Tw > Tw's Quotes

“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
― Linus Torvalds

“We pay attention to what we are told to attend to, or what we're looking for, or what we already know...what we see is amazingly limited.”
― Daniel Simons

“people will focus on procedures and not notice anything that isn't just part of the procedures”
― Daniel Simons

“Humans do not have enough mental capacity to do all the things that we think we can do. As attentional load increases, attentional capacity gradually diminishes.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“When we are tired or preoccupied - what psychologists call 'resource-depleted' - we start to economise, to conserve those resources. Higher-order thinking is more expensive. So too is doubt, scepticism, arugment. 'Resource depletion specifically disables cognitive elaboration,' wrote Harvard psychologist Daniel Gillbert...Because it takes less brain power to believe than to doublt, we are, when tired or distracted, gullible. Because we are all biased, and biases are quick and effortless, exhaustion tends to make us prefer the information we know and are comfortable with. We are too tired to do the heavier lifting of examining new or contradictory information, so we fall back on our biases the opinions and the people we already trust”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Silence is the language of inertia.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“The only consequence of their (employee) silence is that the blind (employer) lead the blind.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“As long as it (an issue) remains invisible, it is guaranteed to remain insoluble.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“You cannot fix a problem that you refuse to acknowledge.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“We know - intellectually - that confronting an issue is the only way to resolve it. But any resolution will disrupt the status quo. Given the choice between conflict and change on the one hand, and inertia on the other, the ostrich position can seem very attractive.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“according to the psychologist irving Janis, is that our sense of belonging (which makes us feel safe) blinds us to dangers and encourages greater risk-taking.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Dominant people, it appears, use snap judgements and conform to received wisdom more than do the less dominant. Those who need power, and those who have it, think differently.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“The combination of power, optimism and abstract thinking makes powerful people more certain. The more cut-off they are from others, the more confident they are that they are right.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“money appears to motivate only our interest in ourselves, making us selfish and self-centered...Money makes people feel self-sufficient, which also means they don't need or care about others; it's each man for himself”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“In treating people as less important than things, work becomes both demoralised and demoralising and we become blind to the moral content of our decisions...Money and wilfful blindness make us act in ways incompatible wiht what believe our ethics to be, and often even with our own self-interest...the problem with money isn't fundamentally about greed, although it can be comforting to think so. The problem with money is that we live in societies in which mutual support and co-operation is essential, but money erodes the relationships we need to lead productive, fulfilling and genuinely happy lives. When money becomes the dominant behavior, it doesn't cooperate with, or amplify, our relationships; it disengages us from them.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“When we care about people, we care less about money, and when we care about money, we care less about people.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Money is just one of the forces that blind us to information and issues which we could pay attention to - but don't. It exacerbates and often rewards all the other drivers of willful blindness; our preference for the familiar, our love for individuals and for big ideas, a love of busyness and our dislike of conflict and change, the human instinct to obey and conform and our skill at displacing and diffusing responsibility. All of these operate and collaborate with varying intensities at different moments in our lives. The common denominator is that they all make us protect our sense of self-worth, reducing dissonance and conferring a sense of security, however illusory. In some ways, they all act like money; making us feel good at first, with consequences we don't see. We wouldn't be so blind if our blindness didn't deliver rewards; the benefit of comfort and ease.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“The sooner we associate long hours and multitasking with incompetence and carelessness the better. The next time you hear boasts of executives pulling an all-nighter or holding conference calls in their cars, be sure to offer your condolences; it's grim being stuck in sweatshops run by managers too ignorant to understand productivity and risk. Working people like this is as smart as running your factory without maintenance. In manufacturing and engineering businesses, everyone learns that the top priority is asset integrity: protecting the machinery on which the business depends. In knowledge-based economies, that machinery is the mind.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Zen Buddhist scholar Daisetz T. Suzuki said, "If one really wishes to be master of an art, technical knowledge of it is not enough. One has to transcend technique so that the art becomes an "artless art" growing out of the Unconscious.”
― Dov Seidman, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything...in Business

“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.”
― Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

“We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities.”
― Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

“The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportunities for agriculture, mining, or trade, but only the imagination and initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can transform the possibilities into fact...Man, not the earth, makes civilization.”
― Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

“In a rule-based society, we often choose efficiency over value, but, while rules-based governance systems may often serve well the values of fairness and representation, their seeming efficiency hides a deep and important flaw: We often rely on rules when they are not, in fact, the most efficient or effective solution to getting the result that we desire.”
― Dov Seidman, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything...in Business

“Despite the best of intentions, people create rules variously and often in reaction to behaviors deemed unacceptable to the larger goals of the group. That is why we often find ourselves revising the rules when new conditions reveal their loopholes.”
― Dov Seidman, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything...in Business

“Human beings are natural problem solvers and enjoy the challenge of puzzles. We will always invent new loopholes, and no rule can govern all the cracks.”
― Dov Seidman, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything...in Business

“The rationales for centralized, to-down decision making - control, direction, and compliance - melts away when individuals are tightly aligned with the company's values and goals, accountable for their actions, and self-regulated.”
― Dov Seidman, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything...in Business

“Self-governing cultures both inspire alignment and eject elements that don't fit in.”
― Dov Seidman, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything...in Business

“The key ingredient to progress, to getting ahead, is to leave a foundation behind.”
― Dov Seidman, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything...in Business

“If you are trying to bring about a better future, you must eery day go someplace you have not been before, to the point of no return. What happens every time you go to the point of no return? You push past your limits and open up new terrains of possibility. Each challenge accepted leads to greater ability when you confront the next.”
― Dov Seidman, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything...in Business

“A leadership disposition guides you to take the path of most resistance and turn it into the path of least resistance.”
― Dov Seidman, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything...in Business