Himalayan Mountaineering
In my worst moments of anguish, I seemed to discover the deep significance of existence of which till then I had been unaware. I saw that it was better to be true than to be strong.
Maurice Herzog – Annapurna
Success and Failure
From chapter 13 of “The Four Hour Work Week” by Timothy Ferriss
Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.
Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM
Clay Shirkey in “Here Comes Everybody”
Meetup is a giant information processing tool, a kind of market where groups are the products and where the market expresses its judgement not in cash but in the expenditure of energy.
Pg. 236
A less obvious but potentially more significant poroblem is that the possible value of various projects is unconnected to anything their designers say about them.
Pg.245
Dave Ramsey, Financial Peace
Dave Ramsey, Financial Peace
I sold many a kitchen to a woman and the house just went with it or sold a big basement to a man and the house just went with it.
Remember this definition of a rich man – a person who is not afraid to ask to see something cheaper.
…but I have never met a lazy person who thinks he is lazy.
Failure
Beck Weathers, in an interview about his disaster on Everest.
Well you don’t learn anything from success. If you want to learn something about yourself, you undergo hard times or you fail because that teaches you something.
Authenticity
Douwe van den Oever, a featured climber at TotalClimbing.com
With climbing, serious skiing, and a couple other sports, you just can’t lie. You either do it or you don’t. It’s very binary. And in climbing, if you don’t do it, the consequences can be severe. You can communicate your way through people and reorganizations. You can’t communicate your way through a mountain.
Happiness
From Leo Tolstoy’s “Family Happiness.” I was made aware of this passage by Chris McCandless via Jon Krakauer’s book “Into the Wild.”
I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possiblity of being useful to people whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor-such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps-what more can the heart of a man desire?
Perfect People
From an interesting, somewhat sad, and yet insightful article.
They want a site that speaks to people where they are, rather than looking like it was manufactured by perfect people.
Theory of Constraints
From Eli Goldratt’s Critical Chain:
… what some would call academic-resource optimization, sequence optimization, investment optimization. I call them irrelevant.
The Goal Eli Goldratt
One particular conversation from Eli Goldratt’s The Goal has been rattling around in my head. So alas, I record it here for all to ponder. Paraphrased from Julie and Al’s discussion in chapter 32:
Common sense is masked by common practice.
More Simplicity
From John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity
… a 73 old artist took me aside and said, “The worlds always been falling apart. So relax.”
Rolling Rocks Downhill
From Clarke Ching’s business novel, Rolling Rocks Downhill.
… when you are playing the wrong “game” the answer is to stop playing the game and change the rules.
Simplicity and Occam’s Razor
While reading through Getting Things Done, I came across this quote I’ve heard before. It’s attributed to Einstein with some uncertainty.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
I googled the quote and came across an interesting paper about simplicity and Occam’s Razor.
Getting Things Done
From David Allen’s Getting Things Done:
I consider “work,” in its most universal sense, as meaning anything that you want or need to be different than it currently is.
- you don’t manage five minutes and wind up with six;
- you don’t manage information overload—otherwise you’d walk into a library and die, or the first time you connected to the Web, or even opened a phone book, you’d blow up; and
- you don’t manage priorities—you have them.
There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.
The Laws of Simplicity
I read John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity a while back. One of the best quotes that keeps coming to mind is:
Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.
Clifford Stoll
The first time you do something it’s science. The second time, it’s engineering. The third time, it’s just being a technician.
Paul Rand
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK-lr_QeI_g
Don’t try to be original, just try to be good.
Lies We Tell Kids
Paul Graham’s latest essay, Lies We Tell Kids, is an extension of ideas he’s written about before. I don’t agree with all of his conclusions. Others are spot on. Here are some of my favorite quotes. Any way you cut it, it’s one of his most controversial essays ever. Enjoy.
When you’re too weak to lift something, you can tell, but when you’re making a decision impetuously, you’re all the more sure of it.
Paradoxical as it sounds, there are some kinds of knowledge that get in the way of other kinds of knowledge. If you’re going to learn that the world is a brutal place full of people trying to take advantage of one another, you’re better off learning it last. Otherwise you won’t bother learning much more.
Very smart adults often seem unusually innocent, and I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think they’ve deliberately avoided learning about certain things. Certainly I do. I used to think I wanted to know everything. Now I know I don’t.
But because adults conceal their flaws, and at the same time insist on high standards of behavior for kids, a lot of kids grow up feeling they fall hopelessly short. They walk around feeling horribly evil for having used a swearword, while in fact most of the adults around them are doing much worse things.
The more confident people are, the more willing they seem to be to answer a question “I don’t know.” Less confident people feel they have to have an answer or they’ll look bad.
This sort of lie is one of the main reasons bad things persist: we’re all trained to ignore them.
Childhood Dreams
Watch the video of Randy Pausch giving his last lecture at Carnegie Mellon. Set aside some time it’s 1 hour and 16 minutes long, but worth it.
Paraphrases:
Give people long enough, and they will eventually surprise you.
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
If you don’t have any idea where to set the bar, don’t.
Be earnest, not hip.
Unknowns
http://www.codesqueeze.com/quit-sweeping-known-uncertainity-under-the-rug/
Give it a whirl, be humble. Give your poor rug a break [from sweeping things under it] and show your team how damn uncertain you are about things. I do and that is why I am the putz with the successful projects.
Programmer Productivity
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1006-sleep-deprivation-is-not-a-badge-of-honor
What separates programmers who are 10x more effective than the norm is not that they write 10x as many lines of code. It’s that they use their creativity to solve the problem with 1/10th of the effort.
Joel on Architecture Astronauts
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html
Damn, they just finished building something called Windows Live FolderShare and I haven’t exactly noticed a stampede to that. I’ll bet you’ve never even heard of it. The 3,398th web site that lets you upload and download files to a place on the Internet. I’m so excited I might just die.
David Laribee
Connecting up with people way smarter than you has always been my strategy for learning….
I couldn’t agree more. From dnrtv. The quote may be Jeremy Miller’s. Honestly, I can’t tell a difference in your voices.
Abraham Lincoln Quote
Thanks David and Jeremy for mentioning this quote in the dnrtv podcast.
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
Freedom
http://www.ibiblio.org/fred/freedom/
While Freedom isn’t Free, this program is.
Be Good
Don’t just not be evil. Be good.
And the very best hackers tend to be idealistic. They’re not desperate for a job. They can work wherever they want. So most want to work on things that will make the world better.
Anyone can adopt “Don’t be evil.” The catch is that people will hold you to it. So I don’t think you’re going to see record labels or tobacco companies using this discovery.
Being good is a particularly useful strategy for making decisions in complex situations because it’s stateless. It’s like telling the truth. The trouble with lying is that you have to remember everything you’ve said in the past to make sure you don’t contradict yourself. If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything, and that’s a really useful property in domains where things happen fast.
UML
From Craig Larman’s Applying UML And Patterns
Experienced analysts and modelers know the secret of modeling: The purpose of modeling (sketching UML, …) is primarily to understand, not to document.
Tagging vs. Taxonomy
http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world?
In a world where publishing is expensive, the act of publishing is also a statement of quality — the filter comes before the publication. In a world where publishing is cheap, putting something out there says nothing about its quality. It’s what happens after it gets published that matters.
You can see there’s a tag “to_read”. A professional cataloguer would look at this tag in horror — “This is context-dependent and temporary.” Well, so was the category “East Germany.”
Tame The Tounge
In one of Paul Graham’s most controversial essays, What You Can’t Say, he talks about guarding ones speech. You just gotta love the Fight Club reference.
The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts. I think it’s better to follow the opposite policy. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. Inside your head, anything is allowed. Within my head I make a point of encouraging the most outrageous thoughts I can imagine. But, as in a secret society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders. The first rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club.
Being Smart
Prof. Gerry Sussman quoted by John Maeda:
Being smart in the arts is the same as being smart in engineering is the same as being smart in writing is the same as being smart in anything, really. It’s the ability to manipulate all the pieces of the puzzle in your mind, try to fit them together, and when they don’t fit quite right … you sand the edges/corners and make them all fit.
