Barbara Adde > Recent Status Updates

“The point isn’t that the candle won’t last the night. Everything is temporary. The point is that the light is gorgeous while it lasts.”

“Sometimes living in this country felt like living at the end of the world. He tried to accept this, tried to find some meaning in it. Who will you be at the end of the world? I tried to be a good parent. I tried to be a good friend.”

“The thing about living in a place like this was how hard you had to work to not see the obvious….”

“Death is transport.”

‘What is transport?…
It’s the movement of matter through time and space. Incidentally, that’s also life.’

“‘I think if you live long enough,’ Nico said, ‘you become a migrant from another timeline. There’s the world you learn to navigate as you enter adulthood, and then that world slips away from you by degrees, and after a while there’s nothing left of it, but you’re still here.’”

“‘She was pretty,’ Eddie said, ‘and tired, but we were all tired in those years. Societal breakdown is exhausting.’”

“But the future arrives regardless.”

“There were entire afternoons that she couldn’t account for later. In those months she felt like she was haunting her own life.”

“Incredibly, those 3K people who comprise the global billionaire class own more wealth than the GDP of every country in the world - except the US and China. In other words, the combined wealth of these 3K people would make them the third wealthiest country on Earth.”

“While nearly 1/2 of the world’s population - over 3.7B people - live in poverty, trying to survive on less than $7 a day, just 3K billionaires throughout the globe have seen their wealth explode by more than $6.5T since 2015.”

Since 1973 … “there was, according to the RAND Corporation, a $79 trillion transfer of wealth from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent.”

“Trump, unlike most Democrats, campaigned with the understanding that the current economic system is broken and failing the vast majority of Americans. He understood that the US consists of more than well-educated, upper-middle-class people on the East and West Coasts.”

“The opportunity to make billions by taking over federal and state programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, NASA, and public transportation is just what the oligarchs have dreamed about for years.”

“When should we trust our instincts, and when should we consciously think things through? On straightforward choices, deliberate analysis is best. When questions of analysis and personal choice start to get complicated - when we have to juggle many different variables - then our unconscious thought processes may be superior.”

“The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”

“What I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.”

“Judgement matters: it is what separates winners from losers.”

Blink is an attempt to understand this magical and mysterious thing called judgment.
Lee’s “ability to sense Hooker’s indecision, to act on the spur of the moment, to conjure up a battle plan they would take Hooker by surprise - his ability…to move quickly and instinctively on the field of battle - was so critical that it is what made it possible for him to defeat an army twice the size of his.”

“A commander does not need to know the barometric pressure or the winds or even the temperature. He needs to know the forecast. If you get too caught up in the production of information, you drown in the data.”

“…to be white and to attend a prestigious high school is to be constantly primed with the idea of ‘smart’?”

“As a society, we place enormous faith in tests because we think that they are a reliable indicator of the test taker’s ability and knowledge. But are they really? If a white student from a prestigious private high school gets a higher SAT score then a black student from an inner-city school, is it because she’s truly a better student or is it because …

“… the fire. It looks different. It sounds different. It flies differently. It is fundamentally, irreversibly changed.”

“They say the phoenix rises from its own ashes, reborn and renewed….
But what the metaphor doesn’t capture is how long it takes for the ashes to cool. How painful the burning is. How disorienting it is to be remade. How you lose everything familiar, everything you relied on for identity and security, before you can become something new.
And how what rises from the ashes isn’t the same bird that went into …

“There is wisdom in the universe, wisdom in the body, wisdom in the patterns that emerge when we stop forcing outcomes. This is what I’m learning to trust now.”

“Increasingly, I felt diminished. Ostracized. Cast aside by those competing for position and power. I was not aligned with the new organizational direction and began to feel unmoored. I lost my purpose and eventually left the organization.
But not before absorbing months of toxicity, months of trying to protect my team, months of buffering them from the dysfunction while being slowly destroyed by it.”