Library of Wisdom
Hard-earned lessons from lives shared by choice — every card donated deliberately by its author, with the whole life behind it. The Library is young; it grows one life at a time.
4 cards from 4 lives on friendship & community.
Leadership & mentoring · Friendship & community
On running a lab
A lab is a family you choose every funding cycle, which concentrates the mind wonderfully. I hired for curiosity over polish, fed people at every defeat, and enforced exactly one commandment: bad news travels fastest. The postdoc who tells you the experiment died on Tuesday is worth three who manage your mood until Friday. That rule, I am told by alumni who now run companies and households, ports everywhere. Make it cheap to bring you the truth and you will be rich in the only currency management actually runs on.
To someone younger: Make it cheap to bring you bad news. Everything else is decor.
— Dr. Priya Sharma · Immunologist — thirty-four years at NIH, BethesdaDemonstration
Home & hospitality · Friendship & community
말이 안 통해도 밥은 통합니다
영어를 못 하던 시절에도 저는 사람을 먹였습니다. 세탁소 뒷방에서 김밥을 싸서 옆 가게 청년에게, 우체부에게, 말 한마디 못 나누는 사람들에게 건넸습니다. 그 사람들이 사십 년이 지난 지금까지 저의 친구입니다. 말이 안 통해도 밥은 통합니다. 낯선 사람, 외로워 보이는 사람이 있으면 묻지 말고 먼저 먹이세요. 무슨 말이 필요했는지는 밥을 다 먹고 나면 서로 알게 됩니다.
To someone younger: 묻지 말고 먼저 먹이세요.
— 박순자 (Park Soon-Ja) · 애넌데일에서 31년간 세탁소를 꾸린 할머니Demonstration
Leadership & mentoring · Friendship & community
Shepherding people smarter than you
My congregation held schoolteachers, two surgeons, a federal judge, and Sister Alma Pettiford, who corrected my Greek from the third pew for thirty years and was usually right. A young preacher thinks the call is to be the smartest voice in the room, and the room will let him think it just long enough to embarrass him. The shepherd is not smarter than the sheep — that was never the job. The job is staying out in the weather with them. Authority you demand lasts a season. Authority they hand you for standing in the rain lasts forty-four years.
To someone younger: Be the one who stays out in the weather. The rest is borrowed.
— Rev. James E. Caldwell · AME Zion pastor, forty-four years — Richmond, VirginiaDemonstration
Friendship & community · Aging
Tuesdays
You want to know what holds a life together, and everybody thinks it's the big things — the wedding, the diploma, the funeral. It's Tuesdays. Our league bowled every Tuesday for forty-one years. That league buried husbands, met babies, sat with Florence through the chemo twice. Three marriages among us went down and the league never missed a week. Pick your people, pick a day, and show up for forty years. That's the whole recipe. Everything else is decoration.
To someone younger: Pick your people, pick a day, show up. Repeat for forty years.
— Dorothy "Dot" Jablonski · Wire-winder, diner owner, fed every kid on Cherry StreetDemonstration