Brainy Thoughts

“Vision without execution is hallucination.”

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847, October 18, 1931)

American inventor and businessman who developed many devices which greatly influenced life in the 20th century. Dubbed “The Wizard of Menlo Park” by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production to the process of invention, and can therefore be credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory. Some of the inventions credited to him were not completely original, but improvements of earlier inventions, or were actually created by his numerous employees working under his direction. Nevertheless, Edison is considered one of the most prolific inventors in history, holding 1,097 U.S. patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.

“Stand together, yet not too near together;
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”

Khalil Gibran (1883 – 1931) was a Lebanese American artist, poet, and writer. Author of The Prophet, a book of 26 poetic essays written in English in 1923.

Khalil Gibran was Born in the town of Bsharri in modern-day Lebanon, as a young man he emigrated with his family to the United States where he studied art and began his literary career.

“Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960 – )

A specialist in financial derivatives, he held a “day job” in a lengthy senior trading and financial mathematics career in a number of New York City’s Wall Street firms, before starting a second career as a scholar in the epistemology of chance events to focus on his project of mapping how to live and act in a world we do not understand, and how to come to grips with randomness and the unknown – which includes his black swan theory of unexpected rare events.