A Quote by Barack Obama
One of the interesting things about being in public life is there are constantly these pressures being placed on you from different sides. To be effective, you have to be able to listen to a variety of points of view, synthesize viewpoints.
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One of the things you learn as president is, as powerful as this office is, you have limited bandwidth. And the time goes by really quickly and you're constantly making choices, and there are pressures on you from all different directions - pressures on your attention, not just pressures from different constituencies. And so you have to be pretty focused about where can you have the biggest, quickest impact.
At some point you have to take responsibility for who you are and where you are and being able to listen to other points of view, whichever side of the tracks you're on.
Being able to provoke a different point of view to the standard current ideological or political perspective as played out in conventional newspaper or radio reportage is what a public intellectual does. But it's not merely about being oppositional, because that's too negative.
The great thing is the thing of being able to see things through many points of view. That's enlarging. I mean, it saves you from ultimately from the boredom of having one point of view, like being locked in a room with nothing but your own point of view, your own references.
Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history... Listen being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.
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Whatever I'm writing has seemed to be about something I don't feel I could freely express in my everyday life, and stand-up is a really effective medium for getting people to hear exactly the things and viewpoints that they normally don't want listen to.
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My son was born somewhat late in my life and I just found myself really feeling like I didn't want to miss out on being a parent and being with him, and not wanting a situation where I was constantly pulled back and forth between being present, and having all these other pressures and considerations.
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With Akismet, there was an interesting dilemma. Is it for the good of the world Akismet being secret and being more effective against spammers, versus it being open and less effective?
There's a variety and depth to the song topics I get to write about in children's music and books: being able to write about things I wouldn't normally write about, like a disappointing pancake, or monsters or opposite day is really different than writing about heartbreak and relationships.
In order to function and pay our bills and our taxes and feed our families and stuff, musicians have to make a living. It's not about being a millionaire. It's about being able to survive. When there are people constantly stealing from you, it's quite frustrating. It's a matter of changing the public's option about doing it.
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