Welcome to The Purpose Memo, a newsletter where I give you ideas for wrestling your life back from digital technology and living a principled life.
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Read time: 5 minutes
My Odd Collection
For a half-decade, I’ve been collecting quotes. I always carry a pocket journal with me, and when I come across interesting quotes in a book, online, or even in a conversation, I jot them down.
I have journals full of them that I’ve transcribed by hand. Something about physically writing the words makes them sink deeper into my psyche, partially because that behavior forces me to spend more time with them.
Quotes are powerful because they capture big, complex ideas with minimal words. Nietzsche once said, “It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.” He was highlighting something important: a great quote is incompressible. Only a person who thoroughly grasps the matter at hand can capture its essence in so few words.
Today, I wanted to take a break from my regular style and share the 12 best ideas I’ve come across this year.
I hope there’s one that resonates.
(If there is, you should write it down.)
12 Good Ideas I’ve Come Across This Year
Shakespeare on the fear of trying:
“Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”
Mortimer Adler on discipline:
“True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.”
Morgan Housel on the problem of easy-money:
“Everyone hates a spoiled child and knows that child is socially ruined, but they themselves want easy money. Do you see the irony? Money you didn’t earn or work hard for quickly becomes a social liability.”
Nassim Taleb on how too much information can be misleading (emphasis mine):
“Data is now plentiful thanks to connectivity; and the share of spuriousness in the data increases as one gets more immersed into it. A not well discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities—even in moderate quantities.
…
The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part called signal); hence the higher noise to signal ratio.
…
This is hard to accept in the age of the internet. It ha been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on…”
Derek Sivers on the same idea:
“If more information was the answer, we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.”
Charlie Munger on avoiding failure:
“Just show me where I’m going to die so I don’t go there.”
Joshua Meyrowitz on the challenge of losing faith in expertise:
“Our increasingly complex technological and social world has made us rely more and more heavily on expert information, but the general exposure of experts as fallible human beings has lessened our faith in them as people. The change in our image of leaders and experts leaves us with a distrust of power, but also a seemingly powerless dependence on those in whom we have little trust.”
Joshua Fields Millburn on the power of decluttering (emphasis mine):
“When there’s less stuff competing for attention, everything that remains has room to breathe. And when something can breathe, it comes alive.
Clutter is suffocating.
Subtraction simply opens up the airways.”
James Clear on how the wrong environment handicaps potential:
“You can be authentic and hardworking and still struggle to find your footing if you’re in the wrong environment.
- A fun person trapped in the wrong city
- A loving partner in a relationship that won’t reciprocate
- A great entrepreneur stuck in the wrong business
Think about your placement as much as your performance. Plant yourself where you can thrive.
Maya Shanker on how change changes us:
"When we’re daunted at the outset of a change, there is some comfort in knowing that the person who will undergo the full experience will be different from the person we are in this very moment. We will become new people on the other side of change, in ways we are capable of shaping.”
Marcus Aurelius on over-valuing the opinions of others:
“It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people but care more about their opinions than our own.”
Oliver Burkeman on the value of loosing our grip on life:
“Unclenching into life demands that we relax in the midst of uncertainty and insecurity, because ‘in the midst of uncertainty and security’ is where we always are. The reward is the aliveness, agency, and sense of purchase on life that comes from no longer pretending otherwise.”
Did you enjoy this style? Let me know!
Didn’t care for it? I want to hear that too.
Thanks for reading. See you next week.
PW