Passion
Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
— Harold Whitman
My hosannahs have all be forged in the crucible of doubt.
Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead.
— David Farragut, Union Admiral during the American Civil War
On this date in 1862, David Farragut commanded a Union flotilla past two Confederate forts on the Mississippi River on his way to capture New Orleans. It wouldn’t be until more than two years later, at the Battle of Mobile Bay, when he would utter his famous phrase.
Both destiny’s kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.
— David Foster Wallace
Listen to that still, quite voice in the back of the mind. It might be your destiny trying to get your attention.
Disney ripped creativity from the culture around him, mixed that creativity with his own extraordinary talent, and then burned that mix into the soul of his culture. Rip, mix, and burn
— Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
So Social Security will be broke in seven years. First Bernie Madoff, now this. It’s like Ponzi schemes don’t even work anymore.
– Bill Muse, Top 5 Rumination