Jays Journal Quotes

Pivoting is not the end of the disruption process, but the beginning of the next leg of your journey.

No obstacle is so big that one person with determination can't make a difference.

Pervy and redundant, don't you think?" I asked the big gay cop, who wouldn't know a va-jay-jay if it bounced up to him and sang the "Star-Spangled Banner." (You ever notice that hardly anything besides the "Star-Spangled Banner" is spangled? There's no, like, the Raisin-Spangled Scone, or the Flea-Spangled Beagle. I'm just saying.) --Being the Journal of Abby Normal

The real challenge is for each of us to determine where we feel we can make the most impact.

Lifelong learning is no longer a luxury but a necessity for employment.

Disruptors don't have to discover something new; they just have to discover a practical use for new discoveries.

The difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that successful ones know that the most unprofitable thing ever manufactured is an excuse.

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

At the heart of all sales and marketing is the ability to create demand even in the absence of logic.

You have a choice: pursue your dreams, or be hired by someone else to help them fulfill their dreams.

Every threat to the status quo is an opportunity in disguise.

All businesses -- no matter if they make dog food or software -- don't sell products, they sell solutions.

Insight and drive are all the skills you need. Everything else can be hired.

You'll never know how close you are to victory if you give up.

No one who ever led a nation got there by following the path of another.

Your energy is a valuable resource, distribute it wisely.

Starting each day with a positive mindset is the most important step of your journey to discovering opportunity.

It is not incumbent on the world to conform to your vision of change. It is up to you to explain the future in terms that those living in the past and present can follow.

Success doesn't teach as many lessons as failure

Speed to fail should be every entrepreneur's motto. When you finally find the one idea that can't be killed, go with it.

The most important tool you have on a resume is language.

To be successful, innovation is not just about value creation, but value capture.

Don't tell me about the Press. I know *exactly* who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they *ought* to run the country. The Times is read by the people who actually *do* run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who *own* the country. The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by *another* country. The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who think it is.' "Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?" "Sun readers don't care *who* runs the country - as long as she's got big tits.

A free and open Internet is a despot's worst enemy.

Be the best at what you do or the only one doing it.

A disruptor finds opportunity and profit from his misfortunes.

There is a difference between failing and failure. Failing is trying something that you learn doesn't work. Failure is throwing in the towel and giving up.

Our world's future is far more malleable and controllable than most people realize.

A negative mind will never find success. I have never heard a positive idea come from a person in a negative state.

A dream with a deadline is a goal.

Accepting that the odds are against you is the same as accepting defeat before you begin.

A career is just a longer trip with a whole lot more baggage.

You will have more regrets for the things you didn't try than the ones you tried and didn't succeed at.

An average idea enthusiastically embraced will go farther than a genius idea no one gets.

Problems are just businesses waiting for the right entrepreneur to unlock the value.

Smart entrepreneurs learn that they must fail often and fast.

Data may disappoint, but it never lies.

The majority of people are not willing to risk what they have built for the opportunity to have something better.

Would you rather work forty hours a week at a job you hate or eighty hours a week doing work you love?

Most startup failures result from entrepreneurs who are better at making excuses than products.

Data has no ego and makes an excellent co-pilot.

The heroic and often tragic stories of American whalemen were renowned. They sailed the world’s oceans and brought back tales filled with bravery, perseverance, endurance, and survival. They mutinied, murdered, rioted, deserted, drank, sang, spun yarns, scrimshawed, and recorded their musings and observations in journals and letters. They survived boredom, backbreaking work, tempestuous seas, floggings, pirates, putrid food, and unimaginable cold. Enemies preyed on them in times of war, and competitors envied them in times of peace. Many whalemen died from violent encounters with whales and from terrible miscalculations about the unforgiving nature of nature itself. And through it all, whalemen, those “iron men in wooden boats” created a legacy of dramatic, poignant, and at times horrific stories that can still stir our emotions and animate the most primal part of our imaginations. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme,” proclaimed Herman Melville, and the epic story of whaling is one of the mightiest themes in American history.

The best big idea is only going to be as good as its implementation.

Building a career or a company is about living a few years of your life like most people won't so that you can spend the rest of your life living at a level most people can't.

Corporate planning cycles are a classic example of generals fighting the last war over again instead of preparing for what might lie ahead.

If you can imagine a solution, you can make it happen.

Those that recognize the inevitability of change stand to benefit the most from it.

The customer is always right...even when they're wrong.

The joy of disruption comes from accepting that we all live in a temporal state.

The most successful people have the same twenty-four hours in a day that you do.

If you don't know where you want to be in five years, how do you ever expect to get there?

You can truly have it all, just not all at the same time.

Plan for ways to get more enjoyment into your life and you will get more joy out of it.

Whether driven by ambition or circumstance, every career gets disrupted.

Security doesn't rob ambition; the illusion of security robs ambition.

Disruption isn't about what happens to you, it's about how you respond to what happens to you.

There are riches to be found simply by capturing the value released through others' disruptive breakthroughs.

There are two types of people in this world: those whose look for opportunity and those who make it happen.

If life, you get what you believe you deserve.

The business world is littered with the fossils of companies that failed to evolve. Disrupt or be disrupted. There is no middle ground.

Billions of dollars worth of research knowledge lie dormant at American universities waiting for the right disruptor to come along and create a business.

All Disruption starts with introspection.

In life, you get what you believe you deserve.

Next, Lucas began inserting his names and places into a short narrative, not much more than a story fragment, called “The Journal of the Whills.” He envisioned borrowing a storytelling device from the old Disney cartoons, showing a storybook—in this case the Journal of the Whills—“falling

She would hate him even more if she knew all the depraved things he’d done. The fantasies, the stalking, the fucking obsession. That he had used her shampoo to jerk off and stolen her clothes, her lipstick. That when she wasn’t around, he had sometimes lain in her bed and imagined what it would be like to touch her the way she said she’d wanted to be touched in her journal. And of course, he had watched her touch herself. Every catch of her breath, every discreet rustle of fabric, every teasing glimpse of brown skin—he had seen it all, and taken it as a sign that not even Jay was immune to pleasure. And, more importantly, that he could give it to her. He could be the one to make her come.

In New York University media scholar Jay Rosen’s definition, journalism is a report on “what’s going on” in the community with which one identifies but outside the scope of individual experience: what happens in a place where you are not, at a time when you are doing something else. Journalists report on people who are unlike the people you know personally but whom you still consider your countrymen; on the proceedings and decisions of your government; on plays, movies, books, and music that you have not necessarily experienced firsthand but that form the culture in which you live. Journalism is essential to democracy because it creates a sense of shared reality across a city, a state, a nation. Without this shared reality, a public sphere—the term philosopher Jürgen Habermas uses to describe the space where public opinion takes shape—cannot exist.

Acknowledging to one another that their aim was not just to do good journalism but to improve democracy with journalism felt to them like a breakthrough.

Journalism at its best is an art practiced against this temptation. It can halt traffic, arrest our attention, say to us: 'here's something you didn't know,' or 'listen to this amazing story,' or 'let's think about that.' Done well, these pieces stop time, allowing us a glimpse of a world made more intelligible--and thus more available to our civic senses.

If Americans increasingly disdained politics because it didn't seem real to them, then journalism had to start revising its view of what the whole thing was about.

Frankel, Jay B., ‘Ferenczi’s Theory of Trauma’, American Journal of Psychoanalysis 58 (1998)

Disruption causes vast sums of money to flow from existing businesses and business models to new entrants.

Crowdsourcing is the ultimate disruptor of distribution because in a most Zen-like fashion, the content is controlled by everyone and no one at the same time.

The power of crowd sourcing always remains with the crowd, not the technological implementation.

Self-disruption is akin to undergoing major surgery, but you are the one holding the scalpel.

CEOs will gladly overpay for a company if the acquisition enables them to keep their jobs.

I find myself thinking about this hue-mon all of the time. I wonder if it ever thought about us? Was there room in here for thoughts about beetles? Did it ever wonder how some glow? Or spray liquid fire? Or dance on water? Or drink fog? Maybe someday, if a hue-mon reads this journal, it will help them appreciate all of the amazing little aliens living underfoot.

As I described in the “Uncorked!” chapter, the economic background in 1970 was turning grim, and sales were weakening. I was concerned. And then, once again, Scientific American came to the rescue. Each September that wonderful magazine devotes its entire issue to a single subject. In September 1970, it was the biosphere, a term I’d never seen before. It was the first time that a major scientific journal had addressed the problem of the environment. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, of course, had been serialized in the New Yorker in the late sixties, so the danger to the biosphere wasn’t exactly news, but it could be considered alarmist news. The prestige of Scientific American, however, carried weight. In fact, it knocked me out. I Suffered a Conversion on the Road to Damascus Within weeks, I subscribed to The Whole Earth Catalog, all the Rodale publications like Organic Gardening and Farming, Mother Earth, and a bunch I no longer remember. I was especially impressed by Francis Moore Lappé’s book Diet for a Small Planet. I joined the board of Pasadena Planned Parenthood, where I served for six years. Paul Ehrlich surfaced with his dismal, and proved utterly wrong, predictions. But hey! This guy was from Stanford! You had to believe him! And in 1972 all this was given statistical veracity by Jay Forrester of MIT, in the Club of Rome forecasts, which proved to be even further off the mark. But I bought them at the time. Bob Hanson, the manager of the new Trader Joe’s in Santa Ana, which was off to a slow start, was a health food nut. He kept bugging me to try “health foods.” After I’d read Scientific American, I was on board! Just how eating health foods would save the biosphere was never clear in my mind, or, in my opinion, in the mind of anyone else, except the 100 percent Luddites who wanted to return to some lifestyle approximating the Stone Age. After all, the motto of the Whole Earth Catalog was “access to tools,” hardly Luddite.

Think about the writers who came together to pen the Federalist Papers. Not only were there three of them—John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton—but all wrote anonymously under the pen name “Publius.” At the time, advocating for a document as revolutionary as the US Constitution was dangerous.

Once nights brought warmth and peace and rest, A lullaby within my breast. A snoring dog beside my feet, A snuggling purring kitten by my face, But, who can trust the human race?

CHAPTER 4 SUMMARY: BEST WAYS 71–80 71. When it comes to ensuring your family’s financial well-being, and securing a meaningful and rewarding job, you need to create a written action plan or a MAP (Meticulous Action Plan). 72. When you create a MAP, you are actually programming your own “employment GPS” so you can go from where you are to where you want to be. 73. When you’re done developing your action plan, you’ll have a highly structured schedule of activities for each day of the week. This includes your job transition campaign as well as your personal, social, and fitness activities. 74. If you are unemployed, you should invest 50, 60, or 70 hours a week on your job campaign. If you have a full-time job, you need to set aside a defined number of hours every week as your investment in your future. 75. Whether you are employed and looking for a better job or out of work seeking a new one, you must hold yourself fully accountable for putting in as many hours as possible and getting the most out of every hour you put in. 76. The first question you will need to address is, how many hours a week will you commit to your job transition campaign? Then, based on the number of weekly hours you’ll invest in getting a new job, your next step is to break weekly hours down into daily hours. 77. There are 13 primary job transition strategies for landing a job in troubled economic times. Your job is to determine which 4 to 6 strategies will be most effective for you. a. Networking and contact development b. Target marketing (identifying companies you want to work for) c. Internet searches and postings d. Federal jobs e. Search firms and employment agencies f. Blogs with job listings g. Classified advertisements in newspapers and trade journals h. Job fairs i. College placement departments and alumni associations j. Workforce System and One-Stops k. Volunteer work l. Job transition strategists m. Creative self-marketing 78. Once you have identified which job transition strategies will work best for your campaign, determine when, during the week, you will work on each. You want to create a structured weekly schedule. When you create a structured weekly schedule, you will have a detailed plan with specific daily tasks both for your job campaign and for personal and social activities. 79. Once you have a structured weekly schedule, you must set goals that you want to achieve from your weekly activities. A MAP without specific goals is not an effective plan. You will want to set specific goals for each strategy so you can track your success or modify the MAP if you are not achieving your weekly goals. 80. Prepare for the worst-case scenario. It is vitally important to remain in a positive, optimistic, and enthusiastic state of mind. But sometimes your plan won’t come to fruition as quickly as you’d like. So expect the best, but plan for the worst. This would include looking at your long- and short-term finances and health and other issues that need to be addressed to free you up to concentrate on getting your next job.

Swap After spotting and stopping the negativity in your heart, mind, and speech, you can begin to amend it. Most of us monks were unable to completely avoid complaining, comparing, and criticizing—and you can’t expect you’ll be completely cured of that habit either—but researchers have found that happy people tend to complain… wait for it… mindfully. While thoughtlessly venting complaints makes your day worse, it’s been shown that writing in a journal about upsetting events, giving attention to your thoughts and emotions, can foster growth and healing, not only mentally, but also physically. We can be mindful of our negativity by being specific. When someone asks how we are, we usually answer, “good,” “okay,” “fine,” or “bad.” Sometimes this is because we know a truthful, detailed answer is not expected or wanted, but we tend to be equally vague when we complain. We might say we’re angry or sad when we’re offended or disappointed. Instead, we can better manage our feelings by choosing our words carefully. Instead of describing ourselves as feeling angry, sad, anxious, hurt, embarrassed, and happy, the Harvard Business Review lists nine more specific words that we could use for each one of these emotions. Instead of being angry, we might better describe ourselves as annoyed, defensive, or spiteful. Monks are considered quiet because they are trained to choose their words so carefully that it takes some time. We choose words carefully and use them with purpose. So much is lost in bad communication. For example, instead of complaining to a friend, who can’t do anything about it, that your partner always comes home late, communicate directly and mindfully with your partner. You might say, “I appreciate that you work hard and have a lot to balance. When you come home later than you promised, it drives me crazy. You could support me by texting me as soon as you know you’re running late.” When our complaints are understood—by ourselves and others—they can be more productive.