Quotes from The Money Game by Adam Smith
6 comments
The following are a few of my favorite quotes from The Money Game by Adam Smith.
- If you really know what's going on, you don't even have to know what's going on to know what's going on.
- Enantiodromia is the tendency of men to swing to their opposites.
- Keynes said that there is nothing so disasterous as a rational policy in an irrational world.
- Samuel Johnson - "No man is so harmlessly occupied as when he is making money."
- Norman Brown - "The dynamic of capitalism is postponement of enjoyment to the constantly postponed future."
- The strongest emotions in the market are greed and fear.
- Money, contrary to popular myth, does help people more than it spoils them, simply because it opens up more options.
- Repeated shocks will give you anxiety, and anxiety is the enemy of identity, and without identity there is no serenity.
What is it the good managers have? It's a kind of locked-in concentration, an intuition, a feel, nothing that can be schooled. The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer...
A man is really at his best, his most fulfilled, when he's on the way to becoming what he's going to become... With the good men, you can see the learning juices churning around every mistake. You learn from mistakes. When I look back, my life seems to be an endless series of mistakes.
Random Friday Friendship Notes
- An old favorite band, Ladytron, plays at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta tonight. You can hear one of Ladytron's songs here.
- I really liked the first episode of Studio 60. It is great to see some West Wing faces again, and Amanda Peet's character is so hot. Her character is probably my ideal woman.
- At Waffle House I have ordered the same thing for breakfast every day for six months - a triple scrambled wheat plate, steamed. But now I am starting to ask for my eggs flipped like an omelette. It is easier to cut onto my wheat toast sandwich that way.
- Did you know... The number of people killed in all aviation accidents last year dropped to 616 from 652 in 2004. Airline fatalities increased from 14 to 22, while Part 135 deaths dropped sharply from 64 in 2004 to 18 last year. Part 91 fatalities in 2005 ticked up slightly to 562 from 558. -- source: NTSB via AINalerts
Personal Notes from a rainy Wednesday morning
Do you have difficulty waking up early in the morning? Contact me for a free wake-up call in any time zone.- Congratulations to my friend Lebbeous. He moved to Cleveland and got a job as a PHP and PostgreSQL programmer.
- Congratulations to Jeff Nolan. He is leaving SAP after nine years to start a new project that he seems pretty excited about.
- A month later, Little Miss Sunshine is still the funniest movie that I have seen all year. My eyes were watering from laughing so hard. I also saw The Puffy Chair and it was good. Hat tip to Zach on these two movies.
How to Introduce Two People via Email
Based on my experience, the best way to introduce two people on-line is as follows.
- Send an email to both people
- Use a subject such as, "Person A, meet Person B."
- In the body, I like to say something like:
Person A, you work at XXX and I met you at XXX. We did this together.
Person B, you like XXX music, you work at XXX and we met at XXX.
I think you two would benefit from knowing eachother because XXX. - Send!
It is courteous for the first responder to Reply-to-All and include the introducer in his communication with the new friend. For example, if I introduced Dan and Amanda, then I would like to see their first message carbon copy me.
To: Amanda
CC: Nick
From: Dan
Nick - thanks for the introduction!
Amanda - I live near the XXX - maybe we could meet up for coffee sometime? Give me a call... Dan
I have not made a lot of email introductions in my life - maybe a dozen or two. But if I do not get included in the initial reply back, it could be my last introduction for those people.
Why? Because I am nosy. That is the main reason.
Bonus points if you include me in the second email message, but under no circumstances would I want to be included in the third or further conversation between the parties. And EXTRA bonus points if you call and ask me if it is OK if you two start dating. (You know who you are!) Stay classy.
How I heard about Steve Irwin's death
Steve Irwin's death is perhaps the biggest news story of 2006... at least judging by the number of times I heard about it yesterday.
7:45am - I first read about Steve Irwin's death on Jess James's blog. I read my blogroll on my cell phone during breakfast.
9:00am - My mother called me at work. "Did you hear the news?"
10:00am - Steve Irwin's death was on the front page of popular news websites, such as Google News and digg.com
12:30pm - I was invited to joing The Steve Irwin Foundation on Facebook; many other Steve Irwin groups were also showing up in my network.
1:40pm - I got an email from a friend with the subject line, Oh my god, linking to an MSNBC story on Irwin
7:30pm - Steve Irwin was the center of our dinner table conversation. I think we were mostly shocked because everyone in my family has gone snorkeling or scuba diving with stingrays many times before. We never considered stingrays harmful compared to the other animals that Irwin wrestled - and I read that Irwin was only the third person in Australia's history to be killed by a stingray. Later in the dinner, I recalled some fond memories of using the phrase Crikey! , which I learned from Irwin's TV show.
9:00pm - Watched Irwin's 2004 interview with Larry King on Larry King Live.
Why is it that a quirky TV show host was able to capture the hearts of so many? I think it is because he was always excited and happy in his work.
Rest in Peace, mate.