Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If you are armed with knowledge, if you are aware that certain dynamics are at play then you have options. You can play defense, you can ignore certain person and take the consequences perhaps with a game plan in mind and it goes on, you've increased your options.
I'd done a lot of research in Hollywood and in academia. I love research and so I wanted to kind of ground the book in history, in things that I read that were universal and timeless and then kind of let my own experiences sort of filter through all of this history.
Let me spell it out: with the psychotic boss, nothing you do is ever quite right. They set traps, asking you to do things, and no matter how hard you think of accomplishing it in their way, it is wrong and you are to blame. This tends to instill a lot of fear in you.
I think I can do whatever I want with fiction, but the more documentary it is, the better it will be because that's what I'm good at. I'm good at observing people's behavior and putting these unspoken things into movie contexts in ways that other people can sometimes miss.
You could have a lot of money at your fingertips, the finest education and intellectual knowledge, but if you are governed by fear none of that will matter. You will remain tied to dead ideas and stale strategies. You will not be able to adapt. You will lose what you have.
The passive aggressive arguer comes armed with tricky tactics. They cannot take the risk that they might be wrong: their self-esteem is too intertwined with their opinions. It is more important to affirm their rightness, and sense of superiority, than to arrive at the truth.
What happens if you stick at something long enough, and study it for so long, you have a different kind of intelligence. It's not an intellectual thing. It's almost like an animal intelligence. I call it our form of instinct, almost how a lion knows exactly where its prey is.
A master performer like Bill Clinton never lost sight of the fact that as president he had to project confidence and power, but if he was speaking to a group of autoworkers he would adjust his accent and his words to fit the audience, and do the same for a group of executives.
Ambition has become a dirty word, and I believe it is a great evolutionary force for the positive. If people fail or go astray in their ambition I can live with it but not with people lowering their expectations, wasting time, slacking off and glorifying failure and stupidity.
I've always been kind of a strategic thinking person - I love sports for instance, but my interest in sports is 'cause I love watching strategy in action or playing it. I'm not into the drama so much, of the physical action. I'm interested in the coach and how he's strategizing.
Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers. Feel motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything. Feeling bored and restless, our minds shut off and we become increasingly passive.
Most of us enter adult life with great ambitions for how we will start our own ventures, but the harshness of life wears us down. We settle into some job and slowly give in to the illusion that our bosses care about us and our future, that they spend time thinking of our welfare.
Movie theaters barely make any money. A movie can make a couple of thousand dollars, or could get lucky and make ten or fifteen thousand dollars, but theatrical releases don't really sustain the work. For me, it's the best sort of advertisement for anything else you'd want to do.
I've always loved black culture; I don't know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music and early jazz, Sly and the Family Stone. I'm older - I'm in my early 50s - so you'll have to excuse me. That was always very exciting to me to connect to the culture on that level.
Desire is both imitative (we like what others like) and competitive (we want to take away from others what they have). As children, we wanted to monopolize the attention of a parent, to draw it away from other siblings. This sense of rivalry... makes people compete for the attention.
To Sun-tzu and the ancient Chinese, doing something extraordinary had little effect without a setup of something ordinary. You had to mix the two - to fix your opponent's expectations with some banal, ordinary maneuver, a comfortable pattern that they would then expect you to follow.
A few years ago, for my birthday, Sean Price Williams said, "I'll give you one free day of shooting." He shot Kati with an I and co-shot Fake It So Real. While we've always worked together, I didn't want him to do it for free, so he cashed in his birthday chip and came for this one day.
You have the power to think differently about who you are. You have the ability to turn off the critical voice inside of you. That's not you. That's coming from the culture. That's coming from the outside of you. You've internalized the voice of your parents, your teachers, your friends.
Most people are passive aggressive in this world. I have the idea that the human being is born with a kind of reservoir of aggression. We are inherently somewhat aggressive creatures and we either channel that in direct ways or we channel it in indirect ways and become passive aggressive.
The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. We all have a dark side, a tendency to manipulate, and aggressive desires. The most dangerous types are those who repress their desires or deny the existence of them, often acting them out in the most underhanded ways.
Be extra careful in the work environment with those who like to maintain their position through charm and being political, rather than getting things done. They are very prone to envying and hating those who work hard and get results. They will slander and sabotage you without any warning.
Most people have no sense of self-awareness. They're not aware of what they really want. They knew it when they were younger but then as they get older they listened to parents, they listened to peers and they think that, for instance, money is the most important thing when it really isn't.
We happen to live in an era that is incredibly wrapped up in notions of political correctness; everything is seen through the lens of politics. But being political and politically correct is just another way of fighting, another form of power and strategy, an insidious means of manipulation.
I'm okay for things like theater and stuff but for film, I just didn't think in the right way and I didn't like the business. So I was unhappy. So I was in something that was moderately related to my, what I call my calling or my life's path, which is writing, but it wasn't like the right fit.
We're close friends [with Brandy Burre]. We're neighbors. I actually lived two houses over from her for a while and then we were traveling one day and she was looking at the house we currently live in - which was between us - and she's like, "You guys should move here! It's bigger and better!"
One of the things I've been talking about with my critical writing and my own work is that these movies are seen differently in a theatrical space. It's very important to me. I edit films to be seen theatrically, like fiction material I've worked on like Listen Up Phillip or other documentaries.
You can never get rid of all of your fears. Some are necessary and a part of life. But most of our fears are illusory, based on risks or threats that exist only in our minds. Such fears constrain and make you miserable. The feeling of moving past a particular fear is one of liberation and freedom.
The Crown. Place it upon your head and you assume a different post-tranquil yet radiating assurance. Never show doubt, never lose your dignity beneath the crown, or it will not fit. It will seem to be destined for one more worthy. Do not wait for a coronation; the greatest emporers crown themselves.
Power is the measure of the degree of control you have over circumstances in your life and the actions of the people around you. It is a skill that is developed by a deep understanding of human nature, of what truly motivates people, and of the manipulations necessary for advancement and protection.
If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. Timidity is dangerous: Better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid.
With such a deep rooted interest you can withstand the setbacks and failures, the days of drudgery, and the hard work that are always a part of any creative action. You can ignore the doubters and critics. You will then feel personally committed to solving the problem and will not rest until you do so.
It's good to have a brand that is consistent that people know about and trust. But it's also good to mix it up and adapt it, to polish it a bit and give it a new aspect. To not violate the reputation you've established but give it a new edge and veneer to show other aspects that people hadn't suspected.
Understand: people will constantly attack you in life. One of their main weapons will be to instill in you doubts about yourself – your worth, your abilities, your potential. They will often disguise this as their objective opinion, but invariably it has a political purpose – they want to keep you down.
Deceiving world, that with alluring toysHast made my life the subject of thy scorn,And scornest now to lend thy fading joys,T'outlength my life, whom friends have left forlorn;How well are they that die ere they be born,And never see thy sleights, which few men shunTill unawares they helpless are undone!
Consciously or unconsciously most of us adhere to what is expected of our role because we realize our social success depends on this. Some may refuse to play this game, but in the end they are marginalized and forced to play the outsider role, with limited options and decreasing freedom as they get older.
When I think about the new film, I think I can do whatever I want with fiction, but the more documentary it is, the better it will be because that's what I'm good at. I'm good at observing people's behavior and putting these unspoken things into movie contexts in ways that other people can sometimes miss.
Everything is judged by its appearance; what is unseen counts for nothing. Never let yourself get lost in the crowd, then, or buried in oblivion. Stand out. Be conspicuous, at all cost. Make yourself a magnet of attention by appearing larger, more colorful, more mysterious than the bland and timid masses.
I had noticed that many of these successful people, historical and contemporary, shared certain common traits. They had a way of thinking that was exceptionally fluid; they could adapt to almost any circumstance; when confronted with problems, they could look at them from novel perspectives and solve them.
A lot of people in college go astray because they choose something that doesn't really, really connect to them. And if it doesn't connect to you, you're not able to put in that 10,000 hours that people talk about. You don't have the focus. And you start off in life on the wrong foot and you never get back.
I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what's going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.
Practically every profession has a really political environment. I think the world has become more competitive. There are so many people in every place competing for small slices of success and power. It's a heated atmosphere and whenever you have competition, you're going to have more politics and manipulation.
You can die from someone else's misery — emotional states are as infectious as diseases. You may feel you are helping the drowning man but you are precipitating your own disaster. The unfortunate sometimes draw misfortune on themselves; they will also draw it on you. Associate with the happy and fortunate instead.
Appearing better than others is always dangerous, but most dangerous of all is to appear to have no faults or weaknesses. It is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices, in order to deflect envy and appear more human and approachable. Only gods and the dead can seem perfect with impunity.
In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them -- those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can enver focus enough to learn.
There's a real tension between it being a collaborative art process, which is almost like performance art of yourself, and, as we talk about the movie, it's kind of a mix between melodrama and cinéma vérité. This involves ideas about playing the role of yourself and the movie of your life and all these other things.
I'll probably take the prize for the most irrelevant degree. Although some of the things now where they study, you know: "post feministic colonial film theory" - those kind of majors, yeah, that's probably worse. But I was, you know, classics, Greek and Latin, like what's more irrelevant than dead languages, you know?
The pyramid would start at the bottom: you don't know who you are or what you're intended to do in life. And so, the X factor - the ingredient that will make you powerful, that will make you successful is your energy and drive and your tenacity. If you've got that, there's nothing in the world that's going to stop you.
I have an argument that to master any field, it's simple: it's a function of time. How much you devote yourself to the process, how much experience you get, how much you're willing to expand your limits, how willing you are to develop your own style. If you're willing to put 10,000 hours, something amazing is going to happen.
You want attention, you want to grab some of that airspace that exists out there in a world that's very difficult to get it because it's so competitive and to get it for more than a few seconds. Any attention is good and that can be what we would normally consider as bad attention so I wanted to make you aware of that dynamic.
A lot of the things that involve power on the highest levels sometimes involve the darker side of human psychology. People can be very passive aggressive or they can be aggressive and they can conceal their intentions. There's this world that exists that nobody writes about or describes it's like a dirty little secret or taboo.