“Seeing the obscure is clarity”

“In any complex effort, communicating a well-articulated vision for what you’re trying to do is the starting point for figuring out how to do it.”

“Eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”

“In seeing that you cannot control your mind, you realize there is no controller. What you took to be the thinker of thoughts is just one of the thoughts… We get into that bind because we have a grammatical rule that verbs have to have subjects… We always insist that there is this subject called the knower. And without a knower there can’t be knowing. Well that’s just a grammatical rule. It isn’t the rule of nature. In nature there’s just knowing, like you’re feeling it.”

“As each rat learned how to navigate the maze, its mental activity decreased. As the route became more and more automatic, each rat started thinking less and less… This process—in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine—is known as “chunking,” and it’s at the root of how habits form.”

“In a time of tyranny, freedom is scarce. In a time of anarchy, leadership is scarce.”

“Despite extraordinary changes in the economic, social, and political environment over the past two centuries, stocks have yielded between 6.6 and 7.2 percent per year after inflation in all major subperiods. The wiggles on the stock return line represent the bull and bear markets that equities have suffered throughout history. The long-term perspective radically changes one’s view of the risk of stocks. The short-term fluctuations in market, which loom so large to investors, have little to do with the long-term accumulation of wealth.”

“When an organ is working properly, you don’t feel it. If you see your eye, you’ve got cataract. If you hear your ears, you’ve got singing in your ears... When you are fully functioning, you are unaware of the organ. When you’re thinking clearly, your brain isn’t getting in your way.”

“Look for ways to make quick progress. Watch for project stalls. Cut corners to skip unnecessary effort. Remove distractions to focus attention where it needs to be. Start approximating your end goal as soon as possible. Maximize the impact of your most difficult effort.”

“From very early on, I felt that the moving meditation of Tai Chi Chuan has the primary martial purpose of allowing practitioners to refine certain fundamental principles … the key was to recognize that the principles making one simple technique tick were the same fundamentals that fueled the whole expansive system of Tai Chi Chuan.”

“In the early phases of software development, it’s possible to shake free of [bureaucracy] , especially when teams are small and the hunt for ideas is still on.”

“Music becomes real when you share it with people in a physical space. That's when the songs actually take shape, when you see how people interact with them, how it makes them feel in real time and that's the thing I care about the most.”

“When marriages fail, it is not increasing conflict that is the cause. It is decreasing affection and emotional responsiveness, according to a landmark study by Ted Huston of the University of Texas. Indeed, the lack of emotional responsiveness rather than the level of conflict is the best predictor of how solid a marriage will be five years into it. The demise of marriages begins with a growing absence of responsive intimate interactions. The conflict comes later.”

“As a designer for a brand, you get control of the brand equity.”

“Advertising does not present a lucid message, but in effect, offers an empty vessel to the audience. Communication is not dispatching information from one entity or person to another, but facilitating the mutual exchange of information.”

“Life is that which emerges from entropy's gravitational field. Information (meaning) emanates from the meaninglessness of chaos. From this perspective, life and information carry the same significance.”

“In a time of tyranny, freedom is scarce. In a time of anarchy, leadership is scarce.”

“To change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.”

“Say no to unnecessary perfections, don’t over-engineer where you don’t have to, but say yes to a new, interesting idea you haven’t tried before. Growth design is as much about learning quickly as it is about moving quickly”

“Color is not understood through our visual sense alone, but through all our senses.”

“We have not realized, therefore, that our environment is not something other than ourselves. In assuming that it is, we have made a great mistake and are now paying the price for it.”

“A society’s competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.”

“Desire is to own the wanting.”

“At Vogue, [Joan] learned the tight, functional economy of public prose. Her editor, Allene Talmey, would assign her to write a story in three hundred words, then, when she was finished, tell her to pare it down to fifty. 'We wrote long and published short and by doing that Joan learned to write'”

“Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentlemen of leisure. The consumption of luxuries in the true sense is a consumption directed to the comfort of the consumer himself and is therefore a mark of the master.”

“There is no love of life without the despair of life”

“You bury enough secrets, the graveyard runs out of room.”

“Our society’s obligatory compassion authorizes new forms of cruelty.”

“Ive began refashioning the icons to harmonize the phone’s digital graphics with its physical shape. They quickly addressed the detail that had always irritated Ive, getting the curve of the icons of Apple’s apps to match the physical curve of the iPhone. The corners of iOS 7 were redesigned using Bézier principles, creating a smoother, more organic bend that was used for the corner of every app… He also began looking for a thinner sans-serif typeface for every app and exploring ways to enliven the home screen with brighter colors. The subtle changes signaled a major departure from the past.”

“Deafness freed Beethoven as a composer because he no longer had society’s soundtrack in his ears…”

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

“Successful communication depends on how well we listen, rather than how well we push our opinions on the person seated before us.”

“If you want to change your behavior, change your narrative. If you want to change someone else’s behavior, offer them a more compelling narrative they can tell themselves.”

“It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.”

“Your brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”

“The whole thing just dies when you try to capture it. It’s like it happened, and then it ended, and then, that’s it.”

“'Cause when the victors rewrite history. It's just another kind of war waged after the battlefield killing is done, to murder the memory of the defeated.”

“Champions don’t do extraordinary things. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.”

“Familiarize yourself with basic principles of cognitive psychology and behavior design to create products or processes that encourage positive engagement and are naturally aligned with user behavior”

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it [a product] looks like. People think it’s this veneer—that the designers are handed this box and told, “Make it look good!” That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

“Like the movie, demos should be specifically choreographed so it’s clear what must be included and what can be left out.”

“You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.”

“In a world in which the motive force is the desire to get the jump on the next person, to reap the wealth computer technology is expected to yield, people have no time to leisurely enjoy the actual benefits and treasures already available, and in leaning so far forward in anticipation of the possibilities, they've lost their balance and are in a highly unstable situation, barely managing to stay upright as they fall forward into their next step...”

“The principle of originality at all costs leads to paralysis. The more we celebrate “creative and enriching” innovations, the fewer of them there are … For two thousand years the arts have been imitative, and it’s only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that people started refusing to be mimetic. Why? Because we’re more mimetic than ever. Rivalry plays a role such that we strive vainly to exorcize imitation.”

“What I've done is who I am, but who I am is what I do now.”

“He allowed staff to take a month after a software release to work on any project of their choosing. The policy helped birth new products for Apple, including the software design that became the impetus for a streaming video device, the Apple TV.”

“Ample incorporation of empty space removes the need for a specific bridge between foreground and background because the navigation is implicit—you can’t get lost.”

“People use new technologies in one of two ways: (1) to do something they could already do but can now do faster, cheaper, easier, or higher quality; or (2) to do something brand-new that they simply couldn’t do before.”

“'Raising kids is hard, you know? You go in and out of sync, it’s like a yo-yo. You love em but you get angry; you scare em they run away.' 'I never get scared of you.' 'I was always scared.'”

“The draft is the document documenting”

“This was part of Steve’s mission for Apple, the most significant strand of Apple’s product development DNA: to meld technology and the liberal arts, to take the latest software and hardware advances, mix them with elements of design and culture, and produce features and products that people found useful and meaningful in their everyday lives.”

“The value of mindless action depends on chance… Rather than hitting on good learning experiences randomly, we begin to select and copy specific actions. We begin to mimic… Simple as it seems, action is the cause, vehicle, and outcome of education. Perceptions, thoughts, ideas, memories, and intentions are important, but they are not the end product… they are just middlemen in the transactions of the mind. The value of action is not in what observers perceive, but in what the learner perceives about his or her own actions. Action is a test of learning, but only the learner can know the motive or the outcome of the tests.”

“Impostor syndrome vs growth mindset: believing in your ability to learn”

“Colors do not exist separately and independently within nature; they are constantly shifting in response to subtle gradations of light. It is language that, magnificently, gives them clear shape.”

“It is a paradox of our time that the path to radical progress begins with moderation. Extreme optimism and fatalistic pessimism may seem to be stark opposites, but they both end in apathy. If things were sure to improve or bound to collapse, then our actions would not matter one way or the other.”

“No one ever tells you that bravery feels like fear.”

“Complexity implies the feeling of being lost; simplicity implies the feeling of being found.”

“That what each of us calls our 'necessary expenses' will always grow to equal our incomes unless we protest to the contrary.”

“To do a thing young is a shortcut to greatness… To be young is to be constantly on the precipice of perfection – just a little further and you’ll get there – but you never get there, and suddenly you’re old, and find yourself in a permanent state of imperfection, which you must reckon with.”

“An important property of any copying process: it is not perfect. Mistakes will happen.”

“Our minds are familiarity-seeking machines. The familiar feels safe; that is, until we teach ourselves that discomfort is temporary and necessary part of transformation.”

“Ideas are nothing without the hard work to make them real.”

“This push for simplicity had a purpose. Even though he was a high-tech CEO, Steve could put himself in the shoes of customers, people who cared nothing for the ins and outs of the software industry. He never wanted Apple software to overload people, especially when they might already be stretched by the bustle of their everyday lives.”

“One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself; you will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself; the height of your success is gauged by your self-mastery, the depth of your failure by your self-abandonment. Those who cannot establish dominion over themselves will have no dominion over others.”

“A logo does not make a company, it is the other way around.”

“If life feels impossible, remember: if you change, everything changes.”

“Success is being excited to go to work and being excited to come home.”

“When safe connection seems lost, partners go into fight-or-flight mode. They blame and get aggressive to get a response, any response, or they close down and try not to care. Both are terrified; they are just dealing with it differently. Trouble is, once they start this blame-distance loop, it confirms all their fears and adds to their sense of isolation.”

“Truth may be vital, but without love it is also unbearable.”

“We are like people eating menus instead of dinners.”

“Blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”

“A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”

“Design is the vocation of taking both old and new media, favoring neither, putting them into a cross-disciplinary perspective, and making full use of all.”

“That’s why they call what we have gifts! Because gifts are for giving.”

“Steve looked carefully at the software and asked me succinct questions to see if the work could be made simpler. This push for simplicity had a purpose. Even though he was a high-tech CEO, Steve could put himself in the shoes of customers, people who cared nothing for the ins and outs of the software industry. He never wanted Apple software to overload people, especially when they might already be stretched by the bustle of their everyday lives.”

“Software demos need to be convincing enough to explore an idea, to communicate a step toward making a product, even though the demo is not the product itself. Like the movie, demos should be specifically choreographed, so it’s clear what must be included and what can be left out.”

“The explanation that Einstein himself most often gave for his mental accomplishments was his curiosity. As he put it near the end of his life, “I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.””

“Design is not the act of amazing an audience with the novelty of forms or materials; it is the originality that repeatedly extracts astounding ideas from the crevices of the very commonness of everyday life.”

“You may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.”

“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.”

“We do not need to reveal ourselves to others, but only to those we love. For then we are no longer revealing ourselves in order to seem but in order to give. There is much more strength in a man who reveals himself only when it is necessary... And, today, there is no greater joy than to live alone and unknown.”

“It does not occur to the ordinary civilized person to regard himself or herself as an expression of the whole universe. It should be obvious that we cannot exist except in an environment of earth, air, water, and solar temperature.”

“You don’t need to be smarter than others to outperform them if you can out-position them. Anyone looks like a genius when they’re in a good position, and even the smartest person looks like an idiot when they’re in a bad one.”

“We fight we die, and we just hope that when our time comes, there is someone else to take our place.”

“You’re not doing whatever you want, you just don’t know what you want to do.”

“This explains why habits are so powerful: They create neurological cravings. Most of the time, these cravings emerge so gradually that we’re not really aware they exist, so we’re often blind to the influence. But as we associate cues with certain rewards, a subconscious craving emerges in our brains that starts the habit loop spinning.”

“It is not by chance that the European aristocracy went into business once heroes and warriors went out of style.”

“The message of EFT is simple: Forget about learning how to argue better, analyzing your early childhood, making grand romantic gestures, or experimenting with new sexual positions. Instead, recognize and admit that you are emotionally attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection.”

“Over time, Don and I began to understand and absorb the model Richard showed us. Look for ways to make quick progress. Watch for project stalls that might indicate a lack of potential. Cut corners to skip unnecessary effort. Remove distractions to focus attention where it needs to be. Start approximating your end goal as soon as possible. Maximize the impact of your most difficult effort. Combine inspiration, decisiveness, and craft to make demos.”

“The designer [Jony Ive] believed that ideas were fragile, tentative things that came at unexpected times from unknown places. Rising up out of the ether, they initially seem obvious and brilliant but can quickly be deemed impossible, squashed by the recognition of some insurmountable hurdle that could prevent them from becoming a reality. He and Jobs shared a belief that ideas should be nurtured, not crushed.”

“Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the controls, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to anything that creates fear. Doing all these things won’t necessarily make the job of managing a creative culture easier. But ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.”

““His eyes reminded Sam of his own. They had the patina of a person who had felt pain and expected to feel it again.””

“Steve figured that the best way to answer difficult questions like these was to avoid the need to ask them… Once Steve gave his verdict, everyone else knew it would have been foolhardy to argue with him, not because Steve wasn’t open to contrary opinions but because doing so would mean speaking up in favor of adding back complexity.”

“Life doesn’t simply happen to us, we produce it. That’s what style is. It’s producing life. Rather than accepting that life is something that we passively receive, accept, or endure, I believe that life is something we generate.”

“When the cost of mistakes is high, we're paralyzed with fear. When the cost of mistakes is low, we can move fast and adapt. Make mistakes cheap, not rare.”

“I have been a misfit throughout my professional life, and that seems to have worked to my advantage. Misfits are not born or made; they make themselves. And a stubborn opinionated child, desperate to be different and to be right, encounters only smaller refractions of the problems he will always experience. And he carries the weight of that dislocation for ever.”

“Never look down on anyone unless you’re helping them up.”

“Don’t complain when your partner shares their pain.”

“Talent is the skill to improve one’s own ability”

“You know the desire to stand in your own light.”

“The key is not the will to win… everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that is important”

“[We] began our study with a barren chessboard. We took on positions of reduced complexity and clear principles. Our first focus was king and pawn against king—just three pieces on the table….Layer by layer we built up my knowledge and my understanding of how to transform axioms into fuel for creative insight….This method of study gave me a feeling for the beautiful subtleties of each chess piece, because in relatively clear-cut positions I could focus on what was essential.”

“Strict modeling of the real world leads to a system that reflects today’s realities but not necessarily tomorrow’s.”

“Edison searched specifically for the best kind of bamboo, and he was undaunted by the need to check a vast number of varieties.”

“When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.”

“Erratic copying in biological replicators can in a real sense give rise to improvement, and it was essential for the progressive evolution of life that some errors were made… it is ultimately these mistakes that make evolution possible.”

“Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior.”

“If you keep it fresh and interesting for you, maybe it will strike the audience as fresh and interesting as well.”

“If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that determines if it’s good or bad.”

“In the lifetime of a man, things that are that improbable can be treated for practical purposes as impossible… But in our human estimates of what is probable and what is not, we are not used to dealing in hundreds of millions of years.”

“But you know, the biggest ego trip going is getting rid of your ego. And the joke of it all is: your ego doesn't exist! There's nothing to get rid of.”

“For me, what I hate, if you want to tick me off, show up and tell me everything is low risk. That makes me believe you haven’t understood your job, right? Don’t make me laugh, don’t make me feel good. Make me feel scared and then make me feel comfortable because you’re dealing with all the risks. Don’t come and say it’s all low risk. It is not low risk, it’s rocket science.”

“Pete Hunt on documentation & hater feedback”

“When we feel safely linked to our partners, we more easily roll with the hurts they inevitably inflict, and we are less likely to be aggressively hostile when we get mad at them.”

“To truly actualize change, you have to engage in the work of making new choices every day. In order to achieve mental wellness, you must begin by being an active daily participant in your own healing.”

“To get through writer’s block, you had to write one sentence, and then another, and then another. To be a writer, you must write.”

“Human intelligence has a very serious limitation. That limitation is that it is a scanning system of conscious attention which is linear... The universe does not come at us in lines. It comes at us in a multidimensional continuum in which everything is happening altogether everywhere at once… And so long as we are stuck with that form of wisdom we cannot deal with more than a few variables at once.”

“When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit—unless you find new routines—the pattern will unfold automatically… Once you break a habit into its components, you can fiddle with the gears.”

“Stay up, never down.”

“It should be obvious that the human being "goeswith" the rest of the universe, even though we say in popular speech, "I came into this world." Now, it is not true that you came into this world, you came out of it in the same way as a flower comes out of a plant or fruit comes out of a tree.”

“The permanence of publishing can feel scary… there is a sort of mourning process to having a show or publish something, because in some ways it loses its potential (in other ways it gains it) but either way you don’t have control over it anymore and that is sort of terrifying.”

“When faced with a problem, people tend to select solutions that involve adding new elements rather than taking existing components away.”

“After Steve showed the Safari icon, he clicked to the next slide. It had a single word: Why? Steve felt the need to say why Apple had made its own browser, and his explanation led with speed…”

“If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff — the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet — but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart…”

“There was a simple set of formulas that defined Einstein’s outlook. Creativity required being willing not to conform. That required nurturing free minds and free spirits, which in turn required “a spirit of tolerance.” And the underpinning of tolerance was humility—the belief that no one had the right to impose ideas and beliefs on others.”

“The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.”

“Goals aren’t promises, they’re hypotheses. Not reaching a goal can be just as valuable as reaching it, just as disproving a hypothesis is as valuable as proving it. The purpose of a goal is to maximize your learning, not commit to a predetermined outcome.”

“Searching for yourself is a journey of a lifetime. Life is what happens in between.”

“When you strip away too much friction, meaning and satisfaction go with it.”

“Emotion is the music of the dance between lovers. To change the dance, you have to change the music.”

“All of us are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were”

“Music continued to beguile Einstein. It was not so much an escape as it was a connection: to the harmony underlying the universe, to the creative genius of the great composers, and to other people who felt comfortable bonding with more than just words. He was awed, both in music and in physics, by the beauty of harmonies.”

“It’s a healthy practice to approach our work with as few accepted rules, starting points, and limitations as possible.”

“Giving from the heart benefits both the giver and receiver”

“Money talks when money's shown”

“Keep a stack of books on your desk and read a little bit each day.”

“He began by quizzing us on the browser analysis we had done before his arrival, and after hearing it, he quickly discarded our effort with Mozilla as unlikely to bear fruit. By doing so, he demonstrated the self-confidence to skip any ingratiating display of deference to his new manager, a person who had years of experience in the technical field he was newly entering.”