“I try to analyze a real situation in its various complexities, with the goal of allowing refusal, and curiosity, and innovation.”— Michel Foucault, michaelbess.org
“I really want to clear my life so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community.”— Mark Zuckerberg, telegraph.co.uk
“Toolkit for clear thinking: Start with the end goal in mind. Think from the perspective of the other person.”— Carl Pei, twitter.com
“All human errors stem from impatience, a premature breaking off of a methodical approach.”— Franz Kafka, amazon.com
“Mr. Emanuel, who is now the mayor of Chicago but remains close to the president Obama, said he and Obama once imagined moving to Hawaii to open a T-shirt shack that sold only one size (medium) and one color (white). Their dream was that they would no longer have to make decisions. During difficult W…”— Michael D. Shear, nytimes.com
“Pick up a book on a topic you know next to nothing about. Put yourself in rooms where you’re the least knowledgeable person. That uncomfortable feeling, that defensiveness that you feel when your most deeply held assumptions are challenged— what about subjecting yourself to it deliberately? Change y…”— Ryan Holiday, amazon.com
“Every time you sit down to work, remind yourself: I am delaying gratification by doing this. I am passing the marshmallow test. I am earning what my ambition burns for. I am making an investment in myself instead of in my ego. Give yourself a little credit for this choice, but not so much, because y…”— Ryan Holiday, amazon.com
“Maybe once or twice a year I'll just take a few days off and wander around and ask myself, if I were starting from scratch today, and I weren't running Facebook, what would I build? I look at this mobile trend in light of the law of sharing, our equivalent of Moore's law, which states that the avera…”— Mark Zuckerberg, wired.com
“A famous sonnet by William Wordsworth begins, 'Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room; / And hermits are contented with their cells; / and students with their pensive citadels.' Wordsworth's point is that what nuns, hermits, and students do is facilitated rather than hindered by the confines o…”— Stanley Fish, amazon.com
“My approach to work was influenced by my parents: find the most straightforward solution — not necessarily simple, but appropriate — and do it the best you can. Start with a good idea and go for it. I learned a certain decisiveness that a lot of people lack; I learned how to quickly scrap an idea th…”— Valentina Vignelli, amazon.com
“I'm making explorations. I don't know where they're going to take me… My writings constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of pattern recognition, rather than to use them in the traditional and ster…”— Marshall McLuhan, cs.ucdavis.edu
“I must explore and experiment. I am never satisfied with my work. I resent the limitations of my own imagination.”— Walt Disney, amazon.com
“Think beyond your lifetime, if you want to do something truly great. Make a fifty-year master plan. A fifty-year master plan will change how you look at the opportunities in the present.”— Walt Disney, amazon.com
“Sometimes, distractions can actually serve a purpose. Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, they warn us— when we feel ourselves regularly succumbing to them— that our work is not well defined, or our tasks are menial, or the whole project we're engaged in is fundamentally pointless. Instead…”— Jason Fried, amazon.com
“Why get hung up on what other people are doing if you go forward and work on what you think is best?”— Larry Page, digiday.com