Wise words in one of Paul Graham’s essays:
If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you’re trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you’re even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what’s the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.
Saw this quote on ‘the daily wtf’ on Enterprise applications:
built to be all things for all people, by people that didn’t have a clear picture of which things it was supposed to be to whom.
I’ve never had to deal with Enterprise applications until recently and just realised how bad they can be!
I heard this definition of experience while at startup camp 3 over the weekend and it’s pretty much spot on.
Experience is the thing you get after you needed it
This quote stuck in my mind because it somehow ringed “true”, like I’ve experienced it
The dictionary define experience as
a general concept comprises knowledge of or skill in or observation of some thing or some event gained through involvement in or exposure to that thing or event
Which is a mundane and objective definition, but if you think about it, the two definitions are quite similar. The first one is a little more restricted in that it requires you to have “needed” the experience where as the latter applies more generally to all experience.
The second quote would have never stuck in my mind. It’s distant, emotionless, and contains no personal pronouns. Understanding the definition requires you to imagine an arbitrary “thing” or “event” and then imagine ones involvement. The first one stuck because it used “you” which immediately draws up first hand personal memories, and those memories are more readily available. It requires less thinking to understand, and a brain like mine likes simple things.
This quote came from a recent post by Seth Godin.
After the decision, going down the path is the easy part.
Decisions without perfect information is scary. Often times we have to make decisions with uncertain outcomes. If waiting longer means that we can obtain more information to help make that decision, then wait. But I think that more often than not, waiting longer doesn’t help and it’s not worth the agony of worry and indecision. The easiest way to become certain is to make a decision and go with it.
It’s easier said than done, and I often have to remind myself of this.
This is a first among many to come of a collection of quotes that have inspired me.
Today’s quote is from the authors preface of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, perhaps the first popular writer of the personal success literature genre of books.
Achievement, All Earned Riches, Have Their Beginning In An Idea
© 2010 Think, Test, Grow · Proudly powered by WordPress & Green Park 2 by Cordobo.
Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional | Valid CSS 3
