Bryan Strawser

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Emails to the Team

Hesitancy

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Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!”

– W.H. Murray, via svn.

Think about what you should be doing…

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Late in the afternoon of May 6th, 1864, Confederate General Jubal Early successfully attacked troops under the command of General John Sedgwick.

During that night, General Grant was receiving reports about the “disaster” that had befallen Sedgwick, one of the Union generals expressed grave concerns that Lee would follow up on the Confederate success and move to cut off the Union Army.

Grant said:

Some of you always seem to think that he [Lee] is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time.

Now, go… and try to think about what we are going to do ourselves – instead of what Lee is going to do.

The Lesson: It’s important to know and think about what your competitors may be planning, and the impact that could have upon you… but it is even more important to be thinking about what you could be doing yourself.

Failures

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An inventor is simply a person who doesn’t take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates from college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. It he succeeds once then he’s in. These two things are diametrically opposite. We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

— Charles Kettering

Wisdom from Ralph Waldo Emerson

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To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,  that is genius.

 Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the utmost and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment… A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another…

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson