Henry J. Heinz, cited in: John Woolf Jordan (1915). Genealogical and Personal History of Western Pennsylvania. p. 38
“The secret to success is to do the common things uncommonly well.”
“You might well remember that nothing can bring you success but yourself.”
“Well, that's true. Do they have anything else in common?”
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Context: Schizophrenics have a whole lot of trouble telling the level of abstraction of a story. They're always biased in the direction of interpreting things more concretely than is actually the case. You would take a schizopohrenic and say, "Okay, what do apples, bananas and oranges have in common?" and they would say, "They all are multi-syllabic words."
You say "Well, that's true. Do they have anything else in common?" and they say, "Yes, they actually all contain letters that form closed loops."
This is not seeing the trees instead of the forest, this is seeing the bark on the trees, this very concreteness.
Forbes: "Peter Thiel: 'Don't Wait to Start Something New'" https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinehoward/2014/09/10/peter-thiel-dont-wait-to-start-something-new/#3c8e20f71e69 (10 September 2014)
“Common sense is seeing things as they are; and doing things as they ought to be.”
“Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.”
“Excellence is doing a common thing in an uncommon way.”
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), pp. 181-182.
“Big risks bring big success!”
Letter to Churchill, dated 25/2/1912, quoted in The World Crisis, Vol 1, 1911-14 (1923), Churchill, Thornton Butterworth (London), p. 107.
