Quotes About Relevance

needed to be wanted. I couldn't go on without being wanted. And I couldn't stop thinking about that little bitch at the restaurant. I used to be that woman, I thought. I used to be the one who turned heads. Now…Christ…I was becoming invisible.

That was probably how religion worked. The triumph of loneliness over intelligence. And why not? Why shouldn't religion be exactly the same as everything else? Faith, hope and charity: as relevant as serving suggestions.

One day as we were doing our bookwork, a teacher suddenly asked us to help him remove all the desks and chairs from the center of the classroom. Then he sat us all down in a circle, brought out his guitar, and sang songs. We recognized the lyrics—the poems and stories we ourselves had written! After that I wrote more, searching dictionaries for new words to express myself. Every day we walked out of class believing that what we did mattered.

It's more effective to do something valuable than to hope a logo or name will say it for you.

To do great work, you need to feel that you're making a difference. That you're putting a meaningful dent in the universe. That you are part of something important.

Pass on hiring people you don't need, even if you think that person's a great catch.

Check the cover letter. In a cover letter, you get actual communication instead of a list of skills, verbs, and years of irrelevance.

What's our market share? Don't know, don't care. It's irrelevant. Do we have enough customers paying us enough money to cover our costs and generate a profit? Yes. Is that number increasing every year? Yes. That's good enough for us. Doesn't matter if we're 2 percent of the market or 4 percent or 75 percent. What matters is that we have a healthy business with sound economics that work for us. Costs under control, profitable sales.

The best designers and the best programmers aren't the ones with the best skills, or the nimblest fingers, or the ones who can rock and roll with Photoshop or their environment of choice, they are the ones that can determine what just doesn't matter. That's where the real gains are made.

It's not uncommon for people to pick up their phones dozens of times a day when some push notification makes it buzz, because WHAT IF IT WAS SOMETHING SUPER IMPORTANT! (It just about never is.)

If you are going to do something, do something that matters.

How should you keep track of what customers want? Don't. Listen, but then forget what people said. Seriously. There's no need for a spreadsheet, database, or filing system. The requests that really matter are the ones you'll hear over and over. After a while, you won't be able to forget them. Your customers will be your memory. They'll keep reminding you. They'll show you which things you truly need to worry about.

Write to be read, don't write just to write.

To do great work, you need to feel that you're making a difference. That you're putting a meaningful dent in the universe. That you're part of something important.

A hot dog stand isn't a hot dog stand without the hot dogs. You can take away the onions, the relish, the mustard, etc. Some people may not like your toppings-less dogs, but you'd still have a hot dog stand. But you simply cannot have a hot dog stand without any hot dogs.

Pass on hiring people you don't need, even if you think that person's a great catch. You'll be doing your company more harm than good if you bring in talented people who have nothing important to do.

We are weighted with the outmoded dreams of dead men and dead systems, walking-corpse institutions and undead, blood-sucking ideologies long past their expiration date which yet haunt the planet, entrapping the joy of the living within the dead ribcage walls of their rotting, false order, and which direly need a stake through the heart simply because they are no longer relevant.

One thing Mauser leaned over the years was that students, almost to a one, viewed the world from the inside of a fishbowl. They had the bigger points covered—genocide in Kamchatka, illegal whale hunting in the Arctic Circle, shit like the. But if you asked about anything relevant to their lives they'd look at you with glazed eyes and go right back to sipping their double-mocha lattes.

The worst thing is not to figure in a book at all, when there was a possibility of doing so.

poco es lo que se hace público, poco lo que interesa, poco lo que quiere conocer la gente, que está fijada en lo suyo, cada uno en lo propio y lo de los demás qué importa.

Lo decisivo jamás se muestra, ni siquiera se comunica, o no en su momento; al contrario, se esconde y se silencia siempre, o durante muchísimo tiempo: si acaso se cuenta cuando ya no interesa, cuando es pasado remoto, y a la gente el pasado le trae sin cuidado, cree que no le afecta y que no puede cambiarse, y lleva razón en esto último

Vieste para perceber se ainda és útil, porque necessário não é ninguém.

know that it wouldn't offend me to be a substitute, because we are all of us substitutes for someone, especially initially:

The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless.