The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard ShawMan and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"Irish dramatist & socialist (1856 - 1950)
Emerging is when you use a platform to come into your own. Merging is when you sacrifice who you are to become part of something else.
Merging is what the system wants from you. To give up your dreams and your identity to further the goals of the system. Managers push for employees to merge into the organization.
Emerging is what a platform and support and leadership allow you to do. Emerging is what we need from you.
-- Seth Godin
“It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.”
-- Jobs quoted in Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, 1987
We think we want a lot of choices, but really we want freedom. There’s a difference, and the overwhelming number of choices in our lives these days leads to confusion, paralysis, and unhappiness.
Scarcity choices can be seen as a bad thing, but I see it as liberating. I’m not saying we should have no choices, but fewer is better.
Try narrowing down your choices, in as many ways as you dare. Watch fewer TV shows by picking just three you watch every week. Pick just one book and read that until you’re done. Have a to-do list that’s only three items long each day. Make a weekly menu that only has two or three meals you cook in big batches, and eat those all week. You might worry that you’re making the wrong choices — you’re not.
There are no wrong choices, there’s only the fear of making the wrong choices.
I find limiting my choices to be an opportunity to let go of the worries about making the wrong choices, and to focus on enjoying the choices I do make.
Leo Babauta @ http://zenhabits.net/scarce/#more-8603
“I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals. As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups.”-- Jobs @ Wired, February 1996
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”-- Jobs @ Stanford commencement speech, June 2005
“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”-- Jobs @ Wired, February 1996
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”-- Jobs @ Stanford commencement speech, June 2005
It's obviously important to do some amount of data modeling. What's not so obvious is when to stop. It's like commenting your code: newer programmers just don't know when to quit. When you're a little insecure, adding comments and metadata are a great security-blanket that make you feel busy when you've in fact stopped making forward progress and are just reiterating (or perhaps teaching yourself) what's already been accomplished.-- Steve Yegge
"I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.''-- Alan J. Perlis
Our parents and grandparents spent their “Cognitive Surplus” watching television. That’s a thing of the past… a historical accident of the old factory-worker age meeting the modern mass-media age. Of course it wouldn’t last forever. We humans as a species were designed to compete, not to sit around on our asses.-- Hugh Macleod @ http://gapingvoid.com/ep/
Plus the five little kids, the two startup companies on the side, etc. Obviously, balance is a distant goal. In the meantime, I delegate, work all the time, hardly sleep, totally ignore politics, sports and pop culture, neglect my family too much and probably don’t do any ofmy jobs as well as I could. But these are exciting days, and if ever there was a time to be overextended, this is it.
-- Chris Anderson
"Frankly, it beats the hell out of commuting every morning to the corporate glass box in the big city, [...] just so I could make enough money to help me forget that I have to commute every morning to the corporate glass box in the big city."-- Hugh Macleod @ http://gapingvoid.com/ep/
If you’re a programmer today and you’re not employed, you’re not looking or you’re not doing the right things:(A) get involved in open source development(B) learn a development environment that’s hot right now.-- @dhh in Episode #26 of the 37signals Podcast
"Work from anywhere is a lifestyle that will become more common as time goes by. This has many implications, the most obvious one is that you can choose a great place to live at, and this is not something to ignore. But there is the other side of it: if you need to put 10k hours in something, it needs to be something you like, and chances are, that the best people doing whatever is that you like will not be seating in the next cubicle.
Working from anywhere works both ways, for you and the people you’re working with. To work with the best people, work with them no matter where they are: they will not move to your area just because. So, choose what you want to work on, you can work on anything from anywhere with anyone, at least when we’re talking about software development."
