Quotes About Impact

The Law of the Vital Few*: In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes.

they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values.

the notification symbol for Facebook was originally blue, to match the palette of the rest of the site, "but no one used it."16 So they changed the color to red—an alarm color—and clicking skyrocketed.

common term I heard in these conversations about modern digital life was exhaustion. It's not that any one app or website was particularly bad when considered in isolation. As many people clarified, the issue was the overall impact of having so many different shiny baubles pulling so insistently at their attention and manipulating their mood.

Others, such as Alan Lightman, or Erez Lieberman, who earned fame by the age of thirty-one through his combination of mathematics and cultural studies, or Esther Duflo, who won a MacArthur "Genius Grant" for her work evaluating anti-poverty programs, didn't make the cut for the book, but still weigh heavily on my thinking about how to best shape my own career. It

We justify many of the technologies that tyrannize our time and attention with some tangential connection to something we care about.

we should treat with great care any new technology that threatens to disrupt the ways in which we connect and communicate with others. When you mess with something so central to the success of our species, it's easy to create problems.

Un libro extenso es un gran mal.

belief in what he called "context": the theory that every man's actions are to a very decisive extent influenced by his early experiences, and that no man's behavior can be analyzed or affected without knowledge of those experiences.

Strike so that he may feel he is dying.

Mega biblion, mega kakon (Big book, big evil)

I have noticed that nothing I never said ever did me any harm.

We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.

I have noticed that nothing I have never said ever did me any harm.

I have never been hurt by what I have not said.

Without application, preaching is at best a lecture and at worst entertainment.

If anybody is left behind in a congregation of a thousand, the preacher has not preached well.

The best of sermons have never been a belch of information or piety.

People want to be impacted by "the great beyond of the Holy Spirit.

Intensity is both the communicator's best friend and worst enemy. To really hold an audience, they must sense that what you are saying is important, at least to you.

A single sermon is not likely to effect much change.

Great sermon theses are powerful acids that etch themselves on the "have-tos" of the speaker. They are rarely written down. They don't need to be. They have already been written boldly on the preacher's soul.

Churches that ignore their communities will not grow, and churches that will not globalize don't matter much.

I think there is a great deal to the idea of not doing a thing, but that when you do a thing, you don't do it in five minutes or in five hours, but in five years. I think there's an element in the slowness of the execution that adds to the possibility of producing something that will be durable in its expression, that will be considered important five centuries later.