Quotes About Complexity

How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.

He doubted that the drivers hurtling down the interstate even noticed the herd, the coyote, or the dogfight in the clouds. Like so many vistas in the state, Joe thought, it looked like a whole lot of nothing at first. But if one stopped and observed, really sat still for a few minutes and observed, there was a lot going on. The high-steppe desert was alive and complex. •

Sound bites in search of a paragraph...

It seems like the good guys turned out to be the bad guys, and the bad guys weren't all that bad.

There is a kink in my damned brain that prevents me from thinking as other people think.

Meditarias: as pessoas falam coisas, e por trás do que falam há o que sentem, e por trás do que sentem há o que são e nem sempre se mostra. Há os níveis não formulados, camadas imperceptíveis, fantasias que nem sempre controlamos, expectativas que quase nunca se cumprem e sobretudo como dizias, emoções.

You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we've painstakingly adapted over millennia. Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.

Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.

Our sociality is simply far too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages & emojis. Any digital minimalist must confront this reality & manage his or her relationship with these tools accordingly. [...] The key is the intention behind what you decide, not necessarily its details.

The point of providing these details is to emphasize that intelligent machines are complicated and hard to master.* To join the group of those who can work well with these machines, therefore, requires that you hone your ability to master hard things. And because these technologies change rapidly, this process of mastering hard things never ends: You must be able to do it quickly, again and again.

Asimismo, una persona que trabajaba en el área del marketing en los años noventa quizá no imaginó que hoy debe tener sólidos conocimientos en análisis digital. Por lo tanto, para seguir siendo valiosos en nuestra economía, es necesario que dominemos el arte de aprender rápidamente cosas complicadas. Esta labor exige un trabajo profundo. Si no cultivamos esta aptitud, nos quedaremos atrás conforme vaya avanzando la tecnología.

Why do some people enjoy their work while so many other people don't? Here's the CliffsNotes summary of the social science research in this area: There are many complex reasons for workplace satisfaction, but the reductive notion of matching your job to a pre-existing passion is not among them.

Generally speaking, as knowledge work makes more complex demands of the labor force, it becomes harder to measure the value of an individual's efforts.

The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable using Facebook (a shallow task, easily replicated), but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run the service (a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate).

To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work. If you're comfortable going deep, you'll be comfortable mastering the increasingly complex systems and skills needed to thrive in our economy. If you instead remain one of the many for whom depth is uncomfortable and distraction ubiquitous, you shouldn't expect these systems and skills to come easily to you.

The complex reality of the technologies that real companies leverage to get ahead emphasizes the absurdity of the now common idea that exposure to simplistic, consumer-facing products—especially in schools—somehow prepares people to succeed in a high-tech economy. Giving students iPads or allowing them to film homework assignments on YouTube prepares them for a high-tech economy about as much as playing with Hot Wheels would prepare them to thrive as auto mechanics.

A good chief executive is essentially a hard-to-automate decision engine,

Knowledge work exchanges this clarity for ambiguity. It can be hard to define exactly what a given knowledge worker does and how it differs from another

Let's begin with the first ability. To start, we must remember that we've been spoiled by the intuitive and drop-dead-simple user experience of many consumer-facing technologies, like Twitter and the iPhone. These examples, however, are consumer products, not serious tools: Most of the intelligent machines driving the Great Restructuring are significantly more complex to understand and master.

other technologies like data visualization, analytics, high speed communications, and rapid prototyping have augmented the contributions of more abstract and data-driven reasoning, increasing the values of these jobs." In other words, those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive.

The fault of the courage culture, therefore, is not its underlying message that courage is good, but its severe underestimation of the complexity involved in deploying this boldness in a useful way.

There are many complex reasons for workplace satisfaction, but the reductive notion of matching your job to a pre-existing passion is not among them.

If you're gonna catch criminals, you got to be a bit of one yourself.

We revel in men like Beecham, Moore—they are the easy repositories of all that is dark in our very social world. But the things that helped make Beecham what he was? Those, we tolerate. Those, we even enjoy…