You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery and you create a feeling of strength in reserve. -- Pablo Picasso

Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot. If you compete with slaves you become a slave. -- Paul Graham and Norbert Weiner, respectively

Measure everything you can about the product, and you'll start seeing patterns. -- Max Levchin, PayPal founder, Talk at StartupSchool2007

As builders and creators finding the perfect solution should not be our main goal. We should find the perfect problem. -- Isaac (blog comment)

What I didn't understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn't the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it's "worth?" The only way you're ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don't have any immediate use for it, you probably never will. -- Paul Graham

I would rather be an optimist and be wrong than a pessimist who proves to be right. The former sometimes wins, but never the latter. -- "Hoots"

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. ~Anonymous

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. –Robert Frost

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. –Anne Frank

There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing. –Aristotle