From Inc.’s profile on Paul Graham:
I ask Graham why he is so intent on growing. Why does the world need so many little software companies? He looks at me as if I’m insane. “Imagine that instead of starting Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had taken jobs in some research lab,” he says. “They would have written a little piece of an operating system that might not even get used and maybe some boring academic papers. Think of how much more they did for the world as start-up founders.”
(via TightWind)
I don’t care how good you are at programming, finding bugs, whatever. If you’re rude, or if you speak poorly to people who don’t understand your… quirks…. you will wind up being shunted to the side. No one wants to work with someone who makes them feel beat down all the time, or someone who they simply can’t understand, or someone whose reaction to every issue is to start wailing about the end of the world.
(via 37signals)
Always grab the reader by the throat in the first paragraph, send your thumbs into his windpipe in the second, and hold him against the wall until the tagline.
— Paul O’Neil (via Kathy Sierra)
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
— Mary Oliver (via psychotherapy)
May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.
— Neil Gaiman (via littlemiss)
“I recognize [it] is an extreme solution – couldn’t you just check into a hotel? Someone asked me, unaware, apparently, that hotels have dozens of soft-core offerings on demand. Couldn’t you just turn off your wi-fi? Another naive soul asked, as if that’s the kind of thing a person can do, just turn it off and stop Twittering.
No, the right thing to do is what I’ve done. Book passage on the Hanjin Boston, from Seattle to Shanghai, face King Neptune and write the damn script.”
Hollywood screenwriter Rob Long in his podcast Martini Shot (via jack cheng)
The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the time
The designers might be telling you that the new design looks much better than the old one, and that’s probably true. But it’s worth conducting some more experiments to find a new design that beats the old one all the way through. In my previous job, this led us to confront the disappointing reality that sometimes customers actually prefer an uglier design to a pretty one. Without split-testing, your product tends to get prettier over time. With split-testing, it tends to get more effective.
Find a happy person, and you will find a project.
— Sonja Lyubomirsky (via Derek Sivers)
If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert.
— Australian psychiatrist W. Béran Wolfe (via Derek Sivers)
Why it’s wise to launch softly - (37signals)
The Montgolfiere brothers came up with a design for the hot air balloon but wanted to make sure it would really work before getting in one themselves. So they first released several unmanned trial hot air balloons. Then they sent up several farm animals to make sure the air at higher levels was safe to breathe. After that, they tried a manned expedition.
The ceramics teacher announced he was dividing his class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right graded solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would weigh the work of the “quantity” group: 50 pounds of pots rated an A, 40 pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an A.
Well, come grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity!
It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
Excerpt from the book Art and Fear (via Derek Sivers)
Seth Godin: Ignore sunk costs.
When making a choice between two options, only consider what’s going to happen in the future, not which investments you’ve made in the past. The past investments are over, lost, gone forever. They are irrelevant to the future.
At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut tells his friend, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history.
Heller said, “Yes, but I have something he will never have: Enough.”
(via Derek Sivers)
Are fans telling friends? If not, improve, don’t promote
The most powerful philosophy of marketing I’ve heard is from my hero Seth Godin, and I think it can be summed up as this:
You’ll know when you’re on to something special, because people will love it so much they’ll tell everyone.
If people aren’t telling their friends about it yet, don’t waste time marketing it. Instead, keep improving until they are.
