195The first chapter of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations makes it clear that the way for business to win is to break the production of goods into tiny tasks, tasks that can be undertaken by low-paid people following simple instructions.
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196Let me be really clear; Great teachers are wonderful. They change lives. We need them. The problem is that most schools don't like great teachers. They've organized to stamp them out, bore them, bureaucratize them, and make them average.
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197Here's what Woodrow Wilson said about public education: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
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198Being good at school is a fine skill if you intend to do school forever.
What they should teach in school--only two things.
1. Solve interesting problems.
2. Lead
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199Chart. X axis: Pay. Y axis: Hours of effort/day. The line slopes from high to the right to low to the left. At the left end, "Following instructions" and at the right end, "Insights"
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200Book--The Art of Possibility;. Roz & Ben Zander.
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201Diagram: X axis Hours of Effort, Y axis Quality. Line from lower left to upper right. Lower left point "Junk". Upper right point "Close to perfect" (but never quite there).
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202Bowling is an asymptotic sport. The best you can do is perfect: 300, that's it. That's the ceiling.
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203Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient
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204By definition, art is human. A machine can't create art, because the intent matters. It's much more likely to be art if you do it on purpose.
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205The only purpose of starting is to finish.
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206There are two solutions to the coordination problem, and both of them make people uncomfortable, because both challenge our resistance.
1. Relentlessly limit the number of people allowed to though(?). That means you need formal procedures for excluding people, even well-meaning people with authority. And you need secrecy. If you have a choice between being surprised (and watching a great product ship on time) or being involved (and participating in the launch of a mediocre project), which do you want? You must pick one or the other.
2. Appoint one person (a linchpin) to run it. Not to co-run it or to lead a task force or to be on the committee. One person, a human being, runs it. Her name on it. Her decisions.
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207Handshakes:
3 people: 3 connections.
4 people: 6 connections.
5 people: 10 connections
6 people: 15 connections.
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208Book: The Art of Thought - Steven Pressfield
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210Successful people are successful for one simple reason--they think about failure differently.
Successful people learn from failure, but the lesson they learn is a different one. They don't learn that they shouldn't have tried in the first place, and they didn't learn that they are always right and thee world is wrong and they don't learn that they are losers. They learn that the tactics they used didn't work or that the person they used them on didn't respond.
You become a winner when you're good at losing.
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209Public speaking is one of the worst things the lizard brain can imagine.
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211When someone says to me "I don't have any good ideas...I'm just not good at that" I ask them "Did you have any bad ideas?". Nine out of 10 times the answer is no.
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212All the creativity books in the world aren't going to help you if you're unwilling to have lousy, lame, and even dangerously bad ideas.
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213Topic: Some classical musicians aren't artists.
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214Where did your art go while you were tweeting?
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215Metcalfe's Law: The value of a network increases with the square of the number of nodes in a network.
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216Illustration. X axis from Passive to Active. Y axis from Attachment to Discernment.
Passive and Discernment: Bureaucrat.
Passive and Attachment: Whiner.
Active and Attachment: Fundamentalist Zealot
Active and Discernment; Linchpin
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217To get support:
1. Understand that there's a difference between the right answer and the answer you can sell. (et seq.)
2. Focus on making changes that work down, not up (et seq.)
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