Security. People naturally resist change in our personal lives. … Malia, actually, was the one who brought it up because she says, 'You know, one of the things that happens is sometimes transitions are hard, and I really enjoy my life, and I like how things are going.' And I said, 'Get in the habit of being able to embrace change, and what's new. Because you don't want to live your life where, you are held back because you've gotten too comfortable, and you are afraid of what might be out there around the corner.'
What is the most overrated virtue?
I think authenticity is a crock, and I think authenticity is overrated and talked about far too much. The problem with authenticity is it’s selfish. Authenticity enables us to say whatever we want and if people don’t like it, well I was just being authentic. It is a ticket to self-absorbed inconsistency, and I don’t think anybody we serve wants that.
Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 29 October 2020 source ↗
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Barack Obama
44th President of the United States, 2009–2017; United States Senator from Illinois 2005–2008
Recorded
Barbara Walters, ABC News 20/20, broadcast 23 December 2011, 22 December 2011
source ↗
Debbie Millman
Designer; host of Design Matters; founder of the SVA branding programme
one of the things that I learned from doing Design Matters from my guest Danny Shapiro, and I think I mentioned this in part one of my interview with Tim; confidence is overrated. Danny Shapiro has said that what is more important than confidence is courage.
Theodore Roosevelt
26th President of the United States, 1901–1909; Governor of New York 1899–1900; Assistant Secretary of the Navy 1897–1898
Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world!
Recorded
Sorbonne, Paris, The American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara, 23 April 1910
source ↗
Wisława Szymborska
Poet and essayist; Nobel laureate in Literature, 1996
All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes, but they “know.” They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments’ force. And any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
Recorded
Swedish Academy, Stockholm, 7 December 1996, The Nobel Foundation (nobelprize.org), 7 December 1996
source ↗
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Jeff Bezos, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Amartya Sen, Wisława Szymborska, Linus Torvalds, Barack Obama
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