The person who is good at disagreement

The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

[Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person, by Alain de Botton, New York Times]

Research paper introduction

The introduction of a (computer science) research paper should answer the following questions:

• What is the problem
• Why is it important
• Why is it hard
• Why hasn't it been solved already
• What is our solution

[according to Jennifer Widom]

Search inside yourself

"There is an old Chinese Zen saying: "The small [meditation] retreat is in the wilderness, the medium retreat is in the city, and the great retreat is in the emperor’s court." Like most Zen sayings, this one is both absurd and true. All the emotional skills you learn are useless if they cannot be applied in the real world, including a setting as seductive and dangerous as the emperor’s court. Conversely, the real world is the best place to sharpen your emotional skills.

The real world is both your dojo and your zendo, from which you will get your mojo. Yo?"

[Search inside yourself, by Chade-Meng Tan]

Exhaustion is not a status symbol and productivity is not a metric of our worth.

One of the things that I found was the importance of rest and play, and the willingness to let go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth.

We don’t know who we are without productivity as a metric of our worth. We don’t know what we enjoy, and we lose track of how tired we are.

What struck me the most is the fact that so few managers and supervisors and teachers and leaders get any instruction on how to give feedback. When I interview H.R. people who spend their days doing exit interviews, over and over the most common criticism they hear [from people leaving their jobs] is, “I never got any feedback.”

I think to create a feedback culture where discomfort is normalized — where there are going to be some uncomfortable conversations but they’re going to be done respectfully and wholeheartedly, with the aim to move the mission of our work forward and to move your personal goals forward — that is the heart of engagement. People felt fundamentally ignored because they weren’t receiving feedback. And when they did, it was corrective. It was fast and not meaningful, and it was blaming.

In the end, people just want to be seen and heard and valued. And they want to be inspired by leaders who engage in the behaviors they ask everyone to engage in. I think it’s that simple and that complicated.

[from here]

Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.

[Winston Churchill]

I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.

[East of Eden, John Steinbeck]

Western culture clothing

"A lesson about Western culture: Women who wanted to be taken seriously were supposed to substantiate their seriousness with a studied indifference to appearance. For serious women writers in particular, it was better not to dress well at all, and if you did, then it was best to pretend that you had not put much thought into it. If you spoke of fashion, it had to be either with apology or with the slightest of sneers. The further your choices were from the mainstream, the better. The only circumstance under which caring about clothes was acceptable was when making a statement, creating an image of some sort to be edgy, eclectic, counterculture. It could not merely be about taking pleasure in clothes.

A good publisher had bought my novel. I was 26 years old. I was eager to be taken seriously. And so began my years of pretense. I hid my high heels. I told myself that orange, flattering to my skin tone, was too loud. That my large earrings were too much. I wore clothes I would ordinarily consider uninteresting, nothing too bright or too fitted or too unusual. I made choices thinking only about this: How should a serious woman writer be? [...]

An old friend said, “Wear what you want to; it’s your work that matters.” But he was a man, and I thought that was easy for him to say. Intellectually, I agreed with him. I would have said the same thing to someone else. But it took years before I truly began to believe this.

I am now 36 years old. During my most recent book tour, I wore, for the first time, clothes that made me happy. My favorite outfit was a pair of ankara-print shorts, a damask top, and yellow high-heel shoes. Perhaps it is the confidence that comes with being older. Perhaps it is the good fortune of being published and read seriously, but I no longer pretend not to care about clothes. Because I do care. "

[Why can't a smart woman love fashion?, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Elle Magazine]

The modern sense of comfort

Notions like taste and practical chic are way too complex to sell today, when much of the world’s population is consumed with either acquisition or basic survival. For that reason it’s tough to talk about comfort and a moral economy of style without sounding grim or like one is trying to promote a car with three wheels (hey, but it drives!). On the other hand, this idea is not so far from something Coco Chanel offered when she arrived in New York, in March 1931. Asked by a reporter to define the fashionable woman, Chanel said, “She dresses well but not remarkably. . . . She disobeys fashion.” Then, perhaps thinking of her rival Elsa Schiaparelli, Chanel added, “But she is not eccentric. I hate eccentricity.” So she was extolling understatement and ease, yes, but also suggesting these choices reflected virtues like self-control and seriousness.

[Sign of the Times | Slave No More, by Cathy Horyn, New York Times]

Este greu sa taci cand nu ai nimic de spus.

Paradox.
[Jurnalul fericirii, de Nicolae Steinhardt]

Prima datorie a crestinului este de a fi fericit.

[Jurnalul fericirii, de Nicolae Steinhardt]

--
Daca pana si crestinul are propria fericire ca prima datorie, nu vad de ce noi, restul paganilor, ne-am concentra pe altceva... :-)

Nicolae Steinhardt

Oscar Steinhardt catre Nicolae Steinhardt:

"E adevărat, zise tata, că vei avea zile foarte grele. Dar nopţile le vei avea liniştite – trebuie să repet ce mi-a spus, trebuie; de nu, m-ar bate Dumnezeu , vei dormi bine. Pe când dacă accepţi să fii martor al acuzării, vei avea, ce-i drept, zile destul de bune, dar nopţile vor fi îngrozitoare. N-o să mai poţi închide un ochi. O să trebuiască să trăieşti numai cu somnifere şi calmante; abrutizat şi moţăind ziua toată, iar noaptea chinuitor de treaz. O să te perpeleşti ca un nebun. Cată-ţi de treabă. Hai, nu mai ezita. Trebuie să faci închisoare. Mi se rupe şi mie inima, dar n-ai încotro. De altfel, chiar dacă apari acum ca martor al acuzării, nu fi prost, după şase luni tot te ia. E sigur."

"Ţi-au spus să nu mă laşi să mor ca un câine? Ei bine, dacă-i vorba aşa, n-am să mor deloc. Te aştept. Şi vezi să nu mă faci de râs, zice. Să nu fii jidan fricos şi să nu te caci în pantaloni."

[de aici]

L'adultère, c'est comme les cadeaux, c'est l'intention qui compte.

[Pascal Thomas]

__
...quite insightful! :)

I do

"We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit."
[Aristotle]

In life, we are defined by what we do.

Sunt tristă, dar de tine niciodată...

[Leac pentru îngeri, Constanţa Buzea]

...if you only walk long enough!

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh you can't help that," said the Cat "We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
"Would you tell me please which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where --" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
" — so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat "if you only walk long enough."

[Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll]

There is nothing a German officer cannot do!

Colonel Manfred von Holstein:   There is nothing a German officer cannot do.
Captain Rumpelstoss:   But... how will I learn to fly, Herr Colonel?
Col. Manfred von Holstein:   The way we do everything in the German army: From the book of instructions.
[Reading from flight instruction manual]
Col. Manfred von Holstein:   Step one: sit down...

[Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes - 1965]

Good artists borrow, Great artists steal

[Pablo Picasso]

__
...not that I appreciate copying or stealing, but because I so understand the blank page syndrome.
And if artistic creation flourishes from nothing, I wonder why we waited so many centuries to reach the artistic/ scientific/ development point where we are today.

Nothing good gets away

Back in 1958, ❤ John Steinbeck ❤, got a letter from his son Thom, in which he was confessing having fallen in love with a girl, Susan. Steinbeck replied the same day, writing him a wise and wonderful letter...

Le plaisir de l'habitude est souvent plus doux encore que celui de la nouveauté

[Marcel Proust]

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

[Leonardo da Vinci]