Richard Branson on learning and mistakes

To be read in an English accent:

When was the last time you took a risk? …Learn the art of making mistakes and learning lessons. People have a fear of failure, and while this is perfectly reasonable, it’s also very odd. It’s through making mistakes that we learn to do things. Watch a musician practice sometime. Watch a baby figure out how to walk. Skills like walking and playing music emerge gradually from a blizzard of often pretty funny mistakes. I think this is true about everything: Learning is about making mistakes and learning from them… [Making mistakes] is not failure; Failure is not giving things a go in the first place.

From the Business Stripped Bare audiobook.

Birth and death in the modern world

Ten years ago in Mexico it was the normal thing to be born and die in one’s own home and to be buried by one’s friend’s. Only the soul’s needs were taken care of by the institutional church. Now to begin and end life at home become signs of either poverty or of special privilege. Dying and death have come under the institutional management of doctors and undertakers.

– Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, published in 1971

The four types of states

The celebrated anthropologist Clifford Geertz has half-jokingly suggested that all states can be parceled into four types: pluralist, in which the state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy; populist, in which government is viewed as an expression of the people’s will; “great beast,” in which the rulers’ power depends on using force to keep the populace cowed; and “great fraud,” in which the elite uses smoke and mirrors to convince the people of its inherent authority. Every state is a mix of all of these elements…

Charles Mann, describing the pre-Columbian states in North and South America, in his excellent book, 1491