Sanjay Subramaniam

“One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit. The derision we heap upon the avid stamp collector or train spotter might really be a kind of defense mechanism, to spare us from confronting the possibility that they’re truly happy in a way that the rest of us—pursuing our telic lives, ceaselessly in search of future fulfillment—are not. This also helps explain why it’s far less embarrassing (indeed, positively fashionable) to have a “side hustle,” a hobbylike activity explicitly pursued with profit in mind.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“Empathy is remembering that everybody has a story. Multiple stories. And remembering to make space to hear someone else’s story before immediately telling your own.”
― Kae Tempest, On Connection