I've read about 80 books a year for the past 50 years. I come from cultural breeding. I don't have a cellphone. When you spend all your time checking your cellphone messages, or updating your Facebook (of course I don't have a Facebook page) then you don't have any time for reading.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of reading and personal time over digital distractions.
Vaclav Smil highlights the value of dedicating time to reading rather than being absorbed in digital communication and social media. He suggests that constant engagement with technology can detract from personal growth and cultural enrichment that comes from reading books.
In practice
In a speech about personal development, one might say, 'As Vaclav Smil reminds us, prioritizing reading over distractions can lead to greater knowledge.'
Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing - from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What's very important is in-house research.
America tends to assume Silicon Valley-style innovators can drive quick and transformative changes, but even Silicon Valley's would-be masters of the universe have discovered that energy transitions are subject to time spans and technical constraints that defy their reach.
Everyone [in higher education] was what I call drillers of deeper wells. These academics sit at the bottom of a deep well and they look up and see a sliver of the sky. They know everything about that little sliver of sky and nothing else. I scan all my horizons.
Most scientific or engineering discoveries would never become successful products without contributions from other scientists or engineers. Every major invention is the child of far-flung parents who may never meet.
I'm old fashioned. I'm not one of these young guys who think they are so smart that they can prescribe what humanity ought to do. Humanity never learns any lessons. Prescriptions don't matter. We already know exactly what to do. We just don't do it.
Economic and technical imperatives - not any preconceived directives - will keep propelling the process of energy transition.
Somehow, there is this feeling that women require remedial financial education, and so everything must be dumbed down. The reality is that we all need a lot more education, but guys just go ahead and invest anyway.
I'm kind of old-school and love nothing more than sitting, opening a book, and reading it. But I also love listening to audio books.
Do not be afraid to ask for help. Nobody gets through college on their own.
The impact of giving someone a connected smartphone is no different from giving them a real computer. I look at how my kids learn and how different it is from how I learned because the impact of these things is just so huge. Sometimes I think we don't fully internalize what it is to get the power of knowledge in everyone's hand.
My family was well off but not rich. I spent the four years I was an undergraduate working on the beach. And it wasn't because I was lazy; it was because my freshman class would go to a hundred different employers and wouldn't get a nibble. That was a disequilibrium system. I realized that the ordinary old-fashioned Euclidean geometry didn't apply.
I can teach many sports, but obviously, tennis is the one. When you do other sports, you see things from different perspectives: different footwork drills, body positions, angles and geometry. All that stuff is helpful, and so when I do other sports, I can see things, because once you know one sport, then the other sport becomes more clear.
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