Make sure that you are in a situation where the constant mistakes are small and can be used for something.

If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.

A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.

A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see

Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea.

Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.

In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.