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- Oscar The Grouch Quotes
This may be the most rewarding random-thought-Google-search find of my recent memory:
In an era of infinite shelf space, of everything feeling commoditized, rapidly consumed, and comfortably discarded,
I take great solace in this Oscar the Grouch quote:
“It’s not garbage; it’s a collection of character!”
That might just be all a Personal Archive represents.
If you collect your reflections on ideas and pieces of interest, from all that’s discarded in the day-to-day lives we’re surrounded with, you’ll end up building a collection of character.*
It might not make sense to anyone else, but it doesn’t need to.
It just needs to make sense of you.
And, once in a while, you’ll get to show up with a piece of your trash and have somebody else feel like you just showed them a treasure.
After this search, I ended up using an Oscar the Grouch quote in a finance podcast** (follow the logic here, for ADHD-addled amusement if nothing else: a clip we were talking about referenced Marxism, which then had me looking up Groucho Marx quotes, which obviously led me to Oscar the Grouch quotes…)
That piece of my trash ended up in a review/reflection piece by Dave Nadig over on his wonderful Substack, Echo Beach:
So what do you do? Make sure your not relying on 30 year old ideas for how markets respond to flow, information and disruption.
I think Matt Zeigler summarized it best:
Oscar the Grouch on the topic of rain: When it rains, it rains trash out of heaven. Every lucky cloud contains trash out of heaven. We gotta take this whole other take and look for the complete other angle. What if somebody thinks this crap is positive? If we don’t take that complete contrarian view and try to argue it, we have no hope for explaining what is going on here. And they all agree something weird is going on.
Build your collection of character.
If anybody else calls it trash, flip them a big ol’ bird.
*Speaking of building… in a world begging you to consider creating tangible things, Cara Brookins and Rusty Guinn have created incredible things with their families and I want everyone to know their stories:
**And if you missed me, Jack Forehand, and Dave Nadig talking finance (and just me referencing Groucho Marx and Oscar the Grouch, but hey, you know my steez):