Acting In Film, by Michael Caine

The following are excerpts from the book, Acting in Film: An Actor's Take on Movie Making, by Michael Caine.

(xiv) "A tour bus pulls up pretty smartly as [we actors] are crossing the studio lot. Fans come piling out of the bus. The driver is trying to corral the actors into signing autographs on our way in. Most of the actors escaped the crowd through a side door. I, on the other hand, knew the bus driver had a job to do, and I was going to make him look good. I signed every autograph on that bus. No big deal, right? Until I tell you that the young driver of that bus turned out to be Mike Ovitz."

(3) "They say you've learned a foreign language when you start dreaming it. A film actor must be able to dream another person's dreams before he can call that character his own."

(14) "Plays are performed; movies are made."

(22) "You're your first best audience long before anybody else hears you. So don't be an easy audience. Keep asking for more."

(25) "One of the most crucial jobs you'll have as an actor will be to know what you're thinking when you're not talking."

(43) "Anticipation is the enemy of all actors. It wreaks particularly savage havoc in films because the camera sees everything, especially lack of spontaneity."

(49) "Do not use rehearsals to give your all as an actor ... if you rehearse a risk, it is no longer a risk."

(52) " ... when I first started, they'd say, 'This is your stand-in,' and there'd be this great-looking young guy standing there. Eventually, one morning you come in and they say, 'This is your stand-in,' and there's this old fellow, standing there with a bald head, wearing a wig."

(59) "Competence is ... treasured far more than erratic brilliance."

(59) "The film actor knows how to reduce a performance physically but not mentally ... your mind should work even harder in a close-up than it does during other shots, because in the close-up, the performance is all in your eyes; you can't use the rest of your body to express yourself."

(68) "Movie acting is a delicate blend of careful preparation and spontaneity. The art of new-minting thoughts and dialogue comes from listening and reacting as if for the first time. [When you have no lines] ' ... sit there and listen, thinking of wonderful things to say, and then you decide not to say them. That's what you're doing in that scene.'"

(73) "Less is more ... very often you can do a completely blank look. The audience will project their emotions on your face."

(78) " ... the obvious trap was to play a German like a man trying to do a German accent; so I decided to play my character like a German trying to speak perfect English."

(89) "You've got to base your character on reality, not on some actor-ish memory of what reality is ... the audience mustn't see 'an actor,' they mustn't see the wheels turning."

(96) "The moment you feel foolish, you look foolish."

(96) "When you flesh out a character to make him real, your tools are the aspects of yourself that apply ..."

(99) "In real life, each person is always in sympathy with his own motives."

(103) "Honest men speak fast because they don't need time to calculate."

(131) "Cutting away to a strong reaction shot on your slightly misplayed line can give the impression that you delivered it far more effectively than you actually did."

(138) " ... small-time experience ... adds up to big-time ability."

(138) "Learn the confidence you can only gain under fire."

On Writing, by Stephen King

The following are excerpts from the book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King.

"This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit." (pg. xvii)


"Take any noun, put it with any verb, and you have a sentence. It never fails." (pg. 114)

"Grammar is not just a pain in the ass; it's the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking." (pg. 114)

Unsure writers feel the passive voice somehow lends their work authority. (pg. 116)

"The adverb is not your friend." (pg. 117)

"... the road to hell is paved with adverbs ..." (pg. 118)

"Paragraphs are almost as important for how they look as for what they say; they are maps of intent." (pg. 123)

"Writing is refined thinking." (pg. 125)

"The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story ... to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all." (pg. 128)

"... the paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing -- the place where coherence begins and words stand a chance of becoming more than mere words." (pg. 129)

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot." (pg. 139)

[On talent and motivation] "If God gives you something you can do, why in God's name wouldn't you do it?" (pg. 147)

"... the work is always accomplished one word at a time." (pg. 151)

"Don't wait for the muse." (pg. 153)

Write about anything you damn well want, as long as you tell the truth. (pg. 153)

"... the assumption that the writer controls the material instead of the other way around." (pg. 155)

"... plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren't compatible." (pg. 159)

"... there is a huge difference between story and plot." (pg. 167)

A restraining order is as useful as a parasol in a hurricane. (pg. 168)

"Honesty in storytelling makes up for a great many stylistic faults ... Liars prosper, but only in the grand sweep of things, never down in the jungles of actual composition, where you must take your objective one bloody word at a time."  (pg. 170)

[On description] "It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's also a question of how much to." (pg. 171)

[On describing a particular element] "... if I describe mine, it freezes out yours, and I lose a little bit of the bond of understanding I want to forge between us ... good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else." (pg. 172)

"... good description begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing." (pg. 177)

"... your job is to say what you see, and then to get on with your story ... one of the cardinal rules of fiction is never tell us a thing if you can show us, instead ..." (pg. 178)

[On dialogue] "Talk, whether ugly or truthful, is an index of character." (pg. 188)

[On the sudden occurrence of ideas] "At one moment I had none of this; at the next I had all of it." (pg. 204)

Starting with questions and thematic concerns is a recipe for bad fiction. (pg. 208)

"Downloading what's in my head directly to the page, I write as fast as I can and still remain comfortable ... outrun the self-doubt that's always waiting to settle in." (pg. 210)

" ... unreal estate ..." "only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, 'Oh well, let it go, that's what copyeditors are for ...'" [On the benefit of putting away your writing] "... a strange, often exhilarating experience. It's yours, you'll recognize it as yours ... and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It's always easier to kill someone else's darlings ..." (pg. 213)

"... deleting all the adverbs I can bear to part with (never all of them; never enough) ... Is this story coherent? And if it is, what will turn coherence into a song? ... at the beginning of a story ... I have a tendency to flail." (pg. 215)

Someone wrote that novels are letters aimed at one person ... "every novelist has a single ideal reader ..." (pg. 216)

Most writers are needy, especially between the first and second drafts, "when the study door swings open and the light of the world shines in." (pg. 222)

[On pacing] Elmore Leonard explained it perfectly by saying he left out the boring parts. (pg. 224)

"... every story and novel is collapsible to some degree." (pg. 225)

[On the weight of research] "... remember that you are writing a novel, not a research paper." (pg. 233)

[On the value of writing retreats] "Do you need someone to make you a paper badge with the word WRITER on it before you can believe you are one? God, I hope not." (pg. 238)

[On King's knowledge of craft] "... has more to do with instinct than with anything resembling 'higher thought.' I found the act of articulating those instinctive truths painfully difficult." (pg. 253)

[On King's post-accident, return-to-writing experience] "I stepped from one word to the next like a very old man finding his way across a stream on a zigzag line of wet stones." (pg. 273)

"... the ordinary miracle that comes with any attempt to create something ... that buzz of happiness, that sense of having found the right words and put them in a line." (pg. 274)

Talent is Overrated

 The following are excerpts from the book, Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, by Fortune Senior Editor at Large, Geoff Colvin.

"Most of us would be embarrassed to add up the total hours we've spent on our jobs, and then compare that number with the hours we've given to other priorities that we claim are more important, like our families; the figures would show that work is our real priority. Yet after all those hours and all those years, most people are just okay at what they do ... 'the experience trap' ... people with lots of experience were no better at their jobs than those with very little experience." (pg. 3)

"The natural-gift explanation also explains why extraordinary performers are so rare; god-given talents are presumably not handed out willy-nilly ... it takes the matter of great performance out of our hands." (pg. 5) 

" ... some people have become international chess masters, though they possess below-average IQs. So whatever it is that makes these people special, it doesn't depend on superhuman general abilities." (pg. 7)

"Contemporary athletes are superior, not because they're somehow different, but because they train themselves more effectively. That's an important concept for us to remember." (pg. 9)

"The scarce resource is no longer money. It's human ability." (pg. 12)

" ... no one knows what the limits of development are." (pg. 13)

" ... because the costs of computing power and telecommunications are in free fall ... a fast growing number of workers everywhere have to be just as good ... as the very best workers in their fields anywhere on earth." (pp. 14-15)

"If you think your job isn't exportable, you may be right - but think about it hard before you relax." (pg. 15)

"In 1992, a small group of researchers in England went looking for talent. They couldn't find it." (pg. 17)

"One factor, and only one factor, predicted how musically accomplished the students were, and that was how much they practiced." (pg. 18)

" ... as most of us understand 'talent,' meaning an ability to achieve more easily ... " (pg. 19)

" ... such findings do not prove that talent doesn't exist. But they suggest an intriguing possibility: that if it does, it may be irrelevant." (pg. 23)

" ... talent is looking like an odd concept if it hasn't made itself known after six years of hard study." (pg. 24)

"For nearly two hundred years many people have believed that [Mozart] had a miraculous ability to compose entire major pieces in his head, after which writing them down was mere clerical work ... based on a famous letter in which he says as much ... The trouble is, this letter is a forgery ..." (pg. 27)

" ... Alex Ross, sums up much of the recent scholarship on the Miracle of Salzburg: 'Ambitious parents who are currently playing the Baby Mozart video for their toddlers may be disappointed to learn that Mozart became Mozart by working furiously hard.'" (pg. 29)

"Steve Ross ... was known for analyzing complex deals in his head ... He supposedly said, 'I hate calculators. They're the equalizer.'" (pg. 39)

" ... critical thinking is obviously important in the real world, and I.Q. doesn't measure it." (pg. 40)

" ... in many cases there's no correlation at all ... between I.Q. and achievement ... " (pg. 42)

"The researchers' conclusion ... suggest[s] 'that whatever it is that an I.Q. test measures, it is not the ability to engage in cognitively complex forms of multivariate reasoning.'" (pg. 44)

" ... a large mass of more recent evidence shows that memory ability is acquired, and it can be acquired by pretty much anyone." (pg. 45)

"What's surprising is that when it comes to innate, unalterable limits on what healthy adults can achieve, anything beyond ... physical constraints is in dispute." (pg. 50)

" ... one of the greatest-ever football players [Jerry Rice] devoted less than 1 percent of his football-related work to playing games." (pg. 55)

"Many scientists and authors produce their greatest work only after twenty or more years of devoted effort, which means that in year nineteen they are still getting better ... evidence showed clearly that people can keep getting better long after they should have reached their 'rigidly determinate' natural limits." (pg. 62)

"Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements ... it is activity designed specifically to improve performance ... it can be repeated a lot ... feedback on results is continuously available; it's highly demanding mentally ... and it isn't much fun." (pg. 66)

" ... becoming significantly good at almost anything is extremely difficult without the help of a teacher or coach, at least in the early going." (pg. 67)

"The great performers isolate remarkably specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they are improved; then it's on to the next aspect ... Only by choosing activities in the learning zone can one make progress. That's the location of skills and abilities that are just out of reach." (pg. 68)

" ... practice proponents do not dispute the possibility that genes could play a role in a person's willingness to put himself or herself through the extremely rigorous demands of becoming an exceptional performer." (pg. 81)

" Average players focused on the ball ... the best players weren't looking at the ball. They were looking at the opponent's hips, shoulders, and arms, which foretold where they would hit the ball ... They had found a way to react faster without improving their reaction time." (pg. 86)

"The difference wasn't literally what they saw. It was what they perceived." (pg. 88)

"It was said of Charles Revson ... that he could distinguish several different shades of black, a particularly difficult skill even among people who work with colors. That ability is a metaphor for making evaluations of every kind." (pg. 93)

"When Garry Kasparov, the world champion at the time, first played IBM's famous Deep Blue program in 1996, the computer was evaluating 100 million positions per second - and Kasparov still won ... why would the computer lose or draw even a single game against any player, ever? The answer is that the human possessed something the computer didn't, which was vast knowledge of chess ... conclusion: 'In the knowledge lies the power.'" (pg. 95)

"The researchers proposed what has become known as the chunk theory. Everyone in the experiment remembered more or less the same number of chunks of information ... But for the masters ... a chunk was much larger, consisting of a whole group of pieces in a specific arrangement." (pg. 99)

"Even brains can be changed." (pg. 103)

"The best performers ... are in effect able to step outside themselves, monitor what is happening in their own minds, and ask how it's going. Researchers call this metacognition ... thinking about your own thinking." (pg. 118)

"Deliberate practice activities are so demanding that no one can sustain them for long without strong motivation." (pg. 134)

" ... too much familiarity with a problem blinds a person to innovative solutions." (pg. 160)

"Abraham Lincoln's pen did not trace out the immortal words of the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope while he was riding to the battlefield; a number of drafts of the speech, on White House writing paper, have been found." (pg. 161)

" ... becoming world-class great at anything seems to require thousands of hours of focused, deliberate practice." (pg. 171)

"Any adult thinking of starting a professional career in any field in which some participants begin their development as small children should first get out a calculator and face the music." (pg. 172)

" ... the temptation to continue doing what you do comfortably is too great." (pg. 173)

" ... the brilliance of what has been achieved blots out any sight of what has been given up." (pg. 178)

" ... excellent performers suffer the same age-related declines in speed and general cognitive abilities as everyone else - except in their field of expertise." (pg. 180)

"Landing on your butt twenty thousand times is where great performance comes from." (pg. 188)

"Teresa Amabile of the Harvard Business School ... proposed a simple hypothesis: 'The intrinsically motivated state is conducive to creativity, whereas the extrinsically motivated state is detrimental.' " (pg. 191)

Shop Class as Soulcraft

The following are excerpts from the book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, by Matthew B. Crawford, a Doctor of Political Philosophy, and mechanic.

"... a genuine crisis of confidence in our most prestigious institutions and professions ... Wall Street in particular has lost its luster as a destination for smart and ambitious young people ... The meta-work of trafficking in the surplus skimmed from other people's work suddenly appears as what it is ..." (pg. 9)

"The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence ... relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth." (pg. 15)

"Any high school principal who doesn't claim as his goal 'one hundred percent college attendance' is likely to be accused of harboring 'low expectations' and run out of town by indignant parents. This indignation is hard to stand against, since it carries all the moral weight of egalitarianism. Yet it is also snobbish, since it evidently regards the trades as something 'low' ... At this weird moment of growing passivity and dependence, let us publicly recognize a yeoman aristocracy: those who gain real knowledge of real things, the sort we all depend on every day." (pg. 32)

"... consider fresh the human dimension of work [as opposed to automation/computers]. In what circumstances does the human element remain indispensable, and why? [Frank] Levy ... writes that '... creativity [sic] is knowing what to do when the rules run out or there are no rules in the first place ...' " (pg. 35)

"The dichotomy of mental versus manual didn't arise spontaneously." (pg. 37)

"... cognitive stratification." (pg. 47)

"Robert Jackall ... concludes that one of the principles of contemporary management is to 'push details down and pull credit up.' That is , avoid making decisions because they could damage your career, but then spin cover stories after the fact that interpret positive outcomes to your credit ... managerial ass covering ..." (pg. 50)

"One feels like a man, not a cog in a machine." (pg. 53)

"The sociologist of education Randall Collins describes a cycle of credential inflation that 'could go on endlessly, until janitors need Ph.D.'s and babysitters are required to hold advanced degrees in child care.' " (pg. 143)

"Occupations based on universal, propositional knowledge are more prestigious, but they are also the kind that face competition from the whole world as book learning becomes more widely disseminated in the global economy. Practical know-how, on the other hand, is always tied to the experience of a particular person. It can't be downloaded, it can only be lived." (pg. 162)

"If thinking is bound up with action, then the task of getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on our doing stuff in it. And in fact this is the case: to really know shoelaces, you have to tie shoes." (pg. 164)

"The [chess] expert is expert not because he has a better memory in general, but because the patterns of chess are the patterns of his experience." (pg. 170)

"You can earn money at something, without the money - or what it buys - being the focus of your day. To be capable of sustaining our interest, a job has to have room for progress in excellence."

Cornel West: Loving and Living Out Loud, a Memoir‏

The following are excerpts from the book, Brother West: Loving and Living Out Loud, a Memoir, by Dr. Cornel West, Princeton University professor, notable public intellectual, "aspiring bluesman in a world of ideas, and jazzman in the life of the mind."

"... a featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creature born between urine and feces." (pg. 4)

"... hope learned and earned in the harsh realities of daily struggle; hope that remains on intimate terms with death; hope that is life-renewing and opposed to the cheap optimism of market-driven America, where Disneyland is sold as heaven on earth" ... "overcom[ing] the social death of slavery, the civic death of Jim Crow and Jane Crow, the psychic death of self-hatred, and the spiritual death of despair." (pg. 6)

"... [Keats] wrote about 'negative capability,' which he explained as the quality 'when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." (pg. 39)

"When I read the poetry of Walt Whitman, I could understand why he answered the question, 'Do I contradict myself?' with 'Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." (pg. 40)

"I was a witness to how intelligent protest can cause real change." (pg. 51)

"... the catastrophic human condition - which is to say, the certain death of the flesh ..." (pg. 85)

"'Try again. Fail again. Fail better' - that's how Beckett saw it." (pg. 86)

"The central question ... the problem of evil ... doesn't go away ... But the fact that there is no reasoned-out answer doesn't turn you cynical. You live with the reality that the question remains, a challenge to your mind and your heart. You can't bring back the bodies that died in the Atlantic Ocean during the slave trade. You can't reconcile a tidal wave wiping out an entire city with the notion of a sovereign God. You can't equate catastrophe with the human condition - but you can, following the teachings of this particular Palestinian Jew, do what you can to help the least among us." (pg. 101)

[Concerning Haitian Emperor Haile Selassie's being deposed in 1974] "Some estimate that over 20 percent of all young people were killed. If your offspring was murdered, and you wished to reclaim his body, you were forced to stand in line and pay for the bullets that killed him." (pg. 143)

"... the widespread accommodation of American religion to the political and cultural status quo ... encourages an existential emptiness and political irrelevance ... worships the gods created by American society and kneels before the altars created by American culture." (pg. 147)

"... what would be Maestro Herbert von Karajan's last performance ... he ... invited me to stand in the wings to watch him conduct Bruckner's Seventh Symphony. By the time he put down the baton, he was so depleted that he couldn't walk. I carried him off the stage." (pg. 157)

"... looking at ourselves through the eyes of others who devalue us." (pg. 172)

"... either/or, absolutist, and supremacist mindsets lead to spiritual dead-ends." (pg. 173)

"... I learned that a man wearing a mask had broken into the kitchen and put a gun with a silencer to [former wife Elleni's] head. He wanted to know where I was." (pg. 177)

"We live in a creative tension with catastrophe." (pg. 179)

"God does not wink at America and close divine eyes to other nations." (pg. 186)

[Regarding failure to be above the fray] "... sometimes we fall into the muddy waters that we're trying to avoid." (pg. 188)

"To be an Afro-American ... is to be in the situation, intolerably exaggerated, of all those who have ever found themselves part of a civilization which they could in no wise honorably defend ... yet ... hoping to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life." (pg. 209)

"... I had heard of a sarcastic memo at the World Bank, where [its former chief economist-turned-Harvard President Lawrence] Summers reportedly suggested shipping polluted materials to sub-Saharan Africa. The reasoning was that the region already suffered from overpopulation, and was under-polluted." (pg. 217)

"Deep and mature spirituality is rooted in a wrestling with catastrophe." (pg. 225)

[Regarding disappointment with others] "I have come to realize that everybody's who they are, and not somebody else." (pg. 239)

"... we must not confuse the empty media category of 'post-racial' with the reality of America becoming less racist. The former is an empty illusion, the latter is a grand achievement." (pg.240)

[Political centrism] moves toward the center for likeability, when often the truth lies not in the middle, but beneath the mediocrity of the superficial exchange." (pg. 241)

Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity

The following are excerpts from this book by former advertising copywriter, cartoonist, and pundit Hugh MacLeod.

"Ignore everybody … The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you … trusting your feelings is not as easy as the optimists say it is ... what [feelings] tell us and what the rest of the world tells us are often two different things." (pg. 1)

“… trying desperately to pry my career out of the jaws of mediocrity … It was so liberating … to have something that didn’t require somebody else’s money, or somebody else’s approval, for a change.” (pg. 6)

“… if somebody wants to rip my idea off, go ahead … unlike me, you won’t be doing it for the joy of it. You’ll be doing it for some self-loathing, ill-informed, lame-ass mercenary reason.” (pg. 10)

“What a happy coincidence. God hates the same people I do.” (pg. 13)

“… the problem of selling a new idea to the general public can sometimes be a piece of cake, compared to selling a new idea internally to your team. This is to be expected: having your boss or biggest client not like your idea and fire you, hits one at a much more immediate and primal level, than having some abstract housewife in rural Kansas hypothetically not like your idea, after randomly seeing it advertised somewhere.” (pg. 15)

“Good ideas don’t exist in a vacuum. Good ideas exist in a social context. And not everybody has the same agenda as you.” (pg. 16)

[On the creative impulse] “Your wee voice doesn’t want you to sell something. Your wee voice wants you to make something. There’s a big difference. Your wee voice doesn’t give a damn about publishers, venture capitalists, or Hollywood producers.” (pg. 27)

“Keep your day job.” (pg. 30)

[On creativity by committee] “‘I don’t know. What do you think?’ ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’ ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’ ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’ ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’ ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’” (pg. 36)

“You are the most important person in my life. Please stop laughing at me.” (pg. 38)

“There’s no correlation between creativity and equipment ownership … A fancy tool just gives the second-rater one more pillar to hide behind.” (pg. 44)

“Don’t try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether … There’s no point trying to do the same thing as 250,000 other young hopefuls, waiting for a miracle. All existing business models are wrong. Find a new one.” (pg. 48)

“Is your plan unique? Is there nobody else doing it? Then I’d be excited. A little scared, maybe, but excited.” (pg. 50)

[On assuming that one’s creative efforts will not pay off] The obvious advantage to this angle is … if anything good comes of it, then it’s an added bonus. The second … is that by scuppering all hope of worldly and social betterment from the creative act, you are finally left with only one question to answer: Do you make this damn thing exist or not? And once you can answer that truthfully for yourself, the rest is easy.” (pg. 53)

“The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally, is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, from what you are not. Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring. Know this and plan accordingly.” (pg. 64)

“The market for something to believe in is infinite.” (pg. 75)

“The choice of media is irrelevant.” (pg. 85)

“It’s hard to sell out if nobody has bought in.” (pg. 91)

“He had original ideas once. But then he got famous.” (pg. 91)

“Nobody cares. Do it for yourself. Everybody is too busy with their own lives to give a damn about your book, painting, screenplay, etc., especially if you haven’t finished it yet.” (pg. 93)

“Welcome to nobody cares. Population: 6 billion.” (pg. 94)

“Worrying about ‘Commercial vs. Artistic’ is a complete waste of time.” (pg. 96)

“Inspiration precedes the desire to create, not the other way around.” (pg. 99)

“You have to find a way of working that makes it dead-easy to take full advantage of your inspired moments. They never hit at a convenient time, nor do they last long ... Writer’s block is just a symptom of feeling like you have nothing to say, combined with the rather weird idea that you should feel the need to say something.” (pg. 100)

“Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else’s voice but your own.” (pg. 103)

[On connecting with an audience/market] “You can’t love a crowd the same way you can love a person.” (pg. 107)

“… there’s really only one way to truly connect. One way that actually works: Write from the heart. There is no silver bullet.” (pg. 108)

“The best way to get approval is not to need it.” (pg. 110)

“Stay ahead of the culture by creating the culture.” (pg. 115)

“Anyone can be an idealist. Anyone can be a cynic. The hard part lies somewhere in the middle – that is, being human.” (pg. 117)

“It’s not what the software does. It’s what the user does.” (pg. 118)

[On frugality] “Part of being creative is learning how to protect your freedom. That includes freedom from avarice.” (pg. 124)

“… which do I think is a better career choice: ‘Creativity’ or ‘Money’? I say both are the wrong answer. The best thing to be in this world is an effective human being. Sometimes that requires money, sometimes it doesn’t. Be ready for either when it happens.” (pp. 129-130)

“Beware of turning hobbies into jobs … ‘A man needs both …’” (pp. 132-133)

“Savor obscurity while it lasts. Once you ‘make it,’ your work is never the same ... It’s hard to invent a new language when a lot of people are already heavily invested in your work (including yourself).” (pp. 136-137)

“If you are successful, it’ll never come from the direction you predicted. Same is true if you fail.” (pg. 149)

The Predictioneer's Game

The following are excerpts from this book by Dr. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a political scientist, senior fellow at the Stanford University Hoover Institution, and game theorist.

"... Cambodia's Pol Pot ... ordered the murder of millions of Cambodians for such crimes as wearing eyeglasses (proof that they were educated and therefore probably a threat to the regime)." (pg. xii)

"The difference between doing a good job and doing a lousy job is driven by how many people a leader has to keep happy." (pg. xiii)

"All that is needed is a tool ... that ... evaluates [information] by assuming that everyone does what they think is best for them ... progress being made in demystifying the world of human thought and decision." (pg. xix)

"Prediction with game theory ... means empathizing with how others think about the same problems." (pg. xx)

"... what game theorists call a 'costly signal'." (pg. 4)

"To be a successful prognosticator, it is critical to think about ... what [others] think, what they think you think, what you think they think. what you think they think you think ... the existence of something called the national interest - may be just a strategic fiction created by politicians for their own advantage instead of ours ... how to use logic to cut through the fog of language." (pg. 11)

"Lies are a part of strategizing ... When promises and interests differ, people ... do whatever they think will benefit them most." (pg. 12)

"Trust but verify." (pg. 13)

"Rational people know when to stop searching [for information] - when enough is enough ... people with crazy ideas can be perfectly rational." (pg. 16)

"Sometimes we have to make decisions even though we are in the dark about the consequences." (pg. 17)

"... manage the range of consequences ..." "... people act on expectations ..." "Tipping is illegal in China." (pg. 18)

"... our leaders really are free to pursue their own interests and to call that the national interest or the corporate interest." (pg. 24)

"The key to any of these games is sorting out the difference between knowledge and beliefs." (pg. 25)

"... whether what they believe is consistent with their new knowledge ... to predict the future we have to reflect on when people are likely to lie and when they are most likely to tell the truth." (pg. 27)

"... engineering the future by exploiting leverage that really does not exist ... Raising the stakes helps flush out the bluffers ... Getting the best results [in bluff detection] comes down to matching actions to beliefs." (pg. 28)

"... what game theorists call a hand wave--that is, at some point the analyst waves his hands in the air instead of providing the logical connection from argument to conclusions." (pg. 29)

"... correlation is not causation ... decisions can be altered by the expectation of their consequences ... a superbly descriptive label for a problem in enforcing contracts. [Economists] ask, is the contract 'negotiation-proof'?" (pg. 31)

"Justice gave way, as it so often does in our judicial system, to the relative ability of plaintiffs and defendants to endure pain." (pg. 32)

"Agenda control--determining the order of decision making--can be everything." (pg. 42)

"... numbers are clear; words are vague." (pg. 52)

"... the CIA has checked out the risk that different experts give greatly different answers leading to greatly different predictions." (pg. 54)

"a lot of classified information is easily reproduced from open, public sources for those who are willing to work at it ... Everyone shares these two goals: get their preferred outcome, and get credit for any outcome." (pg. 55)

"... we can define a player's power--the pressure they really exert to shape the outcome--as equal to their influence multiplied by their salience [i.e. how salient the issue is for them]." (pg. 57)

"Framing the problem is usually the hardest part of the prediction and engineering process." (pg. 67)

"... an 'issue' is any specific question for which different individuals, organized groups, or informal interested parties have different preferences regarding the outcome, and for which it is true that an overall agreement cannot be reached unless at least a key set of players come to agreement on the question." (pg. 70)

"... to signal the other side that they are up against deep pockets that can endure high costs to fight the good fight. The message: 'We will keep you embattled in motions, countermotions, and delays until we break the bank. We can spend more than you.' ... playing the game called the war of attrition." (pg. 88)

"Imagine trying to win at chess when the rules for winning change with each opponent, as they do in the negotiating game!" (pg. 94)

"It takes a courageous person to defy one's own beliefs ..." (pg. 97)

"Sometimes it is worse to win in court than to accept a plea agreement, even when you are innocent." (pg. 100)

"The belief that good deeds, whatever their motivation, will elicit a good response, reflects optimism about human nature that sometimes is met by reality, but all too often is met instead with greed and aggression." (pg. 104-105)

"Management can be a profile in courage by cutting off revenues today to prevent bigger headaches tomorrow, but most profiles in courage, as it turns out, lose their jobs." (pg. 123)

"Models fail for three main reasons: the logic fails to capture what actually goes on in people's heads when they make choices; the information going into the model is wrong - garbage in, garbage out; or something outside the frame of reference of the model occurs to alter the situation, throwing it off course." (pg. 124)

"... an unusual stakeholder ... was content to fail while sticking to her principles." (pg. 127)

"There are two ways to maneuver into a winning position. One is to persuade others to adopt your point of view. The other is to adopt theirs." (pg. 128)

"... how can you predict the unpredictable? Well, although it is impossible to anticipate unpredictable developments, it is possible to predict how big an 'earthquake' is needed to disrupt a prediction." (pg. 130)

"Real people may not be able to do the cumbersome math that goes into a model, but that doesn't mean they aren't making much more complicated calculations in their heads even if they don't know how to represent their analytic thought processes mathematically." (pg. 135)

"... self-interest will beat out the collective good just about every time." (pg. 146)

"Getting some benefit sooner is always worth more than getting it later." (pg. 159)

"The beauty of a model is the freedom it gives us to ask lots of what-if questions." (pg. 161)

"... When a campaigner promises peace and prosperity, motherhood and apple pie, we don't really learn anything about what they plan to do." (pg. 166)

"... any predictioneer worth his or her salt must be willing to risk the embarrassment that comes from being wrong." (pg. 171)

"Just as modern-day central banks increase interest rates to slow growth, so the twelfth-century [Catholic] Church raised interest rates by denying heaven to those who lent money for profit." (pg. 210)

"The path to forgiveness ... generally included making financial restitution to the Church rather than to those from whom a profit had been made." (pg. 211)

"Two common ordeals, both supervised by the Church, involved submersion of the accused in deep water or forcing the accused to hold a red-hot piece of iron for a prescribed amount of time. Failure to stay submerged ... was taken as proof of guilt, as was the inability to hold the red-hot iron." (pg. 213)

"... exercises in what game theorists call cheap talk. Promises are easily made but not easily enforced." (pg. 222)

"To get everyone to agree to something potentially costly, the something they actually agree to must be neither very demanding nor very costly. If it is, many will refuse to join because for them the costs are greater than the benefits, or else they will join while free-riding on the costs paid by a few who were willing to bear them." (pg. 223)

"Cheating is an equilibrium strategy for many polluters, a strategy backed by the good faith and credit of their governments." (pg. 224)