quotesposterous

A few years back, I started a file of all the things I read that jumped out at me, for whatever reason. Wisdom, insights, humor worth remembering and thinking about. I realized later that they are also snapshots of me, and where I was at the time in my life.
Archive for

September 2010

 

from an interview with Antonio Lobo Antunes

At 20, he thought time would solve all problemsm. At 50, he thought time was the problem.


Posted September 23, 2010
 

From Sue Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child

Written down September 17, 2010.

Quoting someone named Pestalozzi--

You can drive the devil out of your garden but you will find him once again in the garden of your son.

Posted September 17, 2010
 

What I Learned From Randy Moss

A piece I wrote for our Agency Creative Blog, called Resisting Gravity

http://www.resistinggravity.com/2010/09/management-advice-from-unlikely-sourc...

 

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Management Advice from an Unlikely Source


"Sometimes you want your boss to tell you that you're doing a good job...You want to be appreciated."

This quote is from Patriot's Wide Receiver Randy Moss, and it was delivered during what has to be one of the oddest post-game interviews I've ever seen (link below). What struck me about it was that here was a guy making $9M a year, and somehow, I know exactly how he feels. My takeaway (unlike most peoples', I suspect) isn't that he's taken too many helmets to the dome. I realized, as a boss, I've made other people feel like that. Even though I've felt underappreciated at times in my career, Randy Moss showed me that you can't be sure the people who work for you know, in the absence of concrete evidence, that you value them. Don't take the easy way out and assume money or fame or record books (or in our case, industry awards) are enough. Because what this Moss episode also demonstrates is that by doing so, you breed malcontents who can demoralize the rest of the team, as his press conference certainly seemed to after the Pat's victory on Sunday.

 

Posted September 14, 2010
 

From The Possessed by Elif Batuman

A wonderful memoir subtitled "Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them." Written down Sept. 2010

…I didn’t care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years—it took the experience of lived time—to realize that they are really the same thing.

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…love is a rare and valuable thing, and you don’t get to choose its object. You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things—and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that’s the wonderful gift right there.

Posted September 14, 2010