So what’s the conclusion? I think that if you really want to help the poor, prepare to develop some technology that will benefit the rich (so that they will pay for the development). That prescription is as paradoxical as the admonition that if you want peace, you should prepare for war. The Zen of Development.
Category: Green Quotes
Charlie Munger provides this quote from the book, “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth” by Benjamin Friedman.
“Where there is no bread, there is no law; where there is no law, there is no bread”
- Rabbi Elizar Ben Azariah
Warren Buffett once said: “I think you can learn a lot from other people. In fact, I think if you learn basically from other people, you don’t have to get too many ideas on your own. You can just apply the best of what you see.”
“Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.” –Laurence J. Peter
DailyLit is an interesting experiement. They send you bit sized chuncks of book everyday by email. I have started reading Henry Ford’s My Life and Work.
Some excerpts from the first installment (1 of 102).
When one speaks of increasing power, machinery, and industry there comes up a picture of a cold, metallic sort of world in which great factories will drive away the trees, the flowers, the birds, and the green fields. And that then we shall have a world composed of metal machines and human machines. With all of that I do not agree. I think that unless we know more about machines and their use, unless we better understand the mechanical portion of life, we cannot have the time to enjoy the trees, and the birds, and the flowers, and the green fields.
[...]
Power and machinery, money and goods, are useful only as they set us free to live. They are but means to an end. For instance, I do not consider the machines which bear my name simply as machines. If that was all there was to it I would do something else. I take them as concrete evidence of the working out of a theory of business, which I hope is something more than a theory of business–a theory that looks toward making this world a better place in which to live…[...]
The natural thing to do is to work–to recognize that prosperity and happiness can be obtained only through honest effort. Human ills flow largely from attempting to escape from this natural course. I have no suggestion which goes beyond accepting in its fullest this principle of nature. I take it for granted that we must work. All that we have done comes as the result of a certain insistence that since we must work it is better to work intelligently and forehandedly; that the better we do our work the better off we shall be. All of which I conceive to be merely elemental common sense.
Life’s whispers are often soft and subtle. They come without warning. The whispers are always there—but we’re not always listening. The noise we surround ourselves with often keeps the whispers at bay. We become incapable of hearing them, until we choose to. At this point we see through fresh eyes.
I’m choosing to listen. But first I had to slow down and stop in order to do so. I had to be willing to miss the train if it meant learning something, even if just for the day. The whispers are there, waiting for us to notice them. But only if we’re open to turn our own volume down, even if only for a brief moment in time. For me, this moment just happened to be the right one.
Simple & crystal clear (to me): To give a high-impact, well-regarded, occasionally life-changing speech “to customers” I first & second & third have to focus all my restless energy on “satisfying” … myself. I must be … physically & emotionally & intellectually agitated & excited & desperate beyond measure … to communicate & connect & compel & grab by the collar & say my piece about a small number of things, often contentious and not “crowd-pleasers,” that, at the moment, are literally a matter of personal … life and death.I crave great “customer feedback”—but in no way, shape, or form am I trying to “satisfy my customer.” I am, I repeat, trying instead to satisfy me, my own deep neediness to reach out and grab my customer & connect with my customer over ideas that consume & devour me.
Hence … my “Job One” is purely selfish & internally focused, to be completely captivated by the subject matter at hand. That is, to repeat in slightly different words, Job One is … self-motivation.
Warren Bennis, my primo mentor, in On Becoming a Leader, said, “No leader sets out to be a leader per se, but rather to express him- or herself freely and fully. That is, leaders have no interest in proving themselves, but an abiding interest in expressing themselves.”
” When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? “- John Maynard Keynes
# There are no effect-free solutions. We need to guesstimate the effects of all potential solutions, measure their real effects if we put them into practice, and compare alternatives to the best of our collective ability.
# We cannot afford to paint things black or white. We need to be able to differentiate a wide range of shades of green, and be willing to give new technologies some extra slack.
But all this does serve to flag up one classic dilemma of sustainable development: namely, what happens when an initiative aimed at meeting people’s aspirations and improving their quality of life runs slap bang into environmental limits? When the social and economic pillars of sustainability, in other words, come crashing down onto the environmental one?
Source: Green Futures Blog
