24 highlights
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If you stop to listen to a musician or street performer for more than a minute, you owe them a dollar.
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Dont ever work for someone you dont want to become.
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No one is as impressed with your possessions as you are.
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When you lead, your real job is to create more leaders, not more followers.
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Efficiency is highly overrated; Goofing off is highly underrated.
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Ask funders for money, and they’ll give you advice; but ask for advice and they’ll give you money.
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It is the duty of a student to get everything out of a teacher, and the duty of a teacher to get everything out of a student.
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Speak confidently as if you are right, but listen carefully as if you are wrong.
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Three things you need: The ability to not give up something till it works, the ability to give up something that does not work, and the trust in other people to help you distinguish between the two.
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When public speaking, pause frequently. Pause before you say something in a new way, pause after you have said something you believe is important, and pause as a relief to let listeners absorb details.
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Spend as much time crafting the subject line of an email as the message itself because the subject line is often the only thing people read.
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When checking references for a job applicant, employers may be reluctant or prohibited from saying anything negative, so leave or send a message that says, “Get back to me if you highly recommend this applicant as super great.” If they don’t reply take that as a negative.
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Half the skill of being educated is learning what you can ignore.
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Always read the plaque next to the monument.
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90% of everything is crap.
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We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day, and underestimate what we can achieve in a decade.
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You cant reason someone out of a notion that they didn’t reason themselves into.
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Your best job will be one that you were unqualified for because it stretches you. In fact only apply to jobs you are unqualified for.
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It’s thrilling to be extremely polite to rude strangers.
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Art is whatever you can get away with.
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Dont wait in line to eat something famous. It is rarely worth the wait.
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To signal an emergency, use the rule of three; 3 shouts, 3 horn blasts, or 3 whistles.
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For a great payoff be especially curious about the things you are not interested in.
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If your opinions on one subject can be predicted from your opinions on another, you may be in the grip of an ideology. When you truly think for yourself your conclusions will not be predictable.