Category: Fortunes

Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. — Dwight Eisenhower.

Begin anywhere. — John Cage.

The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer. — Cunningham’s Law.

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruits are sweet. — Attributed to Aristotle.

High performing teams do routine things in an outstanding manner, routinely. — Ann Dunwoody, USA’s first female 4-star general. At A8C’s Grand Meetup, 2018.

Have the courage to use your own understanding. — Kant, What is enlightenment?

Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances are that they’ll get the ideas right. — Creativity, Ed Catmull.

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. — SICP, preface to the 1st edition.

To became a member of the community of architects requires an ability to learn to view the world as an architect and to use architect’s tools in a professional way. This can happen only by observing and interacting with experienced architects within the context of a studio. — Internet, innovation and OpenSource: Actors in the…

The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends. — Ratatouille, Anton Ego.

Get a good chair, because you can’t always be motivated, and sometimes you have to sit on it until you’re done. — The grandfather of a friend, who had a work ethic that I share.

When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. — Joel Spolsky, Don’t let architecture astronauts scare you.

To learn to make something well can take your whole life. And it’s worth it. — Ursula K. Le Guin.

If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more. — Eric Shinseki. Hat tip: Ann Dunwoody, Automattic Grand Meetup 2018.

Make it work, make it right, make it fast. — The UNIX way, resurfaced decades later by Kent Beck.

It seems to be much easier to make two small jumps than the one big jump in any kind of mental thinking. — Creative Thinking at Bell Labs (1952), Claude Shannon.

Objectives are like a vaccine for fuzzy thinking. — Why the secret to success is setting the right goals, John Doerr.

When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow & exclude people. So create. – Why The Lucky Stiff.