“You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards… Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”
—Steve Jobs in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
Don't trust others' plans for you. You'll soon discover they don't have very much planned at all.
I'm not sure where I first heard that advice, but it appears to be derived from a quote which is, accurately or not, attributed to Jim Rohn:
If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.
I tend to prefer the shorter version, but they both have their strengths. In any case, I think the advice is sound, and I hope to remember it.
“If you take on a role that’s beyond your capabilities, you not only disgrace yourself in that one, but you’ve also passed up the role that you were capable of performing well.”
—The Enchiridion of Epictetus, as newly translated by Robin Waterfield in The Complete Works
“It doesn't seem to conventional-minded people that they're conventional-minded. It just seems to them that they're right. Indeed, they tend to be particularly sure of it.”
—Paul Graham in Orthodox Privilege
“You can't deal logically with an illogical person.”
My dad developed this phrase after working in a psychiatric hospital, and it's always stuck with me. As usual, there’s no subtext here. I’m not trying to be mysterious or send someone a message. It's just something I think about often.
I subscribe to the daily Mutts comic by email. A recent message included a quote by Marc Bekoff which resembles something I wrote in Saying goodbye to Taggy.
I wrote the following:
All animals are conscious. All animals feel comfort and pain. In that way, we are equal.
Bekoff put it differently:
Although other animals may be different from us, this does not make them less than us.
“If our goal is to live in a shared reality with our neighbors, what if our current approach isn't bringing us any closer to that?”
—Peter McIndoe in a TED talk about his satirical conspiracy theory, Birds Aren't Real