Quotes About Influence

with the very long-term political class.

Men are what their mothers made them. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, The Conduct of Life

Jim Harrison's novels, John McPhee's nonfiction, Flannery O'Connor's short stories, and the crime novels of John Sandford, Ken Bruen, and T. Jefferson Parker.

I've been doing this a long time- manipulating people to get my way. That's why you think you love me. Because I've broken you down and built you back up to believe it. It wasn't an accident. Once you leave this behind..... you'll see that. -Caleb

This, I thought, was how the real power-play went: conversations in corners and gardens, nods, shrugs, inclinations of the head. But nothing in writing.

But you were wrong; given the right circumstances fascism can infest any country, feeding off the hatreds and nationalisms that already exist. Nobody is safe.' 'I know.

What are any of us but pawns in the schemes of the great?

At every turn, girls - even the most carefully raised and deeply loved - are surrounded by a popular culture that exhorts them to think of themselves as sexually disposable creatures.

how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

it has the three traits that make people love their work: impact, creativity, and control.

Leave good evidence of yourself. Do good work.

We didn't sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors.

this irresistible attraction to screens is leading people to feel as though they're ceding more and more of their autonomy when it comes to deciding how they direct their attention. No one, of course, signed up for this loss of control. They downloaded the apps and set up accounts for good reasons, only to discover, with grim irony, that these services were beginning to undermine the very values that made them appealing in the first place:

the second force that encourages behavioral addiction: the drive for social approval. As Adam Alter writes: "We're social beings who can't ever completely ignore what other people think of us."18 This behavior, of course, is adaptive. In Paleolithic times, it was important that you carefully managed your social standing with other members of your tribe because your survival depended on it.

Is Silicon Valley programming apps or are they programming people?" Cooper asks. "They are programming people,

or eliminate the need to carry a separate iPod and phone—and then found ourselves, years later, increasingly dominated by their influence, allowing them to control more and more of how we spend our time, how we feel, and how we behave.

locus of control theory, a subfield of personality psychology that argues that motivation is closely connected to whether people feel like they have control over their ultimate success in an endeavor.

The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, . . . was all about: "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?" And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.

Philip Morris just wanted your lungs," Maher concludes. "The App Store wants your soul.

Indeed, if you study the lives of other influential figures from both distant and recent history, you'll find that a commitment to deep work is a common theme.

companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful marketing coup: convincing our culture that if you don't use their products you might miss out.

He called such a culture a technopoly, and he didn't mince words in warning against it. "Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World," he argued in his 1993 book on the topic. "It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.

intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

Just because you cannot avoid this tool altogether doesn't mean you have to cede all authority over its role in your mental landscape