This postA couple weeks ago I bought a beautiful new softcover ruled Moleskine, and wow, I love them. With this one I’ve started writing down quotes and passages — making it a commonplace book — and I’ve got a couple I recently came across and really like. (Seriously, this is a great way to come up with stuff to blog about. I just make sure I copy stuff into it as I read, and then I don’t have to go looking for it when I want to blog. It’s all there in one small, beautiful, delicious-feeling book.)
One is from an interview McKinsey Quarterly recently did with Brad Bird of Pixar. Brad said, “The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. You don’t play it safe — you do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That’s what gets you up in the morning.” Mmm.
The second is from Dennis Rasmussen’s book The Lord’s Question, page 88: “Men can become unable to tell a want from a need. There are forces in this civilization that for their own profit try to create wants and keep the desire for material things at fever pitch. Always they have something new to offer. They seek to maintain in people a continual state of discontent, and utter inability to be happy.”
P.S. Sorry about the comments being whacked out on here the last few days. I made a change to the theme and it was working fine on my home computer, but when I checked it from a lab computer here on campus, all the comments on each post were conflated into a single typographic blob. It looked kind of cool but was rather hard to read. :) Anyway, it’s fixed now.
