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A list of people I find interesting

visakanv
March 30, 2016

This is a “quick-reference” blogpost of high-quality people. These are “all-time-greats” type folks, mostly. I also have a list of relatively-contemporary writers.

  • Aaron Swartz
  • Admiral McRaven
  • Alain de Botton
    • Being a snob
    • The News
  • Alan Watts
  • Alex Ferguson
    • (I’m not a Man Utd fan, but what he accomplished as a manager was remarkable.)
  • Arnold Schwarznegger
    • Decide for yourself what makes you truly happy
    • Don’t be afraid of making decisions
    • Mr Olympia, then movie star, then Governor. He knows some shit. Bill Burr had a great bit about him. Helen is a fan of him too.
  • Andy Grove
    • High Output Management
    • Only The Paranoid Survive
    • Leading indicators / trailing indicators
    • “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”
  • Barack Obama
  • Bilahari Kausikan
  • Bill Gates
    • Playboy interview
  • Bill Wurtz
    • History of Japan / History of the entire world, I guess
  • Benjamin Zander
    • Shining Eyes
    • One-buttock playing
  • Bo Burnham
    • Make Happy
  • Boz
  • Brian Eno
  • Buddha
  • Carl Sagan
    • Pale Blue Dot
    • Contact
    • Biography
  • Charlie Munger
  • Chamath Palihapitiya
    • Degree in electrical engineering, derivatives trader
    • Joined Winamp – 6 kids, 22yo or younger, nobody knew what they were doing, building cool consumer software, platforms… we build distributed social software. we built Newtella which became a key ingredient in limewire/kazaa and destroyed the music business. you build for people, destroy these heirarchical power… do it, you get rewarded
    • winamp -> bought by AOL
    • head of AOL IM -> sean parker says you have join this company – I waited a year, it cost me a bajillion dollars
    • joined some fund – had ambition but it wasn’t going anywhere?
    • joined Facebook – admired Zuckerberg’s lack of ego
    • deconstructing extremely calcified structures of power
      • apply to healthcare
  • Cherian George
  • Chris Hadfield
    • TED talk
    • Zen Pencils
  • Chris Rock
    • Married and bored, single and lonely
    • Jamaica
    • Rims
    • Rich vs Wealthy
  • Christian Louboutin
    • Disregard for academia
    • Early apprenticeships
    • Portfolio
    • Eclectic interests
  • Daniel Dennett
  • Daniel Kahneman
  • David Foster Wallace
  • David Ogilvy
    • Confessions of an Advertising Man is one of the best books I’ve ever read. It took me a long time to get around to reading it. I always assumed that he would be an annoying, unlikeable person. I’m not sure why. I guess I had a negative impression of advertising in general, and I assumed that anything so popular (I’ve heard loads of copywriters and writers praise Ogilvy to the heavens) must be trash. I was so wrong.
    • I put together 8 of his best-selling headlines in a blogpost for ReferralCandy.
  • Derek Sivers
  • Dietrich Mateschitz
    • Red Bull
  • Edwin Land – 1
  • Elon Musk
    • First principles
    • WBW
  • Elizabeth Gilbert
    • Geniuses TED Talk
    • Big Magic
  • Ev Williams
    • XOXO
    • Locks on doors
  • Frank Lloyd Wright
  • Fred Rogers
  • George Lois
    • Damn Good Advice
    • “Poison Gas”
  • George Orwell
  • Guruka Singh
  • Ira Glass
    • The Gap
  • Isaac Asimov – 1
  • Jack Welsh – ?
  • Jane Jacobs – 1
    • “Eyes on the street”
    • Guardians vs Traders
  • Jason Silva
    • To Understand Is To Perceive Patterns
  • Jeannette Walls
    • The Glass Castle
  • Jeff Bezos
    • 1: Yegge Rant 1:
    • 2: Yegge Response To Rant: https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzVeRq
    • http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/22/how-to-pitch-jeff-bezos/
    • http://blog.kissmetrics.com/lessons-from-jeff-bezos/
    • http://signalvnoise.com/posts/3289-some-advice-from-jeff-bezos
    • http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/washington-post-to-be-sold-to-jeff-bezos/2013/08/05/ca537c9e-fe0c-11e2-9711-3708310f6f4d_story.html
    • TEDtalk
    • regret minimization framework
  • Jimmy Wales
    • Quora
  • Joel Spolsky
  • Jon Kabat-Zinn
  • John Green (Crash Course)
  • Kobe Bryant
  • Henry Ford
    • “create new games”
  • Honoré de Balzac
  • Larry Ellison
  • Lee Hsien Loong
  • Lee Kuan Yew
    • “There’s a subtlety in how you insult people”
    • Heads on pikes at Cathay
  • Leo Tolstoy
  • Leonard Cohen
  • Les Brown
    • You gotta be hungry!
  • Louis CK
  • Malcolm Gladwell
  • Malcolm X
  • Marc Andreessen
    • pmarchives
    • Software Is Eating The World
  • Marcus Aurelius
  • Mark Zuckerberg
  • Margaret Mead
  • Martin Luther King, Jr
  • MateusZ
  • Michel Montaigne
  • Michel Foucault
  • Muhammad Ali
    • Thoughts on Vietnam, the draft, on black people being in jail
  • Nassim Taleb
  • Neil Tyson
    • YouTube “We Stopped Dreaming”. Part 1, Part 2. [5 mins each]
    • I also enjoyed his interview with Stephen Colbert. [1 hr+]
    • And his conversation with Richard Dawkins. [1 hr+]
    • He’s got a couple of inspiring quotes on Reddit, about helping others and learning something new every day.
    • I don’t quite understand why he became such a troll on Twitter. He had this really great bit where he tactfully criticized Richard Dawkins for having a lack of sensitivity to the people he was talking to.
  • Niccolo Machiavelli
  • Oliver Sacks
  • Oprah Winfrey
    • “She was just some 23-year-old-punk who needed to get fired so she could become Oprah. Sometimes you gotta fail to succeed.”
  • patio11
  • Paul Adams (padday)
  • Paul Graham
  • Paula Scher [1, 2, Netflix]
  • Peter Drucker
  • Phillipe Starcke – HBR, TED
  • Quentin Tarantino
  • Ray Bradbury
    • Martian Chronicles
      • The story that most sticks with me is the one where the commander relates more to his enemy than his men. There was also one spooky one where the house keeps on going. And a funny one where a guy gets all excited about meeting the only woman around, and then has a change of heart.
    • Zen In The Art Of Writing
      • Great quotes about writing, revisit them regularly – 1
  • Ray Dalio
  • Randy Pausch
    • My notes from his fantastic video, how to achieve your childhood dreams [1:16:26]
      • Elephant in the room? Introduce it
      • Achieve your dreams / enable others to achieve theirs (it’s more fun)
      • Men landing on the moon -> easy time to dream
      • Brick walls keep out people who want it less badly than you
      • Always bring something to the table (win-win)
      • Fundamentals are more important than fancy stuff
      • Good if people still criticize you– they still care
      • Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you want
      • Headfakes = Indirect Learning
      • “Before I answer your question – will you have lunch with me tomorrow?” (Can’t say no.)
      • Easy to be smart when you’re parroting smart people
      • Give people time and they’ll impress you
      • Very important to know when you’re in a pissing match, and get out ASAP
      • 2 ways of saying I don’t know. “You’re excited, so tell me more.”
      • Changing the world in a small way
      • Enable dreams en masse
      • “That was pretty good, but I know you can do better.”
      • “If there’s anything I’ve been raised to do, it’s share.”
      • Body language – if they’re standing close together, it’ll be good
      • Best gift: Educator getting people self reflective
      • “It’s such a same people perceive you as arrogant – it’ll limit what you can accomplish”
      • Ignore what they say, focus on what they do
      • Tell the truth + be earnest
      • Focus on other people
      • The best gold is at the bottom of barrels of crap
      • Get a feedback loop and listen to it
      • Don’t complain – work harder
    • Time management – you need a system, to say no, to delegate.
  • Robin Sharma
    • Kill the Saboteur
    • Writing style in Monk Who Sold His Ferrari – I enjoyed this book more than I expected to
    • Video style
    • The biggest difference Sharma made for me was his perspective on  procrastination and fear, and his description of The Saboteur.
    • His 2015 webinar was alright.
    • I think what I like most about him is how fresh, healthy and clear he looks. I think that’s very compelling. The stuff he says isn’t particularly unique, but the stuff that matters isn’t particularly unique.
    • Interesting to learn that Taylor Swift and Jon Bon Jovi have read his work (according to him in his 2015 webinar).
  • Russell Brand
    • “Thus another friendship was dashed on the cruel rocks amid the storm of my self-destruction.”
    • “The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of day with some purchased relief.”
    • “What I’ve learnt – to my cost – on several occasions in my life, is that people will put up with all manner of bad behaviour so long as you’re giving them what they want. They’ll laugh and get into it and enjoy the anecdotes and the craziness and the mayhem as long as you’re going your job well, but the minute you’re not, you’re fucked. They’ll wipe their hands of you without a second glance.”
    • “My life is just a series of embarrassing incidents strung together by telling people about those embarrassing incidents.”
    • “The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help, they have no hope.”
    • “We all need something to help us unwind at the end of the day. You might have a glass of wine, or a joint, or a big delicious blob of heroin to silence your silly brainbox of its witterings but there has to be some form of punctuation, or life just seems utterly relentless.”
    • “Have you been out in society recently? ‘Cause it’s SHIT.”
    • “It’s difficult to believe in yourself because the idea of self is an artificial construction. You are, in fact, part of the glorious oneness of the universe. Everything beautiful in the world is within you. No one really feels self-confident deep down because it’s an artificial idea. Really, people aren’t that worried about what you’re doing or what you’re saying, so you can drift around the world relatively anonymously: you must not feel persecuted and examined. Liberate yourself from that idea that people are watching you.”
    • “We have been segregated and severed, from each other and even from ourselves. We have been told that freedom is the ability to pursue petty, trivial desires when true freedom is freedom from these petty, trivial desires.”
    • “You have to forgive everyone for everything. You can’t cling on to any blame that you may be using to make sense of the story of your life.”
    • “Her death had a powerful impact on me I suppose because it was such an obvious shock, like watching someone for hours through a telescope advance towards you, fist extended with the intention of punching you in the face. Even though I saw it coming it still hurt when it eventually hit me.”
    • “Being famous is like a little bit of you is taken away and goes off and lives on its own and does what it wants… I wish it would do more interesting things!”
    • “That’s what keeps me alive, perversion and star quality.”
    • “I sometimes cuddled her too hard so that she would yelp. “Here, have some of my painful love,” my febrile embrace would tell her. “It is constrictive and controlling and painful, like all love should be.” In later life, I have come to realize that any expression of love which ends in a yelp probably requires modification.”
    • “Whatever I endure in recovery, I need never again suffer the indignity of active addiction. The despair and hopelessness. The inexhaustible cycle of incremental self-immolation. I am reminded of how far I’ve come, of the miracle that, with help and humility, I can, one day at a time, live free from drugs and alcohol.”
  • Seneca
  • Scott Adams
  • Seth Godin
    • “I saw a bumper sticker that I really liked. It said, “Is it transportation or a lifestyle?” Of course, you never see a bumper sticker like that on a Mercedes. It was on a beater of a Subaru, naturally.”
    • “As a result, the shopper can tell herself a lie… a story about both looking good and feeling good. And that’s the whole point of clothes shopping, isn’t it? We don’t need a new outfit, we want one. And shopping for expensive clothes is all about changing the way the shopper feels.”
    • “Congresspeople from both sides of the aisle are falling over themselves to see who can get the most airtime talking about the case of Terri Schiavo. Not because it’s a legislative priority or because the medical facts support their efforts. They’re doing it because it’s a compelling story, a story with a simple, vivid, powerful argument on one side and a more subtle, fact-based analysis on the other.”
    • “Cigarette marketers were genius storytellers. Of course they lied to us. They told us a story we wanted to believe, a story about the wild west and freedom and sexuality and youth and hipness.This was an astonishingly expensive story to tell, I grant you that. But once told, the meme entered our vocabulary and it’s going to be around for generations.”
    • On fake soy sauce: Does the brown color make diners feel like they’re eating something more Chinese than ordinary table salt would? Undoubtedly.
  • Steve Jobs – creativity is just connecting things
    • There are two great interviews with Steve Jobs that I return to over and over again– the 1985 Playboy interview and the 1996 Wired interview.
      • 1985 Playboy interview (Bill Gates also had a great Playboy interview. I think Playboy does good interviews in general, probably because they can afford to “go all out”.)It’s not so much any specific thing he says in this interview that’s great, but just how he communicates.
      • 1996 Wired interview
        • “When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”
      • Marketing is about Values – internal video where he pitches Think Different to the Apple team.
      • This site seems to have just about everything: allaboutstevejobs.com. Also EverySteveJobsVideo on YouTube.
  • Steve Vai – Focus – the thing that’s holding you back is the way that you’re thinking
  • Steve Wozniak
  • Steven Spielberg
    • Dream whispers
  • Sheryl Sandberg
  • Terence Tao
  • Tharman Shanmugaratnam
  • Tiger Woods
    • Chasing Jack Nicklaus (narcissistic leaders)
  • Tim Ferriss
  • Tim Harford
    • God Complex
  • Tim Urban (WaitButWhy)
  • Tim Minchin – If I didn’t have you
  • Tobias Lutke
  • Tony Robbins
  • Tony Zhuo (Every Frame A Painting)
  • Voltaire
  • Walt Disney
  • Yishan Wong
  • YungSnuggie

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