Ramanujan Redux

Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions. But make sure you guard against the other kind of confusion. People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time–even when hard at work. — Marcus Aurelieus, Meditations

Double your rate of failure. You’re thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. It is better to aim at perfection and miss it than to aim at imperfection and hit it. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that’s where you’ll find success. On the far side. — Thomas Watson (IBM founder), Be Yourself

Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of ‘crackpot’ than the stigma of conformity. Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Every time we’ve moved ahead in IBM, it was because someone was willing to take a chance, put his head on the block, and try something new.

Too many people are waiting for someone else to give them a push. We have tried to develop self-starters in IBM. All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work. — Thomas Watson, Be Yourself

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. The storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. — Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. — Mark Twain, Pick the Brain

You don’t want to be Tesla. He was one of the greatest inventors, but it’s a sad, sad story. He couldn’t commercialize anything, he could barely fund his own research. You’d want to be more like Edison. If you invent something, that doesn’t necessarily help anybody. You’ve got to actually get it into the world; you’ve got to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it. — Larry Page, How to Change the World

You must guard constantly against those who lack vision. You must guard against the reactionary mind. Always cultivate and associate with persons of vision and with persons who believe that things are going to be better. When you do this, you take on the kind of vision, backed by the right kind of inspiration that you need if you are going to grow in this business or any other business. — Thomas Watson, Be Yourself