Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it’s really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never any good at doing in the first place.

- Adam Gopnik, What I Learned when I learned to draw

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear. That’s why it’s so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

- Joshua Foer in Moonwalking with Einstein 

A  quantum computer is the pot that, if watched, really won’t boil.  Charles Bennett described quantum information as being “like the information of a dream - we can’t show it to others, and when we try to describe it we change the memory of it.” When one turns to a quantum computer for an “answer”, that answer, from having been held in that strange entangled way, among many particles, need to surface in just one, ordinary, unentangled place.  That transition from entanglement to non-entanglement is sometimes termed “collapse”. Once the system has collapsed, the information it holds is no longer a dream or a secret or a strange car at once alive and dead the answer is just an ordinary thing we can read off a screen. 

Rivka Galchen, Dream Machine

The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities[…] The reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error.

-Nassim Taleb