📚 Roger's Highlights

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A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .

The uncomfortable truth is that most of us don’t come across the way we intend. We can’t see ourselves truly objectively, and neither can anyone else. Human beings have a strong tendency to distort other people’s feedback to fit their own views. We know this intellectually, and yet we rarely seem to recognize it as it’s happening.

No One Understands You and What to Do About It

Heidi Halvorson

In Virginia and the Middle Colonies, and farther south, there was a tendency to take the easy way out and settle for a tidewater existence. A planter could raise his crop of tobacco, and load it from his own wharf, by his mansion or farmhouse, directly onto a ship that took it to England. The same ship would bring out goods, both luxury products and basic manufactures. A planter was provided with a catalog and made his order, which was delivered the next voyage out, the ship taking his bale of tobacco in return. This was a primitive but highly convenient system, akin to barter, with everything done on credit. It eliminated the need for large market towns and thus impeded urban development. For the planter it was, again, the easy or lazy way out. But of course it operated very much to the advantage of the capitalist merchant in London, to whom the planter quickly got into debt and remained thus all his life. His heir inherited the plantation, the system, and the debts. In his letter to his half-sister, Washington’s mother, Joseph Ball gave some sound advice about the system. Rejecting the sea, he told her that a planter, if industrious, could live much better than the master of a ship. But she, and her son George, if he became a planter-farmer, must beware. “Neither must he send his Tobacco to England to be sold [there] and goods sent him; if he does, he will soon get in the merchant’s debt, and never get out again.” He advised using the market, and being patient: he must “not aim” at “being a fine gentleman before his time.” There is evidence that Washington did not exactly follow this advice to the letter. But it made him think; and he was beginning to acquire the practical habit of thinking in the long term, which was the secret of his success in life.

George Washington

Paul Johnson

Before digital computers, making things consisted of design followed by manufacturing. With software, when the design is finished, you're done.

(23) Paul Graham on Twitter: "@Austen Before Digital Computers, Making Things Consisted of Design Followed by Manufacturing. With Software, When the Design Is Finished, You're Done." / Twitter

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