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“Picture the mind like a waterfall, they said: the water is the torrent of thoughts and emotions; mindfulness is the space behind the waterfall. Again, elegant theory – but, easier said than done.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“Managing a knowledge portfolio is very similar to managing a financial portfolio.”
― Andy Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

“One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don’t care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short span of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner’s desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality.”
― Andy Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

“Easy!,” you think. “Gently lower the collective pitch lever and you’ll descend gracefully to the ground, a hero.” However, when you try it, you discover that life isn’t that simple. The helicopter’s nose drops, and you start to spiral down to the left. Suddenly you discover that you’re flying a system where every control input has secondary effects. Lower the left-hand lever and you need to add compensating backward movement to the right-hand stick and push the right pedal. But then each of these changes affects all of the other controls again. Suddenly you’re juggling an unbelievably complex system, where every change impacts all the other inputs. Your workload is phenomenal: your hands and feet are constantly moving, trying to balance all the interacting forces.
Helicopter controls are decidedly not orthogonal.”
― Andy Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

“An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”
― Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

“A good idea is an orphan without effective communication.”
― Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

“People find it easier to join an ongoing success. Show them a glimpse of the future and you’ll get them to rally around.[7]”
― David Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmer: Your Journey to Mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition

“Computer languages influence how you think about a problem, and how you think about communicating. Every language comes with a list of features: buzzwords such as static versus dynamic typing, early versus late binding, functional versus OO, inheritance models, mixins, macros”
― Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

“Two or more things are orthogonal if changes in one do not affect any of the others. In a well-designed system, the database code will be orthogonal to the user interface: you can change the interface without affecting the database, and swap databases without changing the interface.”
― Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master