Thinking out loud

Peter Thiel: People take it for granted that their retirement funds can earn 8.5 percent a year. That’s what their financial planners tell them. And sure, you look back over the past 100 years, the stock market has generally gone up 6 to 8 percent a year. But in a larger historical perspective, that kind of growth is exceptional. If you had done the equivalent of investing in the stock market from, say, 1000 to 1100 AD, you would not have made 8 percent a year. During the fall of the Roman Empire, you’d have been lucky to get zero. We’ve been living in a unique period of accelerating technological progress. We’ve gone from horses to cars to planes to rockets to computers to the Internet in a very short time. It’s not automatic that that continues.

via Utopian Pessimist Calls on Radical Tech to Save Economy | Magazine.

Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.

- Charles Peters

Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.

via Conan O’Brien’s final monologue: ‘Nobody in life gets what they thought they were going to get’ | EW.com.

“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.”

Ben Franklin

“If everything’s under control, you’re going too slow.” – Mario Andretti

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

People with a growth mindset feel smart when they’re learning, not when they’re flawless.

Michael Jordan, arguably the world’s best basketball player, has a growth mindset. Most successful people do. In high school he was cut from the basketball team but that obviously didn’t discourage him: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career, I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game wining shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Link: Why You Need to Fail – Peter Bregman – HarvardBusiness.org

(Hat Tip: Eric Mathews)

“The real source of wealth and capital is the human mind, the human spirit, the human imagination, and faith in the future.”

-Steve Forbes

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

-Albert Einstein

“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving the non-essential things undone.” -Lin Yutang