Not Fade Away

So there are a few drafts I had left in my inbox before I started working at Google. I am going to try to post those (all have to do with books) first. I found out about Not Fade Away in someone’s blog and decided to pick it up. I read the whole book in one day and enjoyed it very much. Here are a few quotes that really spoke to me:

And this, unfortunately, brings me to one of the most excruciating incidents of my childhood – one of those awful moments, totally trivial in itself, that you literally spent your whole life getting over. I tell this story as a plea to parents, coaches, teachers: For God’s sake, be careful what you say when a child messes up!

This is one of my biggest pet-peeves. Parents who speak without thinking, parents who think their children have the same sensitivity level they have. Parents who scar you forever.

It would have been easy to finish that degree – easier than bolting. With the degree in hand, it would have been easier for me to land a job with one of the status quo watchdogs that with anybody else. Once I had the job, it would have been easier to amend my own beliefs that to change the organization.

Thus, by increments so exquisitely gradual that they might have just passed unnoticed, I could have ended up being totally untrue to myself and living a life I hated. Twenty years later, I might have had a closet full of suits, a passport full of visas, and and irreparable feeling that I’d really blown it.


Another beautifully poignant point. It’s sad and amazing how quickly and quietly we lose control of our lives. How we wake up suddenly, years later, and we can’t remember why we are where we are and how we got there. How easy it is to take the next easy step without thinking why and whether it’s still a step on your eventual destination (assuming you still remember your eventual destination.)

It’s funny, in a way – our society warns us about the temptations of wealth and power, about the slender chances of a rich man getting into Heaven. But poverty has its pitfalls, too. Too little dough can erode a person’s ethics and values just as easily as too much.