Charles Naut

“Cash has disappeared so quickly from Chinese cities that it even “disrupted” crime. In March 2017, a pair of Chinese cousins made headlines with a hapless string of robberies. The pair had traveled to Hangzhou, a wealthy city and home to Alibaba, with the goal of making a couple of lucrative scores and then skipping town. Armed with two knives, the cousins robbed three consecutive convenience stores only to find that the owners had almost no cash to hand over—virtually all their customers were now paying directly with their phones. Their crime spree netted them around $125 each—not even enough to cover their travel to and from Hangzhou—when police picked them up. Local media reported rumors that upon arrest one of the brothers cried out, “How is there no cash left in Hangzhou?”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“it’s possible to transcend anything that doesn’t kill you,”
― David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

“White as the default, white as the center, white as the norm, is the central part of the master narrative. The centrality of whiteness—how it constructed white versus black, legal versus illegal—hurts not only people of color who aren’t white but also white people who can’t carry the burden of what they’ve constructed.”
― Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen

“Look, anyone can manage for the short term—just keep squeezing the lemon. And anyone can manage for the long—just keep dreaming. You were made a leader because someone believed you could squeeze and dream at the same time.”
― Jack Welch, Winning