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
When people ask me how do you make it in show business or whatever, what I always tell them — And nobody ever takes note of it ‘cuz it’s not the answer they wanted to hear. What they want to hear is here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script, here’s how you do this — But I always say, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” If somebody’s thinking, “How can I be really good?”, people are going to come to you. It’s much easier doing it that way than going to cocktail parties.
-- Steve Martin on Charlie Rose
Since the modern, scientifically conceived corporation was invented in the early half of the twentieth century, creativity has been sacrificed in favor of forwarding the interests of the “team player.”
Fair enough. There was more money in doing it that way; that’s why they did it.
There’s only one problem. Team players are not very good at creating value on their own. They are not autonomous; they need a team in order to exist.
So now corporations are awash with nonautonomous thinkers.
Creating an economically viable entity where lack of original thought is handsomely rewarded creates a rich, fertile environment for parasites to breed.
And that’s exactly what’s been happening. So now we have millions upon millions of human tapeworms thriving in the Western world, making love to their PowerPoint presentations, feasting on the creativity of others.
-- Hugh MacLeod @ Ignore Everybody
...programmers eventually have to go through a stupid-teenager phase. [...] I've been hearing sad but unsurprising news stories about teenagers getting stuck on big rocks, being killed falling off cliffs, or dying of exposure. [...] It's just a bad time for us. Even though teenagers are old enough to understand the warnings, they have this feeling of invincibility that gets them into trouble and often mortal peril.The programming equivalent happens around us all the time too. Junior programmers with five to ten years of experience under their belts attempt to build giant systems and eventually find themselves stuck on the cliff waiting for a helicopter bailout, telling themselves "my next system rewrite will be better!" Or they fall off the cliff – i.e., the project gets canceled, people get laid off, maybe the company goes under.That being said [...] you should keep in mind that "5 to 10 years of experience" on a resume does not translate to "experienced"; it means "crazy invincible-feeling teenager with a 50/50 shot at writing a pile of crap that he or she and his or her team can't handle, and they'll eventually, possibly repeatedly, try to rewrite it all." It's just how things are: programmers can't escape being teenagers at some point.-- Steve Yegge
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/
Better to teach people and risk they leave, than not and risk they stay.
-- anonymous
[...] então "estou fazendo alguma coisa que me motiva a levantar da cama todo dia pra fazer" ou "estou fazendo alguma coisa que todo dia eu não quero sair da cama pra fazer" define sucesso ou insucesso na carreira.
- Sob essa óptica, você é bem sucedido?
Eu nem durmo.
-- Fábio Akita, Grok Podcast n° 26
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
Every project worth doing comes with constraints. Our natural inclination is to fight them....There's a useful alternative: embrace the constraints you've been given. Use them as assets, as an opportunity to be the one who solved the problem. Once you can thrive in a world filled with constraints, it's ever easier to do well when those constraints are loosened.-- Seth Godin
This is the first warning sign that a project is in trouble. Quietly, our subconscious starts looking around for an excuse, deniability and someone to blame. It gives us confidence and peace of mind.People who have a built-in all-purpose excuse (middle child syndrom, wrong astrology sign, some slight at the hands of the system long ago) often end up failing - they have an excuse ready to go, so it's easier to back off when the going is rough.Here's an alternative to the excuse-driven life: What happens if you relentlessly avoid looking for excuses at all?-- Seth Godin
Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It’s written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don’t have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally content because they’ve either never done the work or have forgotten how it’s done.
-- rands
Go find a geek. Someone who understands gmail, Outlook, Excel and other basic tools.Pay her to sit next to you for an hour and watch you work.Then say, "tell me five ways I can save an hour a day."Whatever you need to pay for this service, it will pay for itself in a week.-- Seth Godin @ goo.gl/xHQHz
[...] the Curse of the Silicon Valley is that great engineers are often promoted to leadership for their hard work. While many succeed in this role, an equal part fails because the skills required to lead are vastly different than the ones required to be an engineer. The Curse is that we’re often placing our most valuable engineers in a role where they’re predisposed to fail.[...] there’s a large population of immensely talented engineers that should not be leaders. There is no amount of training that would make up for the talent we’d extinguish by teaching them how to write annual reviews.
-- rands @ goo.gl/YYFCs
It’s a fact that a lot of skilled people are working at doomed companies, and that’s bad, because the most precious resource (in business) is the time, energy, talent, and creativity of these people.-- Eric Reis @ http://goo.gl/F9QsU
