the Ripening

Notes & Quotes: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman & Ralph Leighton

The following are my favorite quotes from Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character.

When a person has been negative to you, and then you do something [nice] like that, they’re usually a hundred percent the other way, kind of to compensate.
Once I get on a puzzle, I can’t get off. If my mother’s friend had said, “Never mind, it’s too much work,” I’d have blown my top, because I want to beat this damn thing, as long as I’ve gone this far. I can’t just leave it after I’ve found out so much about it. I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end.
“What a contrast—the person sitting at the table gets this nice cake on a doilied plate, while the pantry man back there with the stubby thumbs is saying, ‘Damn deez doilies!’” So that was the difference between the real world and what it looked like.
I tried to explain—it was my own aunt—that there was no reason not to do that, but you can’t say that to anybody who’s smart, who runs a hotel! I learned there that innovation is a very difficult thing in the real world.
It was not so easy to recognize it as fake Italian. Once, when I was at Princeton, as I was going into the parking lot at Palmer Laboratory on my bicycle, somebody got in the way. My habit was always the same: I gesture to the guy, “oREzze caBONca MIche!”, slapping the back of one hand against the other. And way up on the other side of a long area of grass, there’s an Italian gardner putting in some plants. He stops, waves, and shouts happily, “REzza ma LIa!” I call back, “RONte BALta!”, returning the greeting. He didn’t know I didn’t know, and I didn’t know what he said, and he didn’t know what I said. But it was OK! It was great! It works! After all, when they hear the intonation, they recognize it immediately as Italian—maybe it’s Milano instead of Romano, what the hell. But he’s an iTALian! So it’s just great. But you have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing will happen.
“I could do that, but I won’t”—which is just another way of saying that you can’t.
They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
We were there at the right place, we were doing the right things, but I was doing things as an amateur—stupid and sloppy.
So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everybody else’s, and they had tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.
So my boys really came through, and all that had to be done was to tell them what it was. As a result, although it took them nine months to do three problems before, we did nine problems in three months.
I was always dumb in that way. I never knew who I was talking to. I was always worried about the physics. If the idea looked lousy, I said it looked lousy. If it looked good, I said it looked good. Simple proposition. I’ve always lived that way. It’s nice, it’s pleasant—if you can do it. I’m lucky in my life that I can do this.
After the thing went off, there was tremendous excitement at Los Alamos. Everybody had parties, we all ran around. I sat on the end of a jeep and beat drums and so on. But one man, I remember, Bob Wilson, was just sitting there moping.
I said, “What are you moping about?” He said, “It’s a terrible thing that we made.” I said, “But you started it. You got us into it.” You see, what happened to me—what happened to the rest of us—is we started for a good reason, then you’re working very hard to accomplish something and it’s a pleasure, it’s excitement. And you stop thinking, you know; you just stop. Bob Wilson was the only one who was still thinking about it, at that moment.
When I got back to my office I would write the two numbers down on a piece of paper that I kept inside the lock of my filing cabinet. I took the lock apart each time to get the paper—I thought that was a very safe place for them.
You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.
The whole principle is this: The guy wants to be a gentleman. He doesn’t want to be thought of as impolite, crude, or especially a cheapskate. As long as the girl knows the guy’s motives so well, it’s easy to steer him in the direction she wants him to go.
“Don’t you know how to square numbers near 50?” he says. “You square 50—that’s 2500—and subtract 100 times the difference of your number from 50 (in this case it’s 2), so you have 2300. If you want the correction, square the difference and add it on. That makes 2304.” - Hans Bethe
One day I was absent-mindedly playing with one of those measuring tapes that snap back into your hand when you push a button. The tape would always slap over and hit my hand, and it hurt a little bit. “Geez!” I exclaimed. “What a dope I am. I keep playing with this thing, and it hurts me every time.” He [Paul Olum] said, “You don’t hold it right,” and took the damn thing, pulled out the tape, pushed the button, and it came right back. No hurt. “Wow! How do you do that?” I exclaimed. “Figure it out!” For the next two weeks I’m walking all around Princeton, snapping this tape back until my hand is absolutely raw. Finally I can’t take it any longer. “Paul! I give up! How the hell do you hold it so it doesn’t hurt?” “Who says it doesn’t hurt? It hurts me too!” I felt so stupid. He had gotten me to go around and hurt my hand for two weeks!
The harder the problem, the better chance I had.
First, they [Brazilians] weren’t in the same hurry that I was. And second, if it’s better for you, never mind!
I started to walk into the bar, and I suddenly thought to myself, “Wait a minute! It’s the middle of the afternoon. There’s nobody here. There’s no social reason to drink. Why do you have such a terribly strong feeling that you have to have a drink?”—and I got scared. I never drank ever again, since then.
I had succeeded. I got a kick out of succeeding at something I wasn’t supposed to be able to do.
I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant.
I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would always be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again—I had the solution to that problem.
I never pay any attention to anything by “experts.” I calculate everything myself.
I like to please the people who come to hear me, and I can’t do it if everybody and his brother wants to hear: I don’t know my audience then.
These people who copy things never have the courage to make up something really different. If you find something that is really new, it’s got to have something different. A real hoax would be to take something like the period of Mars, invent a mythology to go with it, and then draw pictures associated with this mythology with numbers appropriate to Mars—not in an obvious fashion; rather, have tables of multiples of the period with some mysterious “errors,” and so on. The numbers should have to be worked out a little bit. Then people would say, “Geez! This has to do with Mars!” In addition, there should be a number of things in it that are not understandable, and are not exactly like what has been seen before. That would make a good fake.
A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way—or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one.
We really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science.
If you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
The idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

If you liked the quotes, read the book!

Notes & Quotes: Tribe by Sebastian Junger

The following are my favorite quotes from Sebastian Junger's Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging.

He’d been generous, yes, but lots of people are generous; what made him different was the fact that he’d taken responsibility for me. He’d spotted me from town and walked half a mile out a highway to make sure I was okay.
Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.
A surprising number of Americans—mostly men—wound up joining Indian society rather than staying in their own. They emulated Indians, married them, were adopted by them, and on some occasions even fought alongside them. And the opposite almost never happened: Indians almost never ran away to join white society.
The intensely communal nature of an Indian tribe held an appeal that the material benefits of Western civilization couldn’t necessarily compete with.
As societies become more affluent they tend to require more, rather than less, time and commitment by the individual, and it’s possible that many people feel that affluence and safety simply aren’t a good trade for freedom.
Numerous cross-cultural studies have shown that modern society—despite its nearly miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology—is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, anxiety, and chronic loneliness in human history.
The mechanism seems simple: poor people are forced to share their time and resources more than wealthy people are, and as a result they live in closer communities.
Self-determination theory holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered “intrinsic” to human happiness and far outweigh “extrinsic” values such as beauty, money, and status.
The more assimilated a person is into American society, the more likely they are to develop depression during the course of their lifetime, regardless of what ethnicity they are. Mexicans born in the United States are wealthier than Mexicans born in Mexico but far more likely to suffer from depression.
[According to] a study in the Journal of Affective Disorders concluded in 2012. “In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.”
Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance.
Humans are primates—we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees—and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them.
As modern society reduced the role of community, it simultaneously elevated the role of authority. The two are uneasy companions, and as one goes up, the other tends to go down.
Christopher Boehm points out that among current-day foraging groups, group execution is one of the most common ways of punishing males who try to claim a disproportionate amount of the group’s resources.
All told, combined public- and private-sector fraud costs every household in the United States probably around $5,000 a year—or roughly the equivalent of working four months at a minimum-wage job.
Total costs for the recession have been estimated to be as high as $14 trillion—or about $45,000 per citizen. Most tribal and subsistence-level societies would inflict severe punishments on anyone who caused that kind of damage.
Dishonest bankers and welfare or insurance cheats are the modern equivalent of tribe members who quietly steal more than their fair share of meat or other resources.
Among hunter-gatherers, bullying males are often faced down by coalitions of other senior males, but that rarely happens in modern society.
In hunter-gatherer terms, these senior executives are claiming a disproportionate amount of food simply because they have the power to do so.
The political origins of the United States lay in confronting precisely this kind of resource seizure by people in power.
War inspires ancient human virtues of courage, loyalty, and selflessness that can be utterly intoxicating to the people who experience them.
Because modern society often fights wars far away from the civilian population, soldiers wind up being the only people who have to switch back and forth.
Combat veterans are, statistically, no more likely to kill themselves than veterans who were never under fire.
The much-discussed estimate of twenty-two vets a day committing suicide in the United States is deceptive: it was only in 2008 that—for the first time in decades—the suicide rate among veterans surpassed the civilian rate in America, and though each death is enormously tragic, the majority of those veterans were over the age of fifty.
A modern soldier returning from combat goes from the kind of close-knit group that humans evolved for, back into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good.
“We are not good to each other. Our tribalism is to an extremely narrow group of people: our children, our spouse, maybe our parents. Our society is alienating, technical, cold, and mystifying. Our fundamental desire, as human beings, is to be close to others, and our society does not allow for that.” - Sharon Abramowitz
America’s great wealth, although a blessing in many ways, has allowed for the growth of an individualistic society that suffers high rates of depression and anxiety. Both are correlated with chronic PTSD.
Resources are not shared equally, a quarter of children live in poverty, jobs are hard to get, and minimum wage is almost impossible to live on. Instead of being able to work and contribute to society—a highly therapeutic thing to do—a large percentage of veterans are just offered lifelong disability payments. And they accept, of course—why shouldn’t they? A society that doesn’t distinguish between degrees of trauma can’t expect its warriors to, either.
What I liked about the encounter was that it showed how very close the energy of male conflict and male closeness can be. It’s almost as if they are two facets of the same quality; just change a few details and instead of heading toward collision, the men head toward unity. There seemed to be a great human potential out there, organized around the idea of belonging, and the trick was to convince people that their interests had more in common than they had in conflict.
The poorest people in modern society enjoy a level of physical comfort that was unimaginable a thousand years ago, and the wealthiest people literally live the way gods were imagined to have.
The earliest and most basic definition of community—of tribe—would be the group of people that you would both help feed and help defend.
Soldiers experience this tribal way of thinking at war, but when they come home they realize that the tribe they were actually fighting for wasn’t their country, it was their unit. It makes absolutely no sense to make sacrifices for a group that, itself, isn’t willing to make sacrifices for you. That is the position American soldiers have been in for the past decade and a half.
The public is often accused of being disconnected from its military, but frankly it’s disconnected from just about everything. Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction—all the industries that keep the nation going are mostly unacknowledged by the people who depend on them most.
When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don’t see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you’re walking around in. And when you fraudulently claim money from the government, you are ultimately stealing from your friends, family, and neighbors—or somebody else’s friends, family, and neighbors. That diminishes you morally far more than it diminishes your country financially.
One way to determine what is missing in day-to-day American life may be to examine what behaviors spontaneously arise when that life is disrupted.
It’s hard to know how to live for a country that regularly tears itself apart along every possible ethnic and demographic boundary. The income gap between rich and poor continues to widen, many people live in racially segregated communities, the elderly are mostly sequestered from public life, and rampage shootings happen so regularly that they only remain in the news cycle for a day or two.
The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs—and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought—will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.
The ultimate betrayal of tribe isn’t acting competitively—that should be encouraged—but predicating your power on the excommunication of others from the group.
For nearly a century, the national suicide rate has almost exactly mirrored the unemployment rate, and after the financial collapse, America’s suicide rate increased by nearly 5 percent. In an article published in 2012 in The Lancet, epidemiologists who study suicide estimated that the recession cost almost 5,000 additional American lives during the first two years—disproportionately among middle-aged white men. That is close to the nation’s losses in the Iraq and Afghan wars combined. If Sergeant Bergdahl betrayed his country—and that’s not a hard case to make—surely the bankers and traders who caused the financial collapse did as well. And yet they didn’t provoke nearly the kind of outcry that Bergdahl did. Not a single high-level CEO has even been charged in connection with the financial collapse, much less been convicted and sent to prison, and most of them went on to receive huge year-end bonuses. Joseph Cassano of AIG Financial Products—known as “Mr. Credit-Default Swap”—led a unit that required a $99 billion bailout while simultaneously distributing $1.5 billion in year-end bonuses to his employees—including $34 million to himself. Robert Rubin of Citibank received a $10 million bonus in 2008 while serving on the board of directors of a company that required $63 billion in federal funds to keep from failing. Lower down the pay scale, more than 5,000 Wall Street traders received bonuses of $1 million or more despite working for nine of the financial firms that received the most bailout money from the US government.
True leadership—the kind that lives depend on—may require powerful people to put themselves last.

Notes & Quotes: Business for Punks by James Watt

The following are my favorite quotes from James Watt's Business for Punks: Break All the Rules -- the BrewDog Way.

At BrewDog we reject the status quo, we are passionate, we don’t give a damn and we always do something which is true to ourselves. Our approach has been anti-authoritarian and non-conformist from the word go.
Ultimately for a crew to be effective leadership needs to come from the top down, the bottom up and everywhere in between.
Michael Jackson led to Martin and I deciding to take the plunge, follow our dreams and start our very own craft brewery. Michael, upon tasting one of our home-brewed concoctions, told us to quit our jobs and start brewing beer. It was the last bit of advice we ever listened to.
Rip up those stuffy old text books, reject the status quo, tear down the establishment and embrace the dawn of a new era.
The decisions you make during your business’s formative months will define your place in the world. They will be the most monumental decisions you will ever make, shaping your fledgling business in ways you cannot yet imagine. So you’d better buckle up, hold tight and step up to the challenge. You will need to make sure your ideas, and their realization, are nothing short of awesome.
Businesses fail. Businesses die. Businesses fade into oblivion. Revolutions never die. So start a revolution, not a business.
Your biggest challenge from day one is to give people a reason to care, and that reason has got to be your mission.
The market for something to believe in is infinite. You need to give people something to believe in.
If money is your motivation then you need to be the greediest, meanest son of a bitch on the planet to make a business work. Solely money-focused businesses do exist, but I don’t like being around them or their people.
Assume no one will care, assume no one will give a damn, assume no one will want to listen. Then figure out how to make people want to care about what you do. If you can’t, then your business is doomed.
Twenty-first-century consumers increasingly want to align themselves with companies and organizations whose missions and beliefs are compatible with, and enhance, their own belief systems.
Advice is for freaks and clowns. The thing about being driven is you need to know your own way.
The only thing you learn from mistakes is that you are not good enough and that you need to get better.
Don't follow when you can lead.
Be a selfish bastard. Seriously, you have to be. If you’re not 110% up for it, no one else is going to give a damn. So dance to your own tune and do it your way. Make crafted products you love, create environments you want to hang out in and give the kind of service you’d love to receive yourself.
Choose a business partner as wisely as you would choose a spouse.
The power of any brand is inversely proportional to its scope.
Planning is merely glorified guesswork. Long-term planning is a vain, self-indulgent fantasy. Don’t waste your time.
Act, don't plan.
Constraints are just advantages in disguise and opportunities to be innovative and imaginative. Cherish constraints. Embrace them.
Be very wary of external agencies and partners. They all speak a good game and promise the earth but at the end of the day they have no reason to care as much as you.
Living the punk DIY ethic means not relying on existing systems, processes or advisers as this would foster dependence on the system.
You need to be an independent, an outsider, a nomad, a libertine. You need to be completely self-sufficient and not rely on anyone for anything. If a skill set is important to your business, then you better learn it and learn it fast.
You need to create pull to be sustainable. And you don’t create pull through sales.
Everything you do is sales and all of your employees are selling all the time. Act accordingly.
Pretty much all you need to do for people to hate you is to be successful doing something that you love.
When you manage to get the Holy Grail of other businesses copying you, whilst others are hating you, you know you have hit a home run.
Eighty per cent of all new businesses fail. And they always fail for financial reasons. The more you understand the numbers the less likely they are to crush you and your dreams.
Comfort zones are places where average people do mediocre things. If you are even the tiniest bit comfortable then you need to push harder.
The lifeblood of your business is cash. If you can’t manage a cash flow, then you can’t run a business.
Spend every last dime as if it actually was your last and ensure that your team spend every single cent as if it were their own.
It was about empowering the change-makers, the misfits, the libertines, the community, the frustrated, the independents, the punks. Together we can, and will, change anything.
There is a huge difference between making a sale and actually being paid for that sale.
If you price down you down-sell everything, and there’s no going back.
You need to defend your price point like a junkyard Rottweiler.
The best way to decide how to allocate your cash and resources is to fully comprehend the opportunity-cost implications of every possible decision you could make in any situation.
Everything you and your business does is marketing. Modern brands don’t belong to companies, they belong to the customer.
Anything that you do, anywhere in your business, which is not completely aligned with your mission and your values is like a tiny little suicide.
Today the only way to build a brand is to live that brand. People want to feel like they are buying into something bigger than themselves. Your brand must give them that opportunity.
For a stunt to really work then it needs to be intrinsically linked to your mission and you already need to have a really strong following and a credible brand.
Whatever type of business you are in you need to start building a community and start turning customers into fans.
The biggest mistake you can make is actually caring what people think. To hell with opinions, conventions and consequences. It is all just a game.
We hate bad beer so much that we are on a permanent campaign to destroy as much of it as we possibly can.
Chasing someone else’s perception of cool is one of the stupidest mistakes it is possible to make.
Having a target market and explicitly marketing to them is a sure-fire way to patronize and alienate pretty much all of the intelligent population.
There are only three very simple things you need to know about sales.

Focus on the product.
Be open and honest.
Don't compete on price.

Sales are merely the by-product of being great elsewhere.
If you can’t get your staff to fall in love with your business, you haven’t got a chance in hell of a customer to even consider liking it.
Any great business today is built on these simple yet enduring and all encapsulating pillars. The three pillars are:

Company culture
The quality of your core offering
Gross margin

Studies show that employees working in a company with a strong company culture are more than twice as effective as employees working in a company with a weak culture.
The things that apply to your business externally are just as important, if not even more so, inside it.
People mimic the behavior and beliefs of their leaders so make sure that you, and the people leading your business, live and breathe the behavior you want to perpetuate.
It isn’t enough for people to know what their business is doing. They have to know why it is doing it.
Companies need to wise up and max out. Smart companies realize, rather than minimizing wages, it is infinitely more productive and profitable in the long term to look to maximize engagement, loyalty, retention and productivity.
Culture has to be a priority from the get-go and it has to start with the founders and then flow from the early employees.
Working on your company culture is actually a much more effective form of marketing than pretty much all traditional marketing mediums combined. Culture is marketing. Culture is brand. Culture now resonates much more with consumers than advertising does.
We have two simple rules for hiring:

They have to be as passionate about our mission as we are.
They have to be the right cultural fit.

If you want your team to really rumble you’ll need to recognize their efforts. Explicitly and frequently. Leave your heartfelt praise and encouragement ringing in their ears and the impact can be off the charts.
Unless you add amazing people to your team, you are going to spend a hell of a lot of time trying to get average people to consistently make great decisions.
Teams tend to operate at, or close to, the ability level of the weakest team member.
Whatever happens, good, bad or ugly, it is a direct consequence of your leadership.
Leaders are rare inspirational beings. Managers are ten a penny; the world is full of adequately competent middle managers trapped in corporate hell.
Work harder, think smarter and focus with laser-like efficiency.
At BrewDog we have a fifty-fifty rule for our five directors. I and the other four people who lead our business are only allowed to spend half of our time working on the day-to-day operations of the company, on solving current challenges and dealing with existing issues and we have to spend at least half of our time working on ways to improve, grow and develop our business, on ways to drive us towards our next phase of growth.
Look for inspiration everywhere. The only place you should never look is within your own industry. Screw what all the other clowns are doing. Ignore it, blank it out; it is of no relevance or significance whatsoever.
Comfort zones are places where average people do mediocre things.
You will not always get it right. But every time you move, every time you make a bold decision, it will take you one step closer to finding the path you are searching for.
Your actions will determine your destiny.
The more action you take, the more opportunities open themselves up to you.
Your team should be governed by your values and your culture and not by policies and rules.
Keep the team as well informed as possible so they can buy into the excitement of what the business is both planning and currently achieving, both of which act as a great motivator.
Put systems in place before, as opposed to after, they are needed and put an infrastructure in place for where you want to be in two years’ time.
Write down your five biggest problems, sit down in a room with your team, and solve them. Then on to the next five.
Attitude is the difference between a setback and an adventure.
So whilst the fools, rats and wannabes are massaging each other’s egos you need to be plotting your revenge. Not on them specifically, but on the system that bred such morons. You need to be quietly planning how to blow the status quo to pieces and create a whole new world order.
You should always imagine the communication from the other party’s perspective. Put thought into what you say and how you say it.
Don’t shout too often, so that you can make sure it truly counts when you want to roar.
It is paramount you track at least ten of the most important performance indicators of your business monthly.
When it comes to your management accounts you should definitely be tracking sales, cost of sales, overheads, gross margin, EBITDA and net margin. You will also need to monitor items on your balance sheet at regular and short intervals, such as debtors, creditors and, most importantly, your cash position. In addition you should track certain other KPIs (key performance indicators), depending on what is important in your business and your current focus. For instance, you should consider tracking things like: average spend per transaction, staff turnover, customer complaints, referrals, shipment accuracy, sales mix, refunds, wastage, sales growth, additional customers, online engagement or staff happiness (to name but a few). In determining which items you need to keep close tabs on it really depends on your business and your objectives.
No measurement = no reporting = no visibility = no one cares = your ultimate demise.
Always do your negotiation homework. Find out about the other party, what makes them tick, their likes and dislikes. Ultimately think about what’s in it for them. Then build your argument around how the deal helps them, because at the end of the day they care much more about what is in their interests than yours.
Find a solution, structure and deal they feel comfortable with, and positive about. But one that is ultimately engineered around what you want.
You need to provide the vision, strategy and tools to help your team achieve your goals.
Whatever goals you’ve set, you should have a list of pint-sized systems, things which you rigorously adhere to without fail, that if consistently applied will help ensure you both achieve your goals and strengthen your brand and company in the long run too.
Committees are breeding grounds for compromise as the tyranny of conformity rules the roost. Conformity is no place for risk and compromise is no place for innovation.
Individual vision is always the force behind truly remarkable ideas and concepts.

There you have it! If you enjoyed the quotes then I recommend that you give it a read for yourself!