Denis Felipe

“It is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong’,”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“It’s quite sufficient a challenge to seek to follow what the philosopher Iddo Landau calls the ‘reverse golden rule’ – that is, not treating yourself in punishing and poisonous ways in which you’d never dream of treating someone else. Can you imagine berating a friend in the manner that many of us deem it acceptable to screech internally at ourselves, all day long? Adam Phillips is exactly right: were you to meet such a person at a party, they’d immediately strike you as obviously unbalanced. You might try to get them to leave, and possibly also seek help. It might occur to you that they must be damaged – that in Phillips’s words ‘something terrible’ must have happened to them – for them to think it appropriate to act that way.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts

“Treating what you do with your time as a sequence of tiny completions means falling into line with how things really are. ‘Work is done, then forgotten,’ says the Tao Te Ching. ‘Therefore it lasts forever.’ You’re no longer fighting the current, but letting it carry you forward. Life is less effort that way.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts

“Nature spends a great deal of resources on what might be called ‘perception hacking’ or, in business terminology, marketing. Berries and fruits that want to be eaten develop a distinctive colouration and an attractive taste when they ripen. By contrast, caterpillars that don’t want to be eaten have evolved to taste disgusting to their predators. And some butterflies produce what look like eyes on their wings because many animals react more cautiously in their presence. Such are examples of how nature is able to hack perception rather than changing reality.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life