“There is only one thing in this world which is worth dedicating all your life. This is creating more love among people and destroying barriers which exist between them.”
Leo Tolstoy
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On a Sunday morning in October of 1967, a crowd of five thousand gathered in the gymnasium of Grinnell College in Iowa. Among those in attendance was 37 year-old Warren Buffett and his wife Susie. Anne Schroeder, in her biography of Buffett writes, “Finally King strode to the podium, dressed in his preacher’s robes. He had chosen the theme of “Remaining Awake During a Revolution,” and his resonant voice rang out with a quote from poet James Russell Lowell’s “The Present Crisis,” the anthem of the civil-rights movement.
Truth forever on the scaffold,
James Russell Lowell
Wrong forever on the throne:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.”
…“One of his lines, which he repeated in many of his speeches, struck Buffett’s heart and pierced his reason. “The laws are not to change the heart,” he said, “but to restrain the heartless.””
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder
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Read more about the sermon in this 2008 NY Times Opinion piece by Taylor Branch. If you’re short on time find the paragraph that begins:
“What Dr. King prescribed in his last Sunday sermon begins with the story of Lazarus and Dives, from the 16th chapter of Luke. Told entirely from the mouth of Jesus, it is a story starring Abraham the patriarch of Judaism, set in the afterlife. There’s nothing else like it in the Bible.”
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The following is from David Perell’s weekly newsletter, Monday Musings, from December 16, 2019:
The Apollo program wouldn’t have happened without the involvement of 400,000 people and 20,000 companies. In an oral history, Neil Armstrong talked about how the team worked together to solve design, manufacturing, and human errors.
Here’s Armstrong:
“Each of the components of our hardware were designed to certain reliability specifications, and by far the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I’ve been told that if every component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about [1,000] separate identifiable failures. In fact, we had more like 150 failures per flight, [substantially] better than statistical methods would tell you that you might have.
I can only attribute that to the fact that every guy in the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that’s setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, “If anything goes wrong here, it’s not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it.” And when you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance. And that’s the only reason we could have pulled this whole thing off.”
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I’ll leave you with the final stanza of The Present Crisis by James Russell Lowell:
“New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
James Russell Lowell
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.”