“The lesson is an obvious one, but still difficult to practice: to be curious we have to slow down. To learn, your mind, body, and heart need to be open and absorbent, and that requires slowing down. In the world you are being born into, son, slowing down is hard. It’s something you are never taught. In the world today, you will be trained, cajoled, and incentivized to do the opposite - the world will do everything it can to get you to go fast. But you don’t have to always acquiesce.”
“If you decide that choosing goodness over power matters to you, and that you want to learn to choose it, you must know what it is. You have to understand goodness to choose it. But as I’ve mentioned already, goodness and an understanding of it doesn’t grow on trees. You’re not born with that knowledge at birth, you have to go figure it out, you have to earn it and learn it. And therefore, you must want to learn it.”
“Perhaps, if we could have such an incredible level of abundance that relative levels of scarcity between people were negligible, maybe that would be sufficient to resolve the corruption problem. If that were true, maybe we wouldn’t have to struggle with the incredibly difficult challenge of becoming men that choose goodness. But that’s not the world we live in, at least right now. That level of abundance is not yet real. We are not off the hook.”
“I hope you are persuaded that our freedom, from the ever growing reach of rules and institutions, is inextricably linked to goodness.”
“I’ve come to believe that that if you eliminate artificial, impractical, purely academic distinctions, mortal men are driven by two things that often come into tension with each other: the desire for power and the desire for goodness.”
“This book is dedicated to you, your mother, and your grandparents. You, in particular are the inspiration for this book. But it's not for you. It's for me.”
The Business of Urban Growth: Modeling The Value Creation And Capture Of Civic Enterprises
I completed this independent study paper in graduate school under the direction of Allan Afuah. It explores how leaders of "civic enterprises" can use business modeling techniques to guide decision-making.
My goal is to reflect on what I've learned, every single day.
I'd like to focus all my effort so that it contributes to a specific, impactful, result.
My goal is to speak more decisively, and cut straight to the point when the situation I'm in merits it.
I was a writing and research assistant for this paper on how work environments can enable rapid performance improvement published by Deloitte University Press.