A good idea, well-crafted and pursued with passion, doesn’t need a gatekeeper’s stamp of approval to succeed

In politics, religion, art and sport we are represented now by proxies where formerly we participated in person. All the forms of communal and cultural activity in which we … formerly shared have been taken over by professionals and the great mass of men are no longer actors, but spectators.

As long as you are curious to learn, most people can add skills to become better at the different tools. I think that your approach to problems is what matters as a designer.

The significance of baseball, more than other sports, lies in the very nature of the game—slow and spread out and rambling. It’s a game of history and memory, a kind of living archive.

Winning lets you play with the game a little, smiling at your goofs and gaffes: Furcal and Holliday messing up that routine fly ball in left field; David Freese dropping a tiny pop-up next to third, with each error producing a run, are perfectly O.K., aren’t they? Who cares, actually? Losing infects everything. If you love the Rangers, tiny errors by your first baseman Michael Young in the fourth and again in the sixth won’t ever go away, and, beating yourself up now, you become convinced that the manager Ron Washington’s decision to pinch-hit for his best reliever, Scott Feldman, in the top of the eleventh, is the worst mistake in franchise history. Freese, who hit that game-tying two-run triple off the right-field wall in the ninth, is the first Cardinals batter up in the bottom half, and he bops the sixth pitch from Mark Lowe into the green lawn behind center field. Walkoff.

If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work. It’s perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. Let me warn you, `important problem’ must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn’t work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It’s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don’t work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn’t believe that they will lead to important problems.

If you’re in San Francisco, and you are deciding to go to Boston or Baltimore, you don’t need to decide right then. They both share the same first step - head East.

Its not like Orville and Wilbur were standing on the beach, about to test their plane, and said ‘fucking damnit, people are gonna want WiFi on this thing, let’s scrap it and go home.’

Building a business is building a machine that can manufacture an idea