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"Strong opinions are very useful to other people" - Brian Eno Very opinionated people, even if narrow-minded or wrong, are useful to conversations. If you don
by sivers 17y ago
"Strong opinions are very useful to other people" - Brian Eno
Very opinionated people, even if narrow-minded or wrong, are useful to conversations.
If you don't have an opinion, you can just say, "Wow. Yeah. I agree with him."
If you do have an opinion, you can reflect against that simplistic strong-opinion to explain why it's wrong.
Either way, it's good to have some black and white in the paint palette.
- eugenejen 17y agoI love citations from Brian Eno. It is nice to see some quotes from masters from different domains.
- jacquesm 17y agoSure, you get football players that comment on politics, movie stars that tell you how to run a business (or a state or a country for that matter). No offense to Brian Eno, he's a pretty smart guy and has a lot of stuff to say that makes sense, also outside his domain. (and makes interesting music, 'the pearl' is my favorite music to code by). But it doesn't generalize.
- KC8ZKF 17y agoHow are strong opinions outside of Brian Eno's domain?
- jacquesm 17y agoThey're not, read again. It's just that it does not generalize from Brian Eno to 'leaders in other fields'. There are people that it applies to and there are those that it definitely doesn't apply to, in other words, being a leader in one domain does not automatically qualify one for comments on other fields, that varies on a case-by-case basis. Brian Eno is exactly the kind of person for who it does seem to work.
- drhodes 17y agoAn observation from ~2500 years ago: "People with opinions just go around bothering each other." —Siddhartha Gautama