“..people who are depressed spend more time focused on negative images..

“Time in a startup. Our series A took five months start to finish.

Money in a startup. Angel round, series A, office lease, immigration, contracts, we’ve spent nearly $90,000 on legal fees this year. A good startup founder can create $50/hr in value. If you spend an hour saving $20 on a $100 graphics card, you’ve wasted money.

Hiring in a startup. We’ll do whatever it takes to get a good employee: $1,200 last-minute flights, $3,000 referral bonuses, 20% annual salary in recruiter commissions. Running a startup consumes your life. It is important to surround yourself with fun interesting people at work because work becomes your life.

“..by downloading an anti-phishing toolbar, you’re currently making yourself more vulnerable than if you had never downloaded it at all.

“We have to manage our own past [on the web] just like ancient egyptions had to manage their sarcophagus and afterlife.

“We’re on to something really cool that doesn’t fall into the same trap that blog comments have, and we promise you’ll be playing with it soon.

“Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and Anil Kumble met the Indian board president and conveyed their wish to be coached by a foreigner.

“When you start explaining what you are doing and how to do it you find you’ve lost your own touch.

“Women make up 70 percent of Algeria’s lawyers and 60 percent of its judges. Women dominate medicine. Increasingly, women contribute more to household income than men.

“If you want to pass your message across, you have to look into the other’s persons eye at least 75% of the time when listening and at least 90% when speaking.

During a group conversation, looking into someone’s eyes is the prominent way to regulate who will speak next. I will look at you before I open my mouth.

Avoiding gaze, also known as gaze aversion, has a basic reason: We tend to think better when we don’t look into someones eyes.

If you are in a business environment and would like to be emotionally detached, it is better to look between the eyes.

If you are in a flirting situation, you can go for the triangular gazing: You shift between his/her left eye, then the right eye and finally the lips.

If you want an emotional result from the other person look at him/her in the soft eye. That will probably be his left one, or the right one as you see it.

Remember to smile..

“It is not true that there is no such thing as good taste. Art can be good, and some artists are better than others at making it.

Art has a purpose: to interest its audience. Once you start talking about audiences, you don’t have to argue simply that there are or aren’t standards of taste. Instead tastes are a series of concentric rings..

If art isn’t all subjective, how do you pick out the people with better taste?

Though appeal to people is a meaningful test, in practice you can’t measure it. You can’t just take a vote.

There are two main kinds of error that get in the way of seeing a work of art: biases you bring from your own circumstances, and tricks played by the artist. The way not to be vulnerable to tricks is to explicitly seek out and catalog them.

It’s harder to escape the influence of your own circumstances, but you can at least move in that direction. The way to do it is to travel widely, in both time and space.

..while anyone’s reaction to a famous painting will be warped at first by its fame, there are ways to decrease its effects. One is to come back to the painting over and over. After a few days the fame wears off, and you can start to see it as a painting.

The most important consequence of realizing there can be good art is that it frees artists to try to make it.