Quack_Quotes

I love it how empowerment is being commercialized through "the lie of leadership". Like "individuality" before it, it's being packaged, dolled-up, re-processed, promoted and available at the right price. While the irony of "individuality" was that while following the urge and advice from everywhere to be a unique individual, you just ended up looking like someone else, one of exactly like others of a group (or someone touted as a model of individuality), the "lie of leadership" plays up the old "youth before age" schism as the drive to be a leader, eschewing experience for cookie cutter slogans and pop-philosophy. No more clearer is this exemplified in the TV series Silicon Valley. Being from the industry, the caricatures are painfully accurate, Dilbert-esque and enough for me to stop watching (let's face it, we watch TV to get away from reality, not have it thrown in the face). But in the tunnel-vision of "leadership...

Stupidity has to be fought, not celebrated. Idiocy has to identified, not identified with.

Being righteous sometime means being wrong sometime, too. Being right means you are right all the time. Being Right doesn't mean you are right, just as being Left doesn't mean you're wrong. Being a right Idiot means being right. Being a Right Idiot means your twice it  An idiot doesn't know how they got it right. An righteous idiot doesn't know how.

Lightning strikes over downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Normally we don't want something to happen again. Unless it's something good. So it's not the fact something happens again that is important, it is what that thing is. It's less likely we will make the same mistake twice if we do thing differently the second time around. And we will likely not achieve the same outcome if we do things differently So why do we do the opposite? How many times you've find yourself trying to make that thing work again by doing something different. Or doing the same thing, believing that things will work out differently this time around. How important is consistency and why do we apply it inconsistently? Insanity is both Doing the same thing expecting the same outcome AND Doing it differently and expecting thes This form of saying is what I call the tangent. It's taking a well known saying or common sense notion and adding an exclusion at the end tha...

A warning sticker on a tractor attachment. Apparently, it isn't obvious. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Questions can be the root of knowledge when it is paired with an understandable answer. It is valid form of communicating knowledge. Confusion reign with answers that are complicated and convoluted. Those really doesn't answer the question. I was asked by a friend, "If you came with a warning label, what would it say." This is my response. It's a take on the usual warning phrase forms that is on all sorts of labels and bottles. 

The way we use adversity is strictly our own choice (Photo credit: symphony of love ) I always wondered what that really phrase meant,  "life sucks".  Where did it come from? Why did that person first said it. If life is literally sucking, I'd like it to be of some use. It might as well suck out the things I fear and doubt. It should suck away things that stop me from trying again and be accepting of the eventual outcome. Despite all the sucking, life still goes on. So if it sucks, let it be for the better.

Sunset at Lake Success (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Updated 12th January 2015 Especially when we are down, we tend to feel like success is far away, fleeting and not permanent. You could not be more right. Success is impermanent. After success will come problems. It may not be failure. But it will need you to be more successful. Success is fleeting if we are not careful. Like a beautiful sunset, it is fleeting. Although there are a million (now 10 million more) pictures of sunsets, these sunsets were short but memorable. Success should be like that. Draw inspiration from it. Think of the good things it brought. And always remember how long it lasted.

Reality smells (Photo credit: Eric.Parker ) Either you stepped in shit or you're somewhere where it's all around you. Either way,  you had something to do with it or getting there. You either walked around oblivious to the things you stepped on.  Confident that whatever it is,  it's not important and won't affect you in any way. Guess what, you've just proved yourself wrong. Or you brought yourself or made your way somewhere where it's shit everywhere. Whether you meant to do so or thought you'd never get to the place where shit is everywhere, what matters is what you do now to get out shit and whether you will learn anything from it. Either way,  it's you and something you did.  Deal with it.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia ) That is what a someone who puts quality over quantity will see. A capitalist will consider how much is the value of the liquid to others in the same room, the value of it somewhere else, the cost of moving the glass there, whether he can make the people in the room compete with the people over there to drive up the value and whether he can sell it to both of them and get away with keeping the glass.

Paparazzi (Photo credit: Todd Huffman ) Nothing changes a person than giving them a camera.  Put any nice guy behind one and they become an inconsiderate jerk.  Especially when there are children involved. They stand in front of you, at events, everywhere, thinking that they have more right than you because they are capturing that moment for posterity. To these people, I say, "Live life but live it in front of the camera."   I really like quotes with the "contrary to popular belief" structure because it's fairly simple to construct an interesting quote. Not necessarily memorable but definitely easy. Just juxtapose an object against an adjective it's not normally associated with. A good one maximizes the distance between the two.

Historians will debate as to whom really wore the pants / signed the checks / stamped the President's seal.  (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) And I mean that in several ways. In the literal way is that those smart people who you hired will just gang up and go against you. In another way, the smart workers will just start finding ways to make their decisions seem to you like they were yours. You make the decisions, feel smart and take all the responsibility. Originally, this thought stream came out when I read an article published in the early weeks of George W. Bush's presidency, pre-9-11. The article defended his academic record and dubious achievements outside of politics. It assured that despite of his history, George W. Bush redeemed himself by surrounding himself with smart people. They were supposed to do his bidding, provide him ideas but at the end, the decision would always be his. I thought it was an accident waiting to happen. Turns out I really didn't have ...

Advertising advertising (Photo credit: Toban B. ) ... Only one is worth reprinting all the time. ...  Only one is guaranteed to attract attention. ...  With facts, the discussion get pretty boring quickly. ... nothing attracts heated words like one of them

Fire Sparks (Photo credit: Kirrus ) ... It's what the spark gets used for that matters. Great ideas come to more people than you think. Most of us don't want to get off the couch.

The caveat to the promise. A reminder that all things come at their time. 

People have these ideas and they hold on to them hard. They will fight reason and logic just to keep holding on to them. The value of the idea to them is more important than the idea itself. But ideas have a strange way of working. Sometimes, the same idea in two different hands, yield two different things. So this idea comes about that perhaps our ideas may not serve us best. Perhaps our ideas, when shared, in the hands of others, will bring forth things that we don't even expect. So let go of your ideas when there is simply too much to not let it go. Because when you do, it makes you ready to accept the next idea that comes by.

I heard this from someone. It sounded inane until I thought about it. All the people I know who spend time cleaning, cleaning their homes or cars or space at the office, complain about not enough time. Not enough time to clean more I guess.. People who like cleanliness tend to find more things to clean. I don't know why really. There is always something to clean. Like there is always something to complain about. In a way, it's even worse than the glass-half-empty people because these people want to throw out the water in the glass and clean it. And then keep it. Making that other person a there-is- no-glass-left kind of person. But be thankful for people who are always looking for something to clean. Their OCD is our gain. And there is almost no end in things to clean.

A reverse take on the famous Mythbuster disclaimer. Time a for a little humor, I guess.

Opinions are hard. They are supposed to be so. You have to put a lot of thought into it. If you don't, you don't even value your opinion. But it's not supposed to be hard. You must at least supposed to consider that you could be wrong. If your opinion is hard and fast, you may not be able to change them even if you find out you are wrong. Wars start like this.

As computers become more ubiquitous, they become more transparent. As companies try to convince that doing something on the computer is easy, they obscure the difficult work already in place or hidden from users views. In the end, we have contradictions like these. All of us send e-mail. At a push of a button, our friend gets to read what we said a few seconds ago, a million miles away. But like the brave and proud members of the postal service who our parents used to take for granted, we too have taken for granted all that is in place and working for the e-mail to reach our loved ones. Just because the action for you has become more trivial, the efforts to make that action work don't become as trivial, too. Users who are purely driven by their need and wallow in their ignorance of everything else, display ingratitude to the powers that made things be. That seems to be quite fashionable now. Especially when the lines promoted is to act like a million buck just because you feel li...

When people get the same idea, they say that you've read their mind. Which is funny because if our mind is a book, we'd all like to skip to the ending. But if our mind is a book, the pages we have read are disappearing fast. We turn back looking for the pages we have read and they are not there or are now blank.