“Start there with your feet firmly planted and see how it feels. Then take a few small steps until you reach a place that still feels firm, but where nobody else is standing. Then try to make something beautiful with what you see.” – Jonathan Harris

“To own or possess is to monopolize the use of something permanently. Hence the need to possess betrays a degree of insecurity. Possession is a way of ensuring access to whatever it is we want to use or enjoy: we are so anxious that the object be there when we want it that we are willing to insist that it be there even when we don’t want it.” – Philip Slater, Wealth Addiction

To Insure Prompt Service

There’s a story ([apocryphal, it turns out](http://www.snopes.com/language/acronyms/tip.asp)) that “tipping” at restaurants first emerged as a way of making sure you’d get good treatment, hence the word “tips” itself–“to insure prompt service”. A friend uses this strategy at hotels, tipping on the first day so that he will benefit while he’s there.

Today [President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize](http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/), and while there is certainly celebration among his supporters, the predominant reaction is “for what?” He is just a few months into his time as president, and has yet to finish any of his ambitious goals.

It’s interesting to think about how this will affect Obama’s remaining time in office (and afterward). It is a validation of what he’s done so far, but he now has even greater expectations to live up to, and risks more disappointment if he fails.

My wife had a fascinating reaction to the news: “I think everyone should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize early in their careers.” Receiving such a large, historic, and public honor forces you to raise your ambitions. Whatever plans you had before the prize, you must now take to a higher level of morality and effectiveness.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s [Player Piano](http://www.ryskamp.org/brain/?p=159), a character named Alfie shares a powerful philosophy of work:

Pick out something impossible and do it, or be a bum the rest of your life.

If you were [woken at 4am](http://nobelprize.org/prize_announcements/magic_call.html) by the words “Congratulations, you have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize”, what impossible things would you start doing?

Pessimism is intellectual laziness.

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious” – Albert Einstein

“My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveler’…” – Albert Einstein

“It’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t in fact what you wanted all along.” – Alain de Botton

Quantum ethics

“By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives. When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen.” – David Deutsch.

Only in San Francisco

Only in San Francisco will you sit next to a guy with a Blackberry phone in one hand and a copy of “Amish Gardening Secrets” in the other.

Go for quantity

Point the Hubble Telescope at nothing and we find 10,000 galaxies. With an estimated 100 billion galaxies in the universe, and 100 billion stars in each, God sure wasn’t stingy with his creativity.

YouTube – The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D.