Quotes Archives

How To Sound Smart in Work and Life

August 14, 2020July 30, 2024 Nik

The easiest way to sound smart is to say nothing at all.

Silence creates an aura of mystery, which people will usually interpret in your favor. They’ll use the time to imagine what you might think and know, to wonder why you remain silent, and, sometimes, to second-guess themselves rather than questioning your abilities.

Silence is powerful because few people dare to employ it. They’re afraid of the initial awkwardness, and so they just keep talking. Of course, the more we speak, the more likely we are to say something stupid, wrong, or offensive. If we stay silent, however, we get to observe, think, and choose our words carefully.

We commend speakers for not filling breaks with “ummm”s and “errrm”s because their silence provides us with time to process what they’ve said. We stare in awe at our screens as TV show characters go quiet to add extra oomph to what they’re about to announce. We can’t fathom how the big boss can keep her mouth shut on a Zoom call for this long, but when she then comes out with a brilliant idea, we at least remember why she does it.

However, even the best silence can only last so long, so the question is: What are you supposed to say when it ends?

Here are a few counterintuitive ideas that’ll help you sound smart at work and in life.

Be Water, My Friend

August 6, 2020August 10, 2024 Nik

Water is balance. That’s why Bruce Lee’s “Be Water” analogy is popular to this day. His metaphor captures the balance we all need in our lives.

Water doesn’t look left or right. It just makes its way however it can. It adapts, but it always perseveres. Even at rest, water still slowly eats away at its surroundings. In Striking Thoughts, Lee expanded on the short recorded clip:

Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Water is a slow judge. It asks: “What shape do I need to be?” It conforms to whatever it’s in touch with, one drop at a time. However, you can only ask that question if you come to any situation with an empty mind.

4 Mighty Quotes From Hidden Figures

July 24, 2020July 23, 2024 Nik

If no one told you what you can’t do, how much would you dare to try?

Unfortunately, humans have a long history of telling each other what we can and can’t do. Most of the time, we do so with words. Sometimes, with weapons. Both can cause pain and irrevocable damage, only one can inspire us to transcend physical and invisible barriers.

In the United States of the 1960s, those barriers took the form of racial segregation. African Americans were forced to use different walkways, different restaurants, different toilets, and even different park benches.

Set against this backdrop, the movie Hidden Figures tells the true story of three heroes. Three American heroes. Three Black female mathematicians, who defied the odds and made history.

Like many great stories of history, it is one told far too late and with too little accuracy, but it’s still a story worth hearing, embracing, and learning from.

Here are four awe-inspiring quotes that surprised and amazed me at the same time, along with some context and research.

Yesterday Is Dead

June 4, 2020June 28, 2024 Nik

“All that’s left is smoke and ash, so let’s keep dancing on the broken glass.”

Thus go the lyrics of Kygo’s latest song. It’s about two lovers breaking up, but right now, it feels like advice to all of us. We’re all going through a similarly traumatic if more abstract separation: Reality broke up with us.

Yesterday died, and it left us high and dry. Slow Fridays at the office with your biggest concern being what you’ll wear for the pub crawl — gone. Two-hour weekend trip flights to the coast to munch on some fresh fish by the beach — gone. First dates in the park while having ice cream — gone.

Don’t you wish you could go back to just figuring out how to switch companies because your boss is annoying? Or to plotting how you’ll finally break free from corporate shackles? Struggling to save for a two-week family vacation sounds like a dream, doesn’t it?

All that’s left now is to stay inside, work, and veg out with Netflix on the couch when you’re done, which is of course later than it used to be because hey, you’re working from home!

Depending on where home is, you might not even want to go outside anymore. What’s there? People yelling, fighting, breaking things — and infecting each other in the process. It’s a great time to get hurt but little else.

Not that you could do anything anyway. Restaurants closed. Shops closed. Bars closed. Gyms closed. Fuck. Travel is forbidden. Dating is dangerous. No large gatherings. And now people ignoring all those rules — health-related and otherwise — to protest and, in some cases, loot stores and torch cars.

Great. Just great. After three months of dying to go outside, quarantine is suddenly attractive. Good one 2020, you got us again! And it’s barely June.

“Cheers to us and what we had, let’s keep dancing on the broken glass.”

The 10 Paradoxical Commandments

April 27, 2020June 27, 2024 Nik

“Even when the world is difficult, even when things seem really crazy, we can still find personal meaning and deep happiness — and we do that by facing the worst in the world with the best in ourselves. That’s the idea.”

Today, Kent Keith talks about his “Paradoxical Commandments” with the ease of a Michelin chef whipping up some eggs Benedict, but when he wrote them down in 1968, he wasn’t sure if the words would form the right message.

The world was different back then, but neither less crazy nor less difficult. “It was the 60s. That was a provocative time. A lot of conflict and confrontation but also idealism and hope.” Keith was only 19, a sophomore at Harvard, but he had already witnessed his fair share of said provocative time.

He’d seen Kennedy get elected, celebrated for the moon program, and then shot. He’d observed the Civil Rights Act, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and the bloody protests at Columbia. In essence, he saw a young generation unable to cause change without violence, unable to find meaning in anything that wasn’t a big symbolic act, “like seizing a building or something,” and it troubled him.

Keith decided to write something that would address these issues and, in the process, he discovered that the answer to better leadership was also the answer to lasting, personal happiness. “If you go out and do what you think is right and good and true, then you’re going to get a lot of meaning and satisfaction. You’ve got that no matter what.”

Today, more than 50 years after Keith published his little set of rules as part of a book on student leadership, he calls them “guidelines for finding personal meaning in the face of adversity.” Millions around the world have read, shared, and put Keith’s commandments on their refrigerator doors. Some say they’re a “no excuses policy.” Others, “a personal declaration of independence from all that stuff we can’t control.” Keith explains:

As individuals, we can’t control the world economy, world population growth, natural disasters, fires and floods, when a terrorist might attack, when a war might break out, which companies are going to succeed, which jobs will be created, which jobs will be eliminated.

What we can control is our inner lives, our spiritual lives. You and I get to decide who we’re gonna be and how we’re gonna live. The good news is that’s where people have been finding a lot of meaning for thousands of years. Even better news: Finding personal meaning is actually a key to being deeply happy.

Here are Dr. Kent Keith’s Paradoxical Commandments.

5 Thought Experiments to Upgrade Your Thinking

March 27, 2020May 22, 2024 Nik

Einstein said we can’t solve our problems with the same thinking that created them. Science estimates we have between 30 and 50 thoughts per minute. That’s a lot of chances to change our thinking.

Widely regarded as the smartest man to ever walk the earth, Einstein made good use of these chances. He loved thought experiments. In fact, a thought experiment became the first seed of his theory of general relativity.

Einstein imagined himself riding on a beam of light towards the sun. Looking at another beam right next to him, he should have perceived it as stationary, but, according to the laws of physics, that was impossible. Years later, thanks to another thought experiment, Einstein concluded the only possible answer: time itself is relative.

Although this wasn’t the insight that won him the Nobel prize, decades of science have built upon it. 100 years later, researchers finally verified the most important chunks of his theory as unequivocally true.

There’s something to be said here about vision, about genius, and about daring to imagine, but the real point is this: A question opens the mind. A statement closes it. You can’t upgrade your thinking with statements. You have to ask better questions.

How To Find Peace of Mind

March 20, 2020May 22, 2024 Nik

On a normal day, traffic in Wuhan looks like this:

Of course, right now, there are no normal days. Not in Wuhan and not anywhere else. So instead, the roads look like this:

Your mind is not a highway, but if it was, it’d look like the first picture when it should look like the second. Especially in times of chaos.

The 7 Quotes That Broke Me Out of My Career Crisis

January 18, 2020June 26, 2024 Nik

Seven years ago, I had a mid-life crisis at the ripe age of 21. I was studying abroad in the US, and, suddenly, nothing about the career path I had chosen two years earlier seemed to make sense anymore.

Why do I need to work 60 hours a week just to pass seven random exams at the end of the semester? Should I really become a consultant if it means I won’t have time to spend any of the money I make? If I’m gonna work a lot, shouldn’t I work on something I believe in?

I was desperate for answers to these questions, and today, I’m happy to say I found them. I built a career that can last a lifetime from scratch, and even in its early stages, I earn more than the best entry-level job could provide. I’m not worried about the future and can stomach bad days with relative ease.

Of course, a lot happened in those seven years, but one of the first steps I took was so simple I didn’t consider it to be “a step” at all: I started a Facebook Page and posted inspiring quotes. Every day, I shared cliché little phrases with the world — on one hand, to take a stand in public, on the other to talk myself into going after my dreams.

While it’s easy to dismiss lines like “actions speak louder than words” as glib and indulging, they’re valuable not always due to their meaning but because they get you to do something when you would otherwise be doing nothing.

That said, I also learned that it doesn’t matter if something’s cliché as long as it’s true. Once I got off my high horse and really made an effort to consider and implement these ideas into my life, things did change for the better.

Here are seven of my favorite lines from that time and how they changed my perspective.

Matthew McConaughey’s 5 Rules for a Good Future

December 10, 2019June 25, 2024 Nik

In 2015, Academy Award winner Matthew McConaughey gave the commencement address at University of Houston. Speaking to some 4,000 graduates, he shared personal stories and lessons he hoped would help young people find their path in life.

Before he even started, however, McConaughey made a sobering but accurate observation: A college degree in and of itself is no longer a guarantee that you’ll have a great career.

“I have two older brothers. One was in high school in the early 1970s — a time when a high school GED got you a job and the college degree was exemplary.

My other brother was in high school in the early 80s, and by this time the GED wasn’t enough to guarantee employment. You needed a college degree, and if you got one, you had a pretty good chance of getting the kind of job you wanted after you graduated.

Me, I graduated high school in 1988, got my college degree in ’93, and that college degree in 93 did not mean as much. It was not a ticket, it was not a voucher, it was not a free pass go to anything.”

Now, if Matthew McConaughey found his college degree to be of little use in the job market in 1993, he’d be in for a real shock 26 years later.

With the half-life of knowledge eroding a little more each day, that certificate on paper is now a one-punch ticket at best and a completely useless credential at worst. At the same time, new career paths open up all the time. Youtuber, Instagram influencer, ecommerce strategist — a few years ago, none of these jobs existed.

Therefore, McConaughey is right in suggesting that the one big commonality people entering the workforce share is uncertainty.

“You’ve just completed your scholastic educational curriculum in life — the one you started when you were five years old, up until now — and your future may not be any more clear than it was five years ago. You don’t have the answers, and it’s probably pretty damn scary.”

Luckily, McConaughey is anything but a downer. Immediately, he offers some reassurance: “I say that’s okay. Because that is how it is. This is the reality that many of you are facing. This is the world that we live in.”

Instead of lamenting this reality, McConaughey urges us to accept it — and then do something about it.

“The sooner that we become less impressed with our life, with our accomplishments, with our career, with whatever that prospect is in front of us, the sooner we become less impressed and more involved with these things, the sooner we get a whole lot better at doing them.”

When you’ve spent 15, 20, 30 years of your life chasing the next grade, the next semester, the next scorecard, it’s easy to get stuck. To follow the same pattern and spend the rest of your life running after, valuing, and blaming certifications, documents, and diploma.

The truth, however, is that we live in a world where references don’t matter nearly as much as they used to. That’s what McConaughey wants us to understand and accept. To help us do this — move past a culture of credentials and into one of action, real impact, and results — he then goes on to deliver a total of 13 lessons. Today, I’d like to share five of them with you.

May they help you build the tomorrow you deserve.

How To Master the Art of the Perspective Shift

July 23, 2019August 9, 2024 Nik

If you don’t know, Yoda is one of the strongest characters in one of the strongest stories of all time: Star Wars.

Yoda is a tiny, green creature of an unknown species, over 800 years old, and Grand Master of the Jedi Order. The best of the good guys, if you will. He has an incredible ability to wield the Force — the invisible power all Jedi rely on — and is a brilliant fighter with a lightsaber, their weapon of choice. He’s also the head teacher of all young Jedi and the first person everyone turns to when they need advice.

Despite his strength, Yoda’s true power lies in his wisdom. He speaks a little backwards and often in riddles, but every word he chooses is placed exactly where it’s meant to be. He says little, but what he says hits hard.

Yoda is not just a Jedi Master, he’s also a master of the perspective shift.

Most of the time, what he tells us completely flips the angle from which we were trying to approach a problem. Often, he shows us we’ve been focusing on the wrong problem altogether. This is incredibly valuable.

Perspective shifts elevate our thinking. They allow us to overcome seemingly insurmountable barriers, move a lot faster, and see the world more clearly. They also help us lift others by sharing what we’ve learned with them.

Since he’s a quiet character, there aren’t that many Yoda quotes to draw from, but I’ve assembled his best ones to show you how he architects perspective shifts. He frequently talks about teacher-student relationships, fighting, and what it means to be a good person. To give you enough context and get the most out of these quotes, I’ve structured them into one coherent narrative.

May they teach you to change your own mind and that of others.

Category: Quotes