The Weekly Q

Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give up the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act. And never suppose, that in any possible situation, or under any circumstances, it is best for you to do a dishonorable thing. Whenever you do a thing, though it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world looking at you, and act accordingly.

— Thomas Jefferson

I do not think there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes everything, even nature.

— John D. Rockefeller

Gordon Dean was a distinguished American lawyer and prosecutor. One of the original members of the Atomic Energy Commission, he became its chairman from 1950 to 1953. It’s said that when Dean died in a plane crash in 1958, among his personal effects was an envelope with nine life lessons scribbled on the back. They’re wisdom about his philosophy of life:

1. Never lose your capacity for enthusiasm.
2. Never lose your capacity for indignation.
3. Never judge people – don’t type them too quickly. But in a pinch never first assume that a man is bad; first assume that he is good and that, at worst, he is in the gray area between bad and good.
4. Never be impressed by wealth alone or thrown by poverty.
5. If you can’t be generous when it’s hard to be, you won’t be when it’s easy.
6. The greatest builder of confidence is the ability to do something – almost anything – well.
7. When confidence comes, then strive for humility; you aren’t as good as all that.
8. The way to become truly useful is to seek the best that other brains have to offer. Use them to supplement your own, and be prepared to give credit to them when they have helped.
9. The greatest tragedies in the world and personal events stem from misunderstandings. So communicate!

— Harvey Mackay, The Mackay MBA of Selling in the Real World

The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you’re not going to stay where you are.

— John Pierpont Morgan

Success seems to be connected to action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.

— Conrad Hilton

New York Yankee great Mickey Mantle had a response for critics who pointed out that he had struck out a whopping 1,710 times in the course of his career: “They may be just strikeouts to some people, but to me every one of them was nearly a home run.”

— Harvey Mackay, The Mackay MBA of Selling in the Real World

My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school, “So? Did you learn anything today?” But not my mother. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?”

— Isidor Isaac Rabi, Nobel laureate

I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.

— George Washington

The three dumbest guys I can think of: Charles Lindbergh, Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill. Why? Because any smart person who understood how impossibly arduous were the tasks they had set themselves would have pulled the plug before he even began.

Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be—and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway. How do we achieve this state of mind? By staying stupid. By not allowing ourselves to think.

How do we achieve this state of mind? By staying stupid. By not allowing ourselves to think. A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.

— Steven Pressfield

It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it. For example, two people may be in the same place, doing the same thing; both may have about an equal amount of money and presitge – and yet one may be miserable and the other happy. Why? Because of a different mental attitude.

“There is nothing either good or bad,” said Shakespeare, “but thinking makes it so.”

Abe Lincoln once remarked that “most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

— Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People