When you read—whether it’s a paper, article, chapter, or book—you may have some expectations about its direction or substance. However, you won’t truly know what your experience with the material will be like until you’re immersed in it.
Likewise, you will not know beforehand, what you will remember it for. That may not be clear until you have read the material, perhaps more than once.
Sometimes, it is a sentence. You may have an overall impression. Perhaps you noted concepts, wrote down thoughts or highlighted quotes or passages. But a single phrase may have gotten stuck in your mind.
Maxim 8 of Maxims for Thinking Analytically: The wisdom of legendary Harvard Professor Richard Zeckhauser, by Dan Levy states:
Good decisions sometimes have poor outcomes
Succinct and helpful, it reminds of luck and uncertainty and to distinguish between decisions and their outcomes. Good decisions can have bad outcomes.
When I think of this book, I think of that sentence.
This is the title for one of the last chapters in Same as Ever by Morgan Housel:
Wounds heal, scars last.
There is the immediate event and there are its consequences — and the consequences’ consequences. The scars are the ripples, often observable in far-ranging areas. Over time, they fade but rarely disappear entirely. Wounds heal, scars last.
For me, it is perhaps the single most memorable sentence of the book.
In The Ex-N.Y.P.D. Official Trying to Tame New York’s Trash, Eric Lach discusses the challenges of managing garbage in New York City. It is interesting reporting and I felt myself drawn in and learning.
Then, towards the last paragraphs of the article, I came across the following:
. . . there’s no such thing as throwing something “away”; [someone always suffers the consequences of trash.]
This is about the realities of waste management and environmental impact, but also system thinking more generally.
No such thing as throwing something away. It is always going somewhere. It is memorable phrasing and when I came across it, I suspected this would stay with me — and it has.
Sometimes, it’s a direct quote; other times, it’s a rephrasing or something more abstract. Either way, I’ve always found it a helpful means to better remember aspects of the material and to enhance further thinking.
It helps make thinking stick.
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