Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world!
What is the most overrated virtue?
I think authenticity is a crock, and I think authenticity is overrated and talked about far too much. The problem with authenticity is it’s selfish. Authenticity enables us to say whatever we want and if people don’t like it, well I was just being authentic. It is a ticket to self-absorbed inconsistency, and I don’t think anybody we serve wants that.
Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 29 October 2020 source ↗
Others on this question
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Theodore Roosevelt
26th President of the United States, 1901–1909; Governor of New York 1899–1900; Assistant Secretary of the Navy 1897–1898
Recorded
Sorbonne, Paris, The American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara, 23 April 1910
source ↗
Eleanor Roosevelt
First Lady of the United States 1933–1945; United States Delegate to the United Nations General Assembly 1945–1952; Chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights 1946–1951
Tolerance ought only to be a preliminary step which allows us to get to know other people, and which prevents us from setting up bars, just because they may be of a different race or religion. The real value of any relationship is the fact that we learn to like people in spite of our differences.
Recorded
'My Day' syndicated newspaper column, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, The George Washington University, 24 November 1943
source ↗
Debbie Millman
Designer; host of Design Matters; founder of the SVA branding programme
one of the things that I learned from doing Design Matters from my guest Danny Shapiro, and I think I mentioned this in part one of my interview with Tim; confidence is overrated. Danny Shapiro has said that what is more important than confidence is courage.
Linus Torvalds
Creator of the Linux kernel and of Git
I've actually felt slightly uncomfortable at TED for the last two days, because there's a lot of vision going on, right? And I am not a visionary. I do not have a five-year plan. I'm an engineer. And I think it's really — I mean — I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, “I want to go there.” But I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in.
Recorded
Chris Anderson, TED2016, Vancouver, TED (transcript of the TED2016 interview), February 2016
source ↗
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