We fail to realize that mastery is not about perfection. It's about a process, a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after year. The master is the one who is willing to try, and fail, and try again, for as long as he or she lives. -- George Leonard, Mastery.
Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve. -- Alan J. Perlis (Epigrams in programmi ng)
Quality of the people is better than the quality of the business idea. Crappy people can screw up the best idea in the world. -- Hadi Partovi & Ali Partovi (iLike.com), Talk at StartupSchool2007
It’s a problem if the design doesn’t let you add features at a later date. If you have to redo a program, the hours you spend can cause you to lose your competitive edge. A flexible program demonstrates the difference between a good designer and someone who is just getting a piece of code out. -- Gary Kildall (inventor of CP/M, one of the first OS for the micro).
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing. -- Alan Perlis
And if you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all. -- Joel Spolsky
When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it. –Henry Ford
Education costs money. But then so does ignorance. –Sir Claus Moser
Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement. –W. Clement Stone
The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself. ~Mark Caine