1. Suddenly, Independence I was emotionally overstretched, having gone through three days and nights of a wrenching experience. With little sleep since Friday night in Kuala Lumpur, I was close to physical exhaustion. I was weighed down by a heavy sense of guilt. I felt I had let down several million people in Malaysia: immigrant […]
Category Archives: Book-Notes
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) Albert Camus
(Pg 31) There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself of them. One has to pay something. A man who has becomes conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it. (Pg 32-33) Now, […]
Tao Te Ching (-400) Laozi
Empty your mind of all thoughts.Let heart be at peace.Watch the turmoil of beings,but contemplate their return.Each separate being in the universeReturns to the common source.Returning to the source is serenity.If you don’t realize the source,You stumble in confusion and sorrow. When you realize where you came from,You naturally become tolerant,Disinterested, amusedKindhearted as a grandmother,Dignified […]
Technological Slavery / Industrial Society and Its Future (2010/1995) Ted Kaczynski
While I appreciate Ted’s mathematical style and perspective as a highly intelligent outsider, I don’t agree with his value judgements and thus his conclusions. I’m on team technology. Nevertheless, many of his observations were prescient and remain thought-provoking. Quotes without further comment below. What the principle of technological autonomy asserts is that the overall development […]
Good Strategy Bad Strategy (2011 ) Richard P. Rumelt
Despite the roar of voices wanting to equate strategy with ambition, leadership , “vision”, planning, or the economic logic of competition, strategy is none of these. The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those […]
Bhagavad Gita (-200) Translation by Stephen Mitchell
“As unnecessary as a well is to a village on the banks of river,so unnecessary are all scripturesto someone who has seen the truth.” {Humility or self-referential undermining? Either way I like it.} *** “What a great man doesordinary people will do;whatever standard he setseveryone else will follow. In all the three worlds, Arjuna,there is […]
The Hard Thing About Hard Things (2014) Ben Horowitz
Paraphrases and genuine quotes completely jumbled together. Chaos. Why it’s hard to bring big company executives into little companies When you are building an organization, there is no organization to design, there are no processes to improve, and communicating with the organization is simple. On the other hand, you have to be very adept at […]
The Glass Bead Game (1943) Hermann Hesse
For after all, the maximum integration of the individual into the hierarchy of the educators and scholars, has ever been one of our ruling principles. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of […]
The Old Man and the Sea (1952) Ernest Hemingway
A classic for a reason and a bargain at 127 pages. The style fits the story. Hemingway’s prose never breaks character. The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea […]
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) Milan Kundera
I tip my bowler hat to Mr. Kundera. This was artful. While I’ve never been a romantic, perhaps I even learned something about love in this novel. The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to […]