Quotes About Adaptation

Bottom line if you want success of any kind: you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable.

What are you not doing today that you were doing when I first met you?

We're not the Faster-than-the-Speed-of-Light Generation anymore. We're not even the Next-New-Thing Generation. We're the Soon-to-Be-Obsolete Kids, and we've crowded in here to hide from the future and the past. We know what's up – the future looms straight ahead like a black wrought-iron gate and the past is charging after us like a badass Doberman, only this one doesn't have any letup in him.

Books seem a little old-fashioned, but hey, I can do old-fashioned if it's good.

The Vietnamese have a saying that you can't use a basket to cover a lion or an elephant.

Unexpected situations are often matched by unexpected virtues, are they not?

Upshaw—Apsaroke, 1905. Curtis's friend and interpreter Alexander Upshaw, "perfectly educated and absolutely uncivilized," as Curtis said of him, had trouble shuttling between two worlds. He chose to pose in the clothes of his ancestors.

He works twelve hours a day, with some of the world's stupidest animals, placed in an environment that is foreign to their native ground. He might as well be raising chickens in Rockefeller Center.

One chart showed how quickly the grass was overturned. In 1879, ten million acres were plowed. Fifty years later, the total was one hundred million acres. Grass was needed to hold the soil in place; it was nature's way of adapting to the basic conditions of the plains, the high wind and low rainfall.

That's what the suitcase farmers were doing. Salesmen, druggists, barkeeps, docs, mechanics, teachers—the range of day-jobbers who thought they wanted to be wheat farmers, ripping up a half-section here and there, trying to hit a crop—they were getting out before they got in any deeper.

Never let a good crisis go to waste. It's the universe challenging you to learn something new and rise to the next level of your potential.

Alternating periods of activity and rest is necessary to survive, let alone thrive. Capacity, interest, and mental endurance all wax and wane. Plan accordingly.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Maxims for Revolutionists

You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. It's that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase that I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: accept.

most people spend most of their time on defense, in reactive mode, in playing with the cards they got instead of moving to a different table with different cards. Instead

Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages. —DAVE BARRY

In cooking—as in business and war—hope for the best but plan for the worst.

In any situation in life, you only have three options. You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. It's that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase that I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: accept.

I've realized that instead of following the trends, you want to identify the trends but not follow them. It's good to recognize trends, but if you follow them, you get sucked into them, and then you also fall with the trend.

I eventually learned to cook by focusing on two principles. Both of them apply to all learning and will be your constant companions throughout this book: failure points and the margin of safety.

Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them. —BILL COSBY

Have you outgrown your systems or beliefs? Is it time that you upgraded? Or, on a personal level, as Jerry Colonna, executive coach to some of the biggest tech stars in Silicon Valley, would ask: "How are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don't want?

As Bruce Lee said, "Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.

don't label a lot of things good/bad. [Instead, I ask] can I evolve from this? What do I want now?