Charles

“Many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.”
― Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

“We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost. That idea is hard to accept. We all have an emotional equity in our first draft; we can’t believe that it wasn’t born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn’t. Most writers don’t initially say what they want to say, or say it as well as they could.”
― William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

“While most would agree with Socrates that, "the unexamined life is not worth living," a lesser-known quote by Sheldon Kopp might be more important here: "The unlived life is not worth examining.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now