A Penny's Worth / A collection of useful, practical, advice and insight from around the web. / Thoughts and insights from the minds and experiences of fascinating people.

A collection of useful, practical, advice and insight from around the web.

Acting

"The studio vice president called me in and said: 'Sit down, kid' even though he was only about six years older than I was. 'I want to tell you a story. The first time Tony Curtis was ever in a movie he delivered a bag of groceries. We took one look at him and knew he was a movie star. You ain't got it kid, you ain't got it. You ain't working hard enough. I want you to get back to class and study. Now get out of here'. I leaned across the table and said: 'I thought you were supposed to think he was the grocery delivery boy'."

Harrison Ford / Columbia Pictures in 1966

Blindness

Really I'm not scared of anything that's going to come to me in sports. I think my biggest fear would be getting my sight back. Once you go blind you start imagining the world as this perfect place. Getting your sight back and seeing how imperfect it is crushes some blind people. To be honest, getting my sight back would be like another low point in my life.

Charlie Wilks, 14 year old blind football player / ESPN

Brevity

Film critic Roger Ebert's mantra is that, "No good film is too long; no bad film is short enough." ... I expect a book to justify every page it goes beyond number 250, which is the limit of my indulgence. ... A generation or two of jazz musicians have labored to rediscover the art of the short, improvised solo. During the swing era, solo spots were often as brief as a mere eight bars. Come the 1960s, John Coltrane was regularly blowing for over 20 minutes a tune ... musicians ... are well advised to spare the audience such Herculean listening tasks. Filmmakers, authors and musicians might want to think of themselves as houseguests of our minds, with the attendant obligation not to overstay their welcome.

Eric Felten / Wall Street Journal

Choice / Contentment

Ms. Iyengar once asked Japanese and American students to compose a list of decisions they would be happy to let someone else make for them. The Japanese were willing to let others decide what they ate, when they woke up in the morning and what they did at work; most of the Americans only wanted the circumstances of their own death removed from their control. Insisting on the freedom to choose may be admirably principled but not in the end the best strategy for contentment: The followers of fundamentalist religions, which tend to impose more rules and restrictions on individual choice and behavior, report being happier than members of liberal churches or atheists.

Christopher Chabris / Book Review: The Art of Choosing

Ms. Iyengar stumbled on this topic [of choice] when she was studying motivation in 3-year-old children. She thought that giving them lots of different toys to play with and switch among would make them happier, but it turned out that forcing them to choose just one toy and stick with it resulted in more enthusiastic play. She tried adding more and fancier toys and running the experiment again, but she couldn't make the paradoxical result go away ...

Christopher Chabris / Book Review: The Art of Choosing

One of her next experiments, known now as the "jam study," has become a modern classic. In a Palo Alto, Calif., supermarket known for its exceptionally vast range of products, she set up two different booths offering shoppers the chance to sample various unusual preserves. One booth offered 24 different options; the other only six. You would think that, with more choices in the first booth, more shoppers who stopped there would find a flavor they liked and go on to buy a jar. But the opposite happened: People tried more samples and bought a lot more jam at the booth with six varieties ... The people who stopped at the 24-jam booth didn't say: "Please take away most of these options so I can more easily make a decision." They simply felt overwhelmed and less willing to make any choice at all.

Christopher Chabris / Book Review: The Art of Choosing

Comedy

[Responding to the question: Do you think bad comedians know they’re bad?] It seems like my experience has been that the truly good comedians, the people who are really funny, are always doubting themselves, and it seems like the people who have very little talent are the ones who never doubt themselves like George Bush. Same thing in politics. He doesn’t seem to be worried, doesn’t have a second thought about anything. So, if you’re a comic and you’re not worried that you’re funny, you’re not funny.
[Editorial note: The political views expressed in this quote don't necessarily reflect those of A Penny's Worth]

Jimmy Dore, Comedian / Buzzine

Creativity

‘A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket and write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought are commonly the most valuable and should be secured because they seldom return.’

Francis Bacon / Google Knol

Debate / Reason

[On Jon Stewart] "There is genuine intellectual curiosity," May told New York. "He's a staunch liberal, but he's a thoughtful liberal, and I respect that." May isn't the only conservative gushing about Stewart. While the movement professes a disdain for the "liberal media elite," it has made an exception for the true-blue 46-year-old comedian. "He always gives you a chance to answer, which some people don't do," says John Bolton, President Bush's ambassador to the United Nations and a Fox News contributor, who went on the show last month. "He's got his perspective, but he's been fair." Says Bolton: "In general, a lot of the media, especially on the left, has lost interest in debate and analysis. It has been much more ad hominem. Stewart fundamentally wants to talk about the issues. That's what I want to do."

Jon Stewart / New York Magazine

As I was finishing college, I was invited to Stanford with a small group of young people to discuss economics with Milton Friedman for a PBS series called ?Tyranny of the Status Quo.? I was a socialist then and spent several weeks studying left-wing economic doctrine in order to rebut the great man.

On the afternoon of my final cram session, I found a chair by the hotel pool, but as I was mastering the high points of the Swedish regulatory regime, the Hawaii women?s volleyball team settled around me, sunning themselves and cavorting in the water. Distracted for some reason, I did not go on to crush Friedman in debate that afternoon.

The show consisted of me making some left-wing argument, Friedman demolishing it in roughly six to eight words, and then me sitting there with my mouth agape trying to think of what to say.

David Brooks / New York Times

Economics

Unfortunately, in troubled economic times the language of recovery is too often tilted toward large, established companies or to "small businesses," a broad term that traditionally applies to businesses with fewer than 500 employees. The conventional wisdom is that such businesses account for half of the labor force and are therefore the engine of future job creation.

That's not quite the case. The more precise factor is not the size of businesses, but rather their age. According to the Census Bureau, nearly all net job creation in the U.S. since 1980 occurred in firms less than five years old. A Kauffman Foundation report released yesterday shows that as recently as 2007, two-thirds of the jobs created were in such firms. Put more starkly, without new businesses, job creation in the American economy would have been negative for many years.

Kauffman Foundation / Wall Street Journal

Engineering

Years ago new engineers in the Lamp Division of General Electric were assigned, as a joke, the impossible task of frosting bulbs on the inside. Eventually, however, an undaunted newcomer named Marvin Pipkin not only found a way to frost bulbs on the inside but developed an etching acid that gave minutely rounded pits instead of sharp depressions. This materially strengthened each bulb. Fortunately, no one had told him it couldn't be done, so he did it.

Bits & Pieces, December, 1989, p. 20-21