Making the uncommon, Commonplace

What's inspirational, motivational, or challenging to you?

Long ago I got into this habit of collecting quotes that resonated with me in a notebook (used to be Moleskins, then the Leuchtturm1917 and now the Mnemosyne). It wasn’t until I got to grad school that I found out there was a name for what I was making - a commonplace book. According to this article in the NYT, “Commonplace books are hardly new. In the Renaissance, readers started transcribing classical fragments in notebooks, bringing ancient writings into conversation with their own lives.” Further on, this quote from The Atlantic really nails it for me: “Its goal was to gather a collection of the wisest statements, usually of the ancients, for future meditation. And here the key thing was to write the words in your own hand -- by this means, by laboriously and carefully copying out the insights of people smarter than you, you could absorb and internalize their wisdom.” That’s what I’m thinking about.

I can hear you out there now, wondering what all this has to do with learning and innovation. Fair question. The answer for me is personal - quotes, lyrics, even book passages - serve as milestones for me - sign posts that are temporal (they remind of what I thinking when) and interestingly, seeing which ones are timeless.

So here’s this little experiment. This may not be copying these quotes by hand but I wanted to start collecting and sharing these and seeing if others would like to add the quotes, lyrics, or passages they found meaningful, insightful or inspirational and maybe a little bit about why. I’ll keep adding to this post and I honestly hope you will too.

I’m also still enough of an academic to try as hard as I can to include sources or a citation. I think Abraham Lincoln said that it’s important to cite sources on the Internet. A final note that will horrify some, it’s ok to write in the margins. Here’s a whole book about it (Annotation: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series).

---

“We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition” ― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition **This is one of my favs. I think it gets to the gap between how fast things are moving and how slowly our organizational structures are able to respond.

---

“The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.” ― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition **Another fav - as a historian, it feels like it puts our work in context.

---

Arthur C. Clarke’s Three Laws:

• When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

• The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

**No secret that I’m a geek. I grew up on hard science fiction (and of course, LOTR) and ACC just distills so many lessons into these laws.

---

“If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others" —Philip K. Dick, 1977, The Metz Speech **I have this as a print hanging next to my desk. I’m pretty sure PKD was from another universe.

---

“One is not unoccupied because one is absorbed. There is visible labor and invisible labor. To contemplate is to labor, to think is to act. Folded arms toil, clasped hands work. A gaze fixed on heaven is a work.” —Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, Chapter VIII. Faith, Law **All-time, Hall of Fame, 100% Classic - this is knowledge work.

---

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” —John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra , 1911, page 110 **John Muir is a hero. Almost single-handedly responsible for the creation of the national parks in the U.S.

---

“Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.” —John Muir's marginal note in volume I of Prose Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson (super appropriate for this post :-)) **Hiking is my personal favorite form of therapy.

---

“The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” —Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs **I mean you have to include something from THE Gonzo journalist and this gets to that spirit of foresight and innovation.

---

“Believing with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning,” —Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures **Geertz is a fav anthropologist of mine and this gets close to how I feel about culture and I why I think so many people get it wrong when talking about organizational culture.

---

“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism **I mean what can you say about Arendt? Nails it.

---

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” —Isaac Asimov, 1980, Newsweek **See prior note about being a geek. Asimov is probably my fav scifi author of all-time. He wrote or edited over 500 fiction and non-fiction books. And this quote is a bullseye.

---

“The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.” —Marshall McLuhan, Mademoiselle: the magazine for the smart young woman, Volume 64, 1966, p. 114 **I love the joke about ‘I don’t know who invented water, but I bet it wasn’t fish.’ I love this warning from McLuhan about our temporal blindness to our present.

---

“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” ― Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene **Haraway is a genius and her Cyborg Manifesto had a huge impact on how I think about the confluence of human and machine.

---

“I don’t have inspiration, I only have ideas. Ideas and deadlines.” —Stan Lee to the Washington Post, 2011 **I was lucky enough to be in the right place at he right time to be able sit around a table with Stan Lee and talk to him for about an hour. He came up in a hard industry at a hard time and wow, could you feel this quote coming off of him.

---

“Jack of all trades and master of none, often times better than the master of one.” —Author unknown but good research here **Love this full quote - kinda describes me. See also Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by Epstein.

---

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” —Roy Amara, this is also known as Amara’s Law - Amara was a past president of the Institute for the Future.

---

“As regards the other subject, the Relation of the Artistic Life to Conduct, it will no doubt seem strange to you that I should select it. People point to Reading Gaol and say, ‘That is where the artistic life leads a man.’ Well, it might lead to worse places. The more mechanical people to whom life is a shrewd speculation depending on a careful calculation of ways and means, always know where they are going, and go there. They start with the ideal desire of being the parish beadle, and in whatever sphere they are placed they succeed in being the parish beadle and no more. A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it.

But with the dynamic forces of life, and those in whom those dynamic forces become incarnate, it is different. People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going. They can’t know. In one sense of the word it is of course necessary, as the Greek oracle said, to know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge. But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul? When the son went out to look for his father’s asses, he did not know that a man of God was waiting for him with the very chrism of coronation, and that his own soul was already the soul of a king.” —Oscar Wilde. De Profundis