Quotes About Challenge

Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (one of the doer-Stoic authors), "fire feeds on obstacles.

How do you innovate? First, try to get in trouble. I mean serious, but not terminal, trouble. I hold—it is beyond speculation, rather a conviction—that innovation and sophistication spark from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity (from the unintended side effects of, say, an initial invention or attempt at invention).

Freedom is always associated with risk taking, whether it leads to it or comes from it.

in Ovid, difficulty is what wakes up the genius (ingenium mala saepe movent)

An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.

It was a different feeling: it is hard to focus on a conversation, especially when it is mathematical, when you have just personally earned several hundreds of times the annual salary of the researcher trying to tell you that you are wrong, by betting against his representation of the world.

Life would be unbearably bland if we had no enemies on whom to waste efforts and energy.

Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste.1 He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will. And the softening he feared was not just at the personal level: an entire society can fall ill.

One of the problems I face in life is that whenever I tell people that the Gaussian bell curve is not ubiquitous in real life, only in the minds of statisticians, they require me to "prove it"—which is easy to do, as we will see in the next two chapters, yet nobody has managed to prove the opposite

Frano Barovi? reading this chapter wrote to me: "Machines: use it and lose it; organisms: use it or lose it." Also note that everything alive needs stressors, but not all machines need to be left alone—a point we will visit in our discussion of annealing. But

survival pressures within the organism play a role in its overall improvement under external stress.

He will be resisted by the older ones

but a problem in our minds, stemming from the way we look at it.

we got here by accident does not mean that we should continue to take the same risks.

A energia em excesso liberada em uma reação exagerada aos contratempos é o que promove a inovação! Essa

complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors.

Clearly risk taking is necessary for large success—but it is also necessary for failure.

you need to make more and more to stay in the same place.

it does not come naturally to me.*

by persons squeezed by life.

Este mult mai dificil s? pierzi într-un joc pe care l-ai pus la punct tu însuÈ›i.

Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste.1 He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will.

Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best.

Otherwise they become fragile. That, I completely missed.* Organisms need, to use the metaphor of Marcus Aurelius, to turn obstacles into fuel—just as fire does.