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Beware of following ancient advice—or you may get ancient practices. "God Almighty, in fashioning his most useful men, often works slowly with quite common stu
by calinet6 13y ago
Beware of following ancient advice—or you may get ancient practices.
"God Almighty, in fashioning his most useful men, often works slowly with quite common stuff. Now and then He turns out a quick job of superfine materials -- a genius who really delivers the goods. But most of His better grade line is ordinary in everything except the extra effort, and dogged determination, which have given it a finer texture and finish."
This tells me of a belief in the innate quality of man, of some who are simply born better than others. Surely only half the story. We know better today.
- softbuilder 13y agoI read it more as aspirational.
- darkmighty 13y agoBut I think the arguments are sound and clear-cut nonetheless. I believe the inadequacy of the argument to modern employment rests rather on importance of the set of skills that he willingly neglected: a more significant portion of jobs those days are very intensive on creativity and reliant on risky behavior associated with the former. With a sound internal structure this risk can be controlled and isolated within organizations to get good results -- e.g. spawning research labs, creating "distributed labs" like Google, etc.
- 3minus1 13y ago> belief in the innate quality of man This is not some ancient belief. It's nature as opposed to nurture, and you see the same thing today when people talk about genetics.