“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
-- Eleanor Roosevelt "If you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it'll spread over into the rest of your life. It'll spread over into your work, into your mortality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you."
-- Bruce Lee
"In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."
-- Bertrand Russell"If you want to achieve greatness stop asking for permission."
Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.
"Good leadership involves responsibility to the welfare of the group, which means that some people will get angry at your actions and decisions. It’s inevitable, if you’re honorable. Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity: you’ll avoid the tough decisions, you’ll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted, and you’ll avoid offering differential rewards based on differential performance because some people might get upset.
Ironically, by procrastinating on the difficult choices, by trying not to get anyone mad, and by treating everyone equally “nicely” regardless of their contributions, you’ll simply ensure that the only people you’ll wind up angering are the most creative and productive people in the organization."
When you start to build something new, think about the what could be, the what may be, and the what will be. Don't settle, don't give up, don't get stuck in a box built by other people's misguided interaction paradigms. The internet is open and free, and that means there are no rules.
"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, while an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.”
-- James Cameron"Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value."
-- Albert Einstein"Do not let your fire go out"
"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours."-- Ayn Rand
"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."
-- T.S. Eliot"Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway."
-- John WayneTen Principles
"I've always sought out the edges, the views, and a feeling of expansiveness.""I was once asked what I think are the ten most important principles that helped make me a successful architect, planner, and educator...
- Think positively, not negatively.
- Accept structure but know that it is to be questioned and broken when necessary.
- Always be willing to explore, experiment and invent. Do not accept the status quo.
- Know yourself and keep your work consistent with who you are and how you think.
- Maintain good moral and social values.
- Be humble, honest, compassionate, and egalitarian.
- Have conviction about your work.
- Be open and say yes to most ideas and requests. The good ones will be valuable, the bad ones will cease to exist.
- Allow employees and fellow workers freedom and the ability to work to their strengths. Avoid hierarchy.
- Money should be the residual of work, not the goal. But do not compromise your worth."
-- Ray Kappe (avant-garde architect)
"If you're not breaking things, you're not moving fast enough."
- Mark Zuckerberg"Positivity is complex and draining yet fruitful. Negativity is simple and lazy yet worthless."
Not talkers. Not dreamers. Builders.
"The good innovation -- the innovation that makes the world a better place and builds real wealth in society -- that stuff is done by radically self-reliant creators who get their hands dirty. Not talkers. Not dreamers. Builders."-> Read "Build" on Garry Tan's blog
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson"You must be the change you wish to see in the world"
"People often find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of the future."
The Age of Unreason
“Old golfers don’t win (it’s not an absolute, it’s a general rule). Why? The older golfer can hit the ball as far as the younger one. He chips and putts equally well. … So why does he take the extra stroke that denies him victory? Experience. He knows the downside, what happens if it goes wrong, which makes him more cautious. The younger player is either ignorant or reckless to caution. That is his edge. It is the same with all of us. Knowledge makes us play safe. The secret is to stay childish.”-- Paul Arden, Whatever you Think Think the Opposite
"There are no shortcuts to anywhere worth going."
-- Beverly SillsTwenty years from now
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things youdidn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail
away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Explore. Dream.
-- Mark Twain
"The father of every good work is discontent, and its mother is diligence."
-- Kassák Lajos, Hungarian artist"There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.
For the reformer has enemies in all who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all who profit by the new order.
This lukewarmness arises partly from fear of their adversaries, who have law in their favor, and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not believe in anything new until they have had an actual experience of it.”
-- Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish. A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.
-- John Quincy Adams
What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?
"Never give in. Be willing to change tactics, but never give up your core purpose. Be willing to kill failed business ideas, even to shutter big operations you've been in for a long time, but never give up on the idea of building a great company. Be willing to evolve into an entirely different portfolio of activities, even to the point of zero overlap with what you do today, but never give up on the principles that define your culture. Be willing to embrace the inevitability of creative destruction, but never give up on the discipline to create your own future. Be willing to embrace loss, to endure pain, to temporarily lose freedoms, but never give up faith in the ability to prevail. Be willing to form alliances with former adversaries, to accept necessary compromise, but never - ever - give up on your core values.
The path out of darkness begins with those exasperatingly persistent individuals who are constitutionally incapable of capitulation. It's one thing to suffer a staggering defeat - as will likely happen to every enduring business and social enterprise at some point in history - and entirely another to give up on the values and aspirations that make the protracted struggle worthwhile. Failure is not so much a physical state as a state of mind; success is falling down, and getting up one more time, without end."
-- Jim Collins, How the Mighty Fail
"It's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be."
"The greatest discovery of our generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. As you think, so shall you be."
-- William James
"When a really great dream shows up, grab it!"
You know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know how, if you don’t have a pencil and pad by the bed to write it down, it will be completely gone the next morning?Well, I had one of those dreams when I was 23. When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking: what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links and… I grabbed a pen and started writing! Sometimes it is important to wake up and stop dreaming. I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work. Soon after, I told my advisor, Terry Winograd, it would take a couple of weeks to download the web — he nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me. The optimism of youth is often underrated! Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine. The idea wasn’t even on the radar. But, much later we happened upon a better way of ranking webpages to make a really great search engine, and Google was born. When a really great dream shows up, grab it!
-- Larry Page, Commencement Address, University of Michigan, May 2009
A willingness to follow your passions
A willingness to follow your passions, regardless of whether they lead to fortune and fame. A willingness to question conventional wisdom and rethink the old dogmas. A lack of regard for all the traditional markers of status and prestige - and a commitment instead to doing what is meaningful to you, what helps others, what makes a difference in this world.
That's the spirit that led a band of patriots not much older than you to take on an empire. It's what drove young pioneers west, and young women to reach for the ballot; what inspired a 30 year-old escaped slave to run an underground railroad to freedom, and a 26 year-old preacher to lead a bus boycott for justice. It's what led firefighters and police officers in the prime of their lives up the stairs of those burning towers; and young people across this country to drop what they were doing and come to the aid of a flooded New Orleans. It's what led two guys in a garage - named Hewlett and Packard - to form a company that would change the way we live and work; and what led scientists in laboratories, and novelists in coffee shops to labor in obscurity until they finally succeeded in changing the way we see the world.
That is the great American story: young people just like you, following their passions, determined to meet the times on their own terms. They weren't doing it for the money. Their titles weren't fancy - ex-slave, minister, student, citizen. But they changed the course of history - and so can you.
-- Barack Obama, ASU Address
"To double your success rate, double your failure rate."
-- Thomas Watson, Founder of IBM
The best things in life, the most enjoyable times, have all been from asking a simple question: "What's the worst thing that could happen?"
-- Tim Ferriss at TED
"When imagination is joined to common purpose and necessity to courage"
Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short, for they have forgotten what this country has already done, what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose and necessity to courage.-- Barack Obama, Inaugural Address, 1/20/2009
"People are uncomfortable with things that are different."
"I think, in general, people are uncomfortable with things that are different. Even now when I talk about adding new features to Gmail, if it isn't just a small variation or rearranging what's already there, people don't like it. People have a narrow concept of what's possible, and we're limited more by our own ideas about what's possible than what is really possible. So they just get uncomfortable, and they kind of tend to attack it for whatever reason.But for me, I am more interested in things that are new, and so I'm always excited just to see what will happen. That was actually one of the biggest reasons I joined Google in the first place. It wasn't so much that I was convinced that it was a good business; I just thought it was interesting and I was excited to see what would happen."
-- Paul Buchheit, in Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work
"This Generation Cannot Stand Still"
"This generation cannot stand still. We cannot be content merely to celebrate the achievements of the 20th century, or enjoy the comforts of the 21st century; we must learn from the past to build on its success. [...]
This is our generation. This is our time. And I am confident that we can meet any challenge as long as we are together."
-- Barack Obama, Strasbourg, France, 4/3/2009
We try and we fail, and then we try something else
"In an age of instant gratification, it's tempting to believe that every problem can and should be solved in a span of a -- a week. When these problems aren't solved, we conclude that our efforts to solve them must have been in vain. But that's not how progress is made. Progress is slow. It comes in fits and starts, because we try and we fail, and then we try something else.And when there are setbacks and disappointments, we keep going."
- Barack Obama, Strasbourg, France, April 3, 2009
"I think one of the things that kills great things so often is compromise - letting people talk you out of what your gut is telling you. Not that I don't value people's input, but you have to have the strength to ignore it sometimes, too. If you feel really strongly, there might be something to that, and if you see something other people don't see, it could be because it's that powerful and different. If everyone agrees, it's probably because you're not doing anything original."
- Evan Williams, in Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work
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