Editor’s Comment: Bryson is well known for his variety of interests, from his ambitious “A Short History of Nearly Everything” to a delightful childhood memoir I read called “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid”. “The Body” fascinated me with startling details of how our body works. Chapters are broken into parts: brain, heart, lungs as well as systems: immune, chemistry and skeleton. Bryson adds a point of view, such as his concerns over the overuse of antibiotics. (see excerpt) I’m recommending this book with only two promises, it’s far more readable than your biology textbook and you will understand a lot more about the only body you’ll ever own when you’re done.
My first 17 years and the last 17 years have been spent in my little hometown of Ashtabula, Ohio.
I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.” -Ray Dalio
Editor’s Note: Thanks to Amy Salo, who pointed me to this article on her blog.
Without a doubt, Bill Gates is a genius. The Microsoft co-founder dropped out of college at age 19 because he believed a computer should be on every desk and in every home.
You only put a lot of money and time into something when when you have relentless confidence in your abilities.
But there was another side of Gates — quite the opposite of his unshakable confidence. From the day he started Microsoft, he insisted on always having enough cash in the bank to keep the company alive for 12 months with no revenue coming in.
As a result, Gates erred on the side of caution.
“I always had to be careful that we wouldn’t hire too many people,” he said in a 2017 interview on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” “I was always worried because people who worked for me were older than me and had kids, and I always thought, ‘What if we don’t get paid? Will I be able to meet the payroll?’”
