Fire & Motion 23

Fleeting Quote

A short life and a merry one is far better than a long life sustained by fear, caution and perpetual medical surveillance.
/
Hedged words are usually not useful because they hedge the responsibility of being wrong.

Reading

📕A Promised Land

"There's only one thing you can count on, Mr. President," he said. "On any given moment in any given day, somebody somewhere is screwing up." We went to work trying to minimize screw-ups.

When Obama asking about how to manage such a large branch as the government of the United States.

Instead, I was constantly dealing with probabilities: a 70 percent chance, say, that a decision to do nothing would end in disaster; a 55 percent chance that this approach versus that one might solve the problem (with a 0 percent chance that it would work out exactly as intended); a 30 percent chance that whatever we chose wouldn't work at all, along with a 15 percent chance that it would make the problem worse.

In such circumstances, chasing after the perfect solution led to paralysis. And I come to realize that there must be some kind of logic and deliberation behind ridiculous decisions, especially those made by Trump.

I reminded myself that every president felt saddled with the previous administration's choices and mistakes, that 90 percent of the job was navigating inherited problems and unanticipated crises. Only if you did that well enough, with discipline and purpose, did you get a real shot at shaping the future.

Career advice :))

📄The radical idea that people aren't stupid

Visual illusions don’t prove you are bad at seeing. They prove that your visual system is doing tons of stuff under the hood to make you good at seeing, and specially-designed images can expose its clever tricks. Cognitive illusions do the same—they help us understand how the mind works by figuring out how the mind breaks, just with words and numbers instead of pictures.

It's another perspective to view those vulnerabilities, that by exposing them, we are able to navigate the system and improve beyond.

📄Henry Miller on Turning 80, Fighting Evil, And Why Life is the Best Teacher

If at eighty you’re not a cripple or an invalid, if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin’ and keepin’ power. If you are young in years but already weary in spirit, already on the way to becoming an automaton, it may do you good to say to your boss — under your breath, of course — “Fuck you, Jack! You don’t own me!” … If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked.It’s the little things that matter, not fame, success, wealth.

Watching

🎥Up

This one is probably one of the most underrated. Love it!

Adventure is out there.

I can't help but thinking of Milan Kundera's Life is Elsewhere.

The boring stuff is the stuff I remember the most.

Outside Interest!

🎶欢喜就好 - 陳雷

📹UP: Married Life | Script to Screen

🔗The New Gatekeepers