Clement Setiabudhi > Clement's Quotes

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass

“There are no dead ends in life's journey; there are no crossroads, no forks in the road. People who chose not to see reality, see the world as a tangled maze of intersections, forks in the road, and dead ends. These are illusions of people who follow the well trampled wide path woven out by others. This is not their true path. Life's true sojourn reveals a long winding narrow path that only you can choose. Few have the courage to walk it.”
― RJ Blizzard

“Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can’t help but be that. But more importantly, if you’re honest about who you are, you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them hope.”
― Charlie Kaufman

“The question we need to ask ourselves is: what is success to us? More money? That's fine. A healthy family? A happy marriage? Helping others? To be famous? Spiritually sound? To express ourselves? To create art? To leave the world a better place than we found it?

What is success to me? Continue to ask yourself that question. How are you prosperous? What is your relevance?

Your answer may change over time and that's fine but do yourself this favor – whatever your answer is, don't choose anything that would jeopardize your soul. Prioritize who you are, who you want to be, and don't spend time with anything that antagonizes your character. Don't depend on drinking the Kool-Aid – it's popular, tastes sweet today, but it will give you cavities tomorrow.

Life is not a popularity contest. Be brave, take the hill. But first answer the question.”
― Matthew McConaughey, Greenlights

“The Dip creates scarcity; scarcity creates value”
― Seth Godin, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit

“The people who skip the hard questions are in the majority, but they are not in demand.”
― Seth Godin, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit

“The mass market is dying. There is no longer one best song or one best kind of coffee. Now there are a million micromarkets, but each micromarket still has a best.”
― Seth Godin, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit

“Aut viam inveniam aut faciam tibi.

I will either find a way or make one.”
― Kendall Ryan, Unravel Me

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“The world will ask who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.”
― Carl Jung

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.

I do not make any of my own clothing.

I speak a language I did not invent or refine.

I did not discover the mathematics I use.

I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.

I am moved by music I did not create myself.

When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.

I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.

I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.”
― Steve Jobs, Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words

“Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules.”
― Marvin Bell

“All that is transitory is but a metaphor.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“I met a man at a party. He said "I'm writing a novel" I said "Oh really? Neither am I.”
― Peter Cook

“It's not only joy as an act of defiance; it’s business as usual as an act of defiance. This is just: Do your thing.”
― Bono

“Science works with chunks and bits and pieces of things with the continuity presumed, and DeWeese works only with the continuities of things with the chunks and bits and pieces presumed.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“Anxiety is the price of the ticket to life: intrapsychic depression is the by-product of the refusal to climb aboard.”
― James Hollis

“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Whether chemists, physicists, or political scientists, the most successful problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they are facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorized procedures.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In a wicked world, relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Their findings about who these people are should sound familiar by now: "high tolerance for ambiguity"; "systems thinkers"; "additional technical knowledge from peripheral domains"; "repurposing what is already available"; "adept at using analogous domains for finding inputs to the invention process"; "ability to connect disparate pieces of information in new ways"; "synthesizing information from many different sources"; "they appear to flit among ideas"; "broad range of interests"; "they read more (and more broadly) than other technologists and have a wider range of outside interests"; "need to learn significantly across domains"; "Serial innovators also need to communicate with various individuals with technical expertise outside of their own domain.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“it is difficult to accept that the best learning road is slow, and that doing poorly now is essential for better performance later. It is so deeply counterintuitive that it fools the learners themselves,”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Seeding the soil for generalists and polymaths who integrate knowledge takes more than money. It takes opportunity.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Yokoi was the first to admit it. “I don’t have any particular specialist skills,” he once said. “I have a sort of vague knowledge of everything.” He advised young employees not just to play with technology for its own sake, but to play with ideas. Do not be an engineer, he said, be a producer. “The producer knows that there’s such a thing as a semiconductor, but doesn’t need to know its inner workings. . . . That can be left to the experts.” He argued, “Everyone takes the approach of learning detailed, complex skills. If no one did this then there wouldn’t be people who shine as engineers. . . . Looking at me, from the engineer’s perspective, it’s like, ‘Look at this idiot,’ but once you’ve got a couple hit products under your belt, this word ‘idiot’ seems to slip away somewhere.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World