What I'm Reading...

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

— Aristotle

Steve Jobs on creativity:

To be a creative person, you need to “feed” or “invest” in yourself by exploring uncharted paths that are outside the realm of your past experience. Seek out new dimensions of yourself—especially those that carry a romantic scent.

But one has no way of knowing which of these paths will lead anywhere in advance. That’s the wonderful thing about it, in a way. The only thing one can do is to believe that some of what you follow with your heart will indeed come back to make your life much richer. And it will. And you will gain an ever firmer trust in your instincts and intuition.

— Steve Jobs, Make Something Wonderful

John Dewey:

Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy.

The late Clayton Chrtistensen in How Will You Measure Your Life?:

The final element is execution. The only way a strategy can get implemented is if we dedicate resources to it. Good intentions are not enough—you’re not implementing the strategy that you intend if you don’t spend your time, your money, and your talent in a way that is consistent with your intentions.

Richard Rumelt, in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy:

It takes years for a formerly regulated company, or a former monopolist, to wring excess staff expense and other costs out of its system and to stop its accountants from making arbitrary allocations of overhead expenses to activities and products.

In the meantime, these mental and accounting biases mean that such companies can be expected to wind down some product lines that are actually profitable and continue to invest in some products and activities that offer no real returns.