Daniel Brandt

“So in the first six months of working together, Bezos, Kaphan, and Barton-Davis wrestled with trying to find the balance between providing customers with an e-mail catalog and conducting business strictly on the Web.”
― Robert Spector, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast – An Unauthorized Revealing Account of Jeff Bezos and Internet Brand Dominance

“In those early months, Amazon.com hedged its bets by focusing on being both an e-mail store and a Web store. Under the e-mail system, when a customer e-mailed Amazon.com with a request for a particular book, the company would run a search for the book, and e-mail the results back to the customer, who would then send another e-mail to place the order.”
― Robert Spector, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast – An Unauthorized Revealing Account of Jeff Bezos and Internet Brand Dominance

“The shadow, when it is realized, is the source of renewal; the new and productive impulse cannot come from established values of the ego. When there is an impasse, and sterile time in our lives—despite an adequate ego development—we must look to the dark, hitherto unacceptable side which has been at our conscious disposal….This brings us to the fundamental fact that the shadow is the door to our individuality. In so far as the shadow renders us our first view of the unconscious part of our personality, it represents the first stage toward meeting the Self. There is, in fact, no access to the unconscious and to our own reality but through the shadow. Only when we realize that part of ourselves which we have not hitherto seen or preferred not to see can we proceed to question and find the sources from which it feeds and the basis on which it rests. Hence no progress or growth is possible until the shadow is adequately confronted and confronting means more than merely knowing about it. It is not until we have truly been shocked into seeing ourselves as we really are, instead of as we wish or hopefully assume we are, that we can take the first step toward individual reality.”
― Connie Zweig, Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature

“And you will understand how true it is that everyone who stops clinging to brothers or sisters, father, mother or children, land or houses … is repaid a hundred times over and gains eternal life.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life