Those “best leaders” excel at six skills . . . They have a winning attitude, a passion for customers, an ability to collaborate across boundaries, a global mindset, an ability to leverage diversity and a talent for working just “fast enough” — getting the right balance point between overly rapid decision-making and paralysis by analysis.
— Ann Livermore, HP Executive VP
(From a Knowledge at Wharton article)
Every crowd has a silver lining.
— Phineas Taylor Barnum
I posted this quote for the sole reason that it always makes me smile. But as I looked at the list of names, and their sequence, I realized that, in a simplistic way, these simple words also reflect our evolution of philosophy and thought. Socrates lived more than 2,400 years ago and his influence on thought is legendary. Jean Paul Sartre was a prominent French philosopher at the peak of the twentieth century. Frank Sinatra was born only ten years after Sartre but has come to embody a later generation.
I want to beg you as much as I can . . . to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your innermost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
— Mark Twain
The severest test of a character is not so much the ability to keep a secret as it is when the secret is finally out, to refrain from disclosing that you knew it all along.
I suspect that this principle of character also applies to the ability to refrain from chiming in when someone in the room is explaining something and you can’t resist what you think is a better explanation. I know that is certainly one of my challenges.