I first saw this at Twitter HQ but didn’t think much of it. Then I read this post by Caterina Fake (good one, do read it) and found the origin of this image.
Now get excited and make things!!
Posts Tagged ‘quotes’
Get Excited And Make Things!
Sunday, September 4th, 2011Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will and selfishness
Sunday, October 17th, 2010A really great quote when you have to work with people that really stress you out to no ends and you find yourself running really low on patience.
Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will and selfishness—all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow-creature similarly endowed with reason and share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading.
—Marcus Aurelius
From the book:
Technology Macro-Myopia
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009Quotable quotes from Morgan Stanley’s ’09 “The Mobile Internet Report Key Themes” 659-slide deck:
It’s a very consistent pattern in this business that collectively as a society and as individuals we all suffer from what I call macro-myopia. A pattern where our hopes and our expectations or our fears about the threatened impact of some new technology causes us to overestimate its short-term impacts and reality always fails to meet those inflated expectations. And as a result our disappointment then leads us to turn around and underestimate the long-term implications and I can guarantee you this time will be no different. The short-term impact of this stuff [the Internet] will be less than the hype would suggest but the long-term implications will be vastly larger than we can possibly imagine today.
—Paul Saffo, 6/12/1995 Interview with PBS in Palo Alto, CA
Roll with uncertainty
Saturday, November 14th, 2009A lot of time we spin our wheels going back and forth when faced with uncertainty in life. I know sometimes I tend to overanalyze and try to risk-assess something to death, and still get no closer to a decision. At the last Y Combinator Startup School in Berkeley, Mark Zuckerberg said (paraphrase),
“In a world where everything around you is constantly changing quickly, the most dangerous thing you can do is to not change”.
And that’s especially true in the technology business. As a technologist, if you don’t learn to love it, you won’t keep up. I’m a big fan of Tina Seelig and her famous talk at Stanford titled “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20” (I can’t highly recommend it enough, please check it out and you can thank me later). That talk has received so much interest that it’s now a book.
Going back to uncertainty, it just never stops. If everyone had equal visibility and the exact equal amount of information for decision making, then everybody would be able to make the same sound decision. Now making decision, with incomplete information .. that’s how you win; how you get an edge on the competition. Also not easy, but you have to roll with it.
In a recent Q&A with Tina on BNET,
Q: Your latest book is entitled What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World. So the inevitable question: if you could go back and give your 20-year-old self just one piece of advice, what would it be?
A: I would tell myself that the uncertainty of life never goes away. There are always choices in front of you, challenges to overcome, and failures from which you need to recover. If you embrace the challenges and view them through the lens of possibilities, then you will not only be happier, but will be much more likely to turn the inevitable obstacles into opportunities. The world is always changing, and it is up to you to be flexible and optimistic. With a positive attitude and creative thinking, most problems can be viewed as opportunities in disguise.
Yours truly is reading this book on my Kindle. I. highly. recommend. it.
What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World
The good kind of stress.
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009We hear people whining about stress but rarely do we hear someone extolling it. And that’s why I’d like to make a distinction between stress and pressure. I understand that the two words are used interchangeably, and that there was a book about good stress, but the word is itself stressful. Stress is when you’re contemplating failure, when you’re threatened, in danger, being pushed. Ah, but pressure can be when you’re hopeful, when you’re contemplating victory, when opportunity is winking at you, pulling you onward.
“Deadlines are your friends,” has been my companion for many years. Deadlines mean you get to finish, to let go. And, for many of us, deadlines mean you get to start. After all, if there’s no hurry, it’s never going to see the upper half of your to-do list. A deadline is GAME ON!
