Asklemmy

"We're getting paid to put paint on the wall."

I was like 17 or so and had a temp job as a housepainter for a couple weeks, and I was sinking time and energy into doing an excellent job and being really efficient with paint and ... kind of missing the forest for the trees. I was putting unnecessary care & excellence into a back wall and the wall was taking longer to prep than the whole-house job could afford. One of the old guys on site pulled me aside me and, in the eloquent terms above, pointed out that ... the real goal here is paint on the wall. We're doing a good job because we take pride in our work, but the outcome is significantly more important than the journey to everyone else. Doing a "good job" can't wind up as an obstacle to the job itself.

I was always a details person and perfectionist, and that one clear lesson about taking a step back from the details of a task to double-check what the actual goal is ... has always stuck with me.

Failure is always an option. - Adam Savage

@zinklog

Listen

There is only one way to make people talk more than they care to. Listen. Listen with hungry earnest attention to every word. In the intensity of your attention, make little nods of agreement, little sounds of approval. You can’t fake it. You have to really listen. In a posture of gratitude. And it is such a rare and startling experience for them, such a boon to ego, such a gratification of self, to find a genuine listener, that they want to prolong the experience. And the only way to do that is to keep talking. A good listener is far more rare than an adequate lover.

-Travis McGee
from Nightmare in Pink
by John D. McDonald

"It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier but you gotta do it every day, that's the hard part, but it does get easier".

As far as I'm concerned, everyone owns themselves watching Bojack Horseman.

Strong Pokémon. Weak Pokémon. That is only the selfish perception of people. Truly skilled trainers should try to win with their favorites.

• Elite 4 Karen, Pokémon Gold and Silver

A falling knife has no handle.

I literally repeat this out loud anytime a knife falls and I think it's become my mental stopping mechanism to make sure I don't try to catch it.

“No one is going to write you were a good employee on your headstone. “

And

“Time is the one form of compensation you can never recoup. “

Meaning Time off from work is valuable, more so than the $$ value especially once you get to a certain point.

The Serenity Prayer - "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference."

I don't consider myself very religious, but this has always stuck with me.

"What stands in the way becomes the way." - Marcus Aurelius

You don't have to set yourself on fire to keep others warm.

"I prefer the sharp dagger of the truth over the sweet poison of a lie." - My ex girlfriend

"The things you own end up owning you." - Tyler Durden

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Frank Herbert, Dune

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

"Many hands make light work"

As a young child I interpreted this as acknowledging all of the people involved in:

• Mining and transporting coal
• Running the powerplant
• Installing and maintaining the powerlines
• Wiring the house
• Manufacturing the lightswitch, light socket, light bulb, etc

All so I can flick a switch and turn on a light in my house. It really shows that all the small things we take for granted rely on a well functioning society.

Then when I was around 10 or so someone used it in a context where it's usual interpretation was the only one that made sense.

“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness—that is life.” - Capt. Picard, Star Trek TNG

I've got two:

“The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.” by Terence McKenna

And the other is from an old salty chief when I was in the navy. This is paraphrasing but:

"Every fuck up comes down to a combination of three root causes: didn't know, didn't care, or a material problem"

Someone gets hurt on the job? Well, did they not know they were doing something wrong? Did they not care enough about safety? Or was it simply because something broke? Maybe they didn't know AND they didn't care to find out.

"You can't unshit yourself".

A bit crass maybe but it's always stuck with me. Basically a way of thinking in bad situations that need action eg if you've shat yourself, no amount of wishing you hadn't is going to change the fact that you've shat yourself, so what are you going to actually do about it?

Hopefully it's metaphorical but works on both counts.

"Dude, suckin' at something is the first step to being sorta good at something." - Jake the Dog, Adventure Time.

“Knowledge is power; France is bacon”

"Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things."

I once overheard a pair of utility workers talking, and as I walked past I only overheard a snippet of conversation. The older one yelled up the cherrypicker to the younger one and said, in a heavy Boston accent:

"If only you could use your powers for good, instead of for useless..."

That sentence is seared into my brain.

"Only when the white man has destroyed the whole forest, has killed fish and animals and all rivers are dry, will realize that no one can eat money. "

"Compassion is priceless in the truest sense of the word. It must be given freely. In abundance. "- Steven Erikson.

"Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool." -Mark Twain

"You are too concerned what was and what will be. Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called present."- Master Oogway.

"I never lose, either I win or I learn."

As fluffy as this quote sounds, I always find it relevant. From taking on a difficult task at work, to getting past ladder anxiety in a video game. If you've ever executed on something so well that afterwards you felt like it was a waste of time, it might be. You didn't get an opportunity to learn. Which reminds me of another relevant quote, "Losing is fun!"

In German but "As long as they pretend to pay me, I pretend to work." Probably one of the first pieces of wisdom I got way back as a wee apprentice.

Now, I work more than this quote may make one think of me, but it‘s influenced me insofar as I‘m aware of not overdoing it as my employers never overdo the pay part either.

If something is worth doing, it's worth doing well.

Said by a friend who, in the late 90s, copied a dozen albums to minidisk for me. He named all the albums and track names using a remote to select each letter one by one. It must have taken him many hours to do it. But he wanted to do a good job. Up up up up A right, up up up up up f, etc etc. Utterly tedious but he wanted to do a good job.

"Our prime purpose in this world is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them."

• The Dalai Lama

“A journey will have pain and failure. It is not only the steps forward that we must accept. It is the stumbles. The trials. The knowledge that we will fail. That we will hurt those around us.

But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fail, the journey ends. That failure becomes our destination.”

Dalinar Kholin, from the Stormlight Archive

"No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away..." - Terry Pratchet

Never play an ace if a two will do.

"Don't have a wish bone where a back bone should be."

"Once a man, twice a child."

I see now that the circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are.

• Mewtwo

I thought about that quote a lot when I first began transitioning.

THERE IS NO JUSTICE, JUST US. ~Mort

Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

Instead of focusing exclusively on how fast you can get to the finish, which may result in missteps along the way that slow you down, focus on moving smoothly accounting for variables that might make the journey more rough and doing what you can to plan for/avoid them. Making everything "smooth sailing" all the way to the finish line. There's a dozen different interpretations that can be applied here, and it's more or less an adaptation of "slow and steady wins the race" but it's so broad that it's generally true.

Sometimes, speed for the sake of speed is faster, period, but often speed for the sake of speed comes with compromises and issues along the way which may make the whole process slower over all. I'd rather go smoothly than quickly.

A good real-world example of this is stop and go traffic. Instead of going quickly to catch up to the person ahead of you, then stopping abruptly, if you instead go at a slow/steady rate, you will burn less fuel, consume less of you brake material, and over all have a more pleasant drive than if you're constantly stopping and going. In addition, if everyone were to adhere to this in heavy traffic, then most traffic jams would very likely be less impactful on travel delays. You'd get through congestion easier and with less frustration, and very likely arrive sooner, feeling more calm and relaxed.

Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

"Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum."

My second favourite: "Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of '99

Wear Sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it.

A long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists

Whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable, than my own meandering experience."

Never pee against the wind.

"Never hesitate to state the obvious", for socially awkward teenager-me this was a game changer how to participate in conversation. I still live by it and it's really useful in meetings, as it also brings real value to the conversation, as whatever is obvious to you isn't necessarily obvious to others. And even if everyone knew, it may still spark a discussion.

Oof, I have quite a lot. One of my favourites is, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

I find it immensely relatable, as I think a huge number of problems in the world today stem from simply apathy. People who say they dislike the state of the world and even that they want to change it, but refuse to do absolutely anything at all, being perfectly content to just let bad things happen.

I reject your reality and substitute it with my own

This line from Schindler's List always stuck with me:

“Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.”

The context is that at the end of the movie Schindler is distraught thinking of how many more he could have saved if he just did certain things differently, like selling a ring and using that money to hire another Jewish worker. One of the people he saved tells him the above line.

It's stuck with me for two reasons, I think.

First, it's an interesting perspective on individuality. Each person has their own unique perspective of the world. When that person dies, that perspective is gone forever. An entire universe dies with them, never to be seen again. I think that's a powerful way to view the individual.

Second, it's a reminder that we do what we can, and while it may be imperfect, it's enough. You can't save everyone, just live well and help those you can in the capacity that you can. If you save one of those people, you've saved the world.

Everything remains possible, as long as you don't choose.

Mr. Nobody (2009)

"Many that live deserve death and some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be so eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the wise cannot see all ends." Gandalf, Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring

For some reason, this quote (and the entirety of Gollum's story) has stuck itself in my head. I guess I interpret this as a message to not be so quick to judge death upon another person, no matter what they had done. You never know what their future will be like, and cutting their lives off would mean losing out on the potential benefits that their future might bring. Even bad people can contribute good things. I know that this is just my personal opinion, and a lot of people probably won't agree with this, but this is the lesson that I got from Gollum's story.