Naveen Kumar Chowdari

“If you ever hear the words conventional and wisdom conjoined, reject them. Because if it is conventional, it isn’t wisdom. And if it’s wisdom, it isn’t conventional. —Herb Kelleher How has Southwest been able to attain uncommon results in the worst industry in capitalism? The company has succeeded by being unconventional. Herb likes to tell the story of how a Washington think tank told the company that it would not be able to survive without six of the “keys to success” that other carriers have used. Southwest followed none of those keys to success. At every point of Southwest’s history, the company has successfully challenged industry norms. Southwest differed from the competition because of its low-cost fares. In the 1970s, before deregulation, flying was expensive, because the government controlled the prices. Rollin King and Herb Kelleher’s idea was to provide lower fares and enable a greater number of Americans to fly. Southwest would not be competing with other airlines but with other forms of transportation.”
― Sean Iddings, Intelligent Fanatics: How Great Leaders Build Sustainable Businesses

“Our inherited desire to explain what we see fuels two kinds of cognitive errors. First, we are too easily seduced by patterns and by the theories that explain them. Second, we latch onto data that support our theories and discount contradicting evidence. We believe stories simply because they are consistent with the patterns we observe and, once we have a story, we are reluctant to let it go.”
― Gary Smith, Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics

“how is it that you came up with so many clever solutions to what seemed to be impossible problems?” “They weren’t, not really . . . clever, I mean. They were actually kind of crazy and not even well thought out. Stupid, you might say.” I pause, feeling like a fool before an audience of millions. “But—with all factors put together, they worked—for the circumstances. It’s like—you know that old myth about the bee? That, according to ‘physics,’ a bumblebee is not ‘aerodynamic’ enough, is not supposed to be able to fly—it just does because it doesn’t know any better? Well, that’s all nonsense. A bumblebee flies just fine! It flies according to physical laws, only different ones, because it itself is different, using other complex variables for its flight method—for example, something called ‘dynamic stall’ comes into play. . . . Anyway, what I did wasn’t clever but kind of all over the place, using everything at my disposal . . . like the bee. It’s like—if you move fast enough and just the right way—if you do some things quickly and desperately enough, hoping they don’t have time to fall apart on you—you can make the seemingly impossible happen. And it’s not ‘before it knows any better.’ It’s before the whole unstable construct falls apart. Move fast enough and you can walk on water. .”
― Vera Nazarian, Qualify

“Part Three In A Nutshell How To Break The Worry Habit Before It Breaks You RULE 1: Crowd worry out of your mind by keeping busy. Plenty of action is one of the best therapies ever devised for curing “wibber gibbers”. RULE 2: Don’t fuss about trifles. Don’t permit little things—the mere termites of life—to ruin your happiness. RULE 3: Use the law of averages to outlaw your worries. Ask yourself: “What are the odds against this thing’s happening at all?” RULE 4: Co-operate with the inevitable. If you know a circumstance is beyond your power to change or revise, say to yourself “It is so; it cannot be otherwise.” RULE 5: Put a “stop-loss” order on your worries. Decide just how much anxiety a thing may be worth—and refuse to give it any more. RULE 6: Let the past bury its dead. Don’t saw sawdust.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and start Living