Tim Urban Quotes & Sayings

A company like GM is a finance-driven company who always has to live up to financial expectations. Here we look at it the other way around - the product is successful when it's great, and the company becomes great because of that." (This mirrored what Musk had told me earlier in the day: "The moment the person leading a company thinks numbers have value in themselves, the company's done. The moment the CFO becomes CEO - it's done. Game over.") Von — Tim Urban

Be humbler about what [you] know, more confident about what's possible, and less afraid of things that don't matter. — Tim Urban

And learning, for Musk, is simply the process of "downloading data and algorithms into your brain."3 Among his many frustrations with formal classroom learning is the "ridiculously slow download speed" of sitting in a classroom while a teacher explains something, and to this day, most of what he knows he's learned through reading. — Tim Urban

The best friend of a blind Us is a nemesis Us - Them. Nothing unites Us like a collectively hated anti-Us, and the blind tribe is usually defined almost as much by hating the dogma of Them as it is by abiding by the dogma of Us. Whatever — Tim Urban

Over time, big industries tend to get flabby and uncreative and risk-averse - and if the right outsider company has the means and creativity to come at the industry with a fresh perspective and rethink the whole thing, there's often a huge opportunity there. — Tim Urban

Gen-Ys are delusional; Most people are not special - otherwise "special" wouldn't mean anything. Even right now, most of Gen-Ys reading this are thinking, "Good point. But I actually am one of the few special ones" - and this is the problem. — Tim Urban

A Facebook status is annoying if it primarily serves the author and does nothing positive for anyone reading it. — Tim Urban

We base our ideas about the world on our personal experience, and that experience has ingrained the rate of growth of the recent past in our heads as "the way things happen." We're also limited by our imagination, which takes our experience and uses it to conjure future predictions - but often, what we know simply doesn't give us the tools to think accurately about the future. When we hear a prediction about the future that contradicts our experience-based notion of how things work, our instinct is that the prediction must be naive. If I tell you [...] that you may live to be 150, or 250, or not die at all, your instinct will be, "That's stupid - if there's one thing I know from history, it's that everybody dies." And yes, no one in the past has not died. But no one flew airplanes before airplanes were invented either. — Tim Urban

Depending on where The Great Filter occurs, we're left with three possible realities: We're rare, we're first, or we're fucked. — Tim Urban

Atheism isn't a growth model any more than "I don't like rollerblading" is a workout strategy. — Tim Urban

Humility is by definition a starting point - and it sends you off on a journey from there. The arrogance of certainty is both a starting point and an ending point - no journeys needed. — Tim Urban

Insecurity can be solved the hard way or the easy way - and by giving people the easy option, dogmatic tribes remove the pressure to do the hard work of evolving into a more independent person with a more internally-defined identity. — Tim Urban