a nervous 23 year old Steve Jobs preps for his first tv appearance

"You need to tell me where the restroom is too because I'm deathly ill and ready to throw up at any moment"

uncontacted tribes

Transcendentalist

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

arrows

An Efe pygmy prepares poison arrows for hunting monkeys. Source here.

vision

" ... to be an artist was to see what others could not."
- Patti Smith, Just Kids, p. 11

motivation

"History shows people just as prepared to fight for honour and recognition as they are for less abstract concepts like food or territory."
- Attributed to Francis Fukuyama

jolie laide

National Geographic photo of Mouse Lemur by Mark Thiessen

Jolie Laide

[French: pretty ugly] not pretty in conventional terms, but nevertheless has a distinctive harmony or charm

how to cut up a chicken

V

"Happy are the painters for they shall not be lonely."
- Winston Churchill 

success

"A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do."
- Bob Dylan

hovercraft

"We came over in different ships, but we're all in the same boat."
- Jesse Jackson

maxim

"I'd rather spend two days as a tiger than 200 years as a sheep."
- Tipu Sultan

give up

"When one is alone and unarmed, surrender may be pardoned."
- Napoleon

trying to put his troubled life back together

"I don't trust happiness. I never did; I never will."
- Robert Duvall as Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies

On the importance of making mistakes

"If you're not making mistakes, you're not trying."
- Wynton Marsalis

village

"These fighters against capitalistic society are to be met in Greenwich Village ... they are the companions of the crafstman of the chisel, the brush, and the pen."
- Hippolyte Havel, 1915

scroll

"We heard the word 'beat' spoken on street corners in the village—it meant characters of special spirituality emphasizing a new style for American culture."
- Jack Kerouac, 1957

not haunted

"Something can only haunt you if you decide to let it haunt you."
- Charlize Theron

depression

"Two prime victims of the disease are your libido and your ability to read. Five times through a paragraph and unable to say what it's about. But oddly, you can read a book or article about depression with full comprehension."
- Dick Cavett, Talk Show, p. 151

player

"You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else."
- Albert Einstein

Sam

"What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and words! His real life is lead by his head, and is known to none but himself ... His acts and his words are merely the visible thin crust of his world ... and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden — it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written ... Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man - the biography of the man himself cannot be written."
- Mark Twain

what is 6 Sigma?

aphorism

"I've only remembered what I've learned by myself."
- Nassim Taleb

A: Adherence to strategy.

"Q: What failures and the successful have in common."
- Guy Kawasaki reflecting upon his Apple tenure

I forget

"If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us as long to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of facts which filled them."
- William James

fight

"Must you carry the bloody horror of combat in your heart forever?"
- Homer, The Odyssey

managers and meetings

Why the office isn't the best place to get work done:

patience and discipline

"One of the Japanese experts on quality and employee involvement likens the need for patience and discipline to that of the bamboo farmer. Once the bamboo seed is planted, the farmer must water it every day for four years before the tree breaks ground! But when it finally does, it grows 60 feet in 90 days."
- Paul Allaire, Xerox Corporation

buried and honored by five presidents

President Richard Nixon

Because only if you've been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.

MBA

"[The Business School] was reported to be so toxic that some had been medicated for stress, anxiety and depression."
- Wade Hemsworth in the Hamilton Spectator