Something Confusing about "Hard": It's tempting to think that if it's hard, then it's valuable. Most valuable things are hard. Most hard things are completely useless -- (picture of someone smashing their head through concrete blocks kung-fu style). Hard DOES NOT EQUATE TO BEING valuable. Remember Friendster back in the day? You'd sign in, invite friends, have 25 friends, go to their profile, and then it'd show how you were connected to each one. That's an impressive [some geeky CS jargon] Cone traversal of a tree - 100 million string comparisons per page -- it won't scale. Used to take a minute per page to load, and Friendster died a painful death. MySpace -- not interested in solving problems They use the shortcut of "Miss Fitzpatrick is in your extended network" (i.e. even when you're not even signed up for MySpace) They didn't solve the hard problem. But they make the more relevant assumption that you want to be connected to hot women. [LOL] Shows Alexa graph showing that in early 2005 Myspace took off, and quickly bypassed Friendster and never looked back. -- Max Levchin, PayPal founder, Talk at StartupSchool2007

Attitude is no substitute for competence. -- Eric S. Raymond, How to become a hacker

You can’t get to version 500 if you don’t start with a version 1. -- BetterExplained.com

Side projects are less masturbatory than reading RSS, often more useful than MobileMe, more educational than the comments on Reddit, and usually more fun than listening to keynotes. -- Chris Wanstrath

Good work is no done by ‘humble’ men. -- H. Hardy, A mathematician's apology.

The best people and organizations have the attitude of wisdom: The courage to act on what they know right now and the humility to change course when they find better evidence. The quest for management magic and breakthrough ideas is overrated; being a master of the obvious is underrated. Jim Maloney is right: Work is an overrated activity -- Bob Sutton

You measure the size of the accomplishment by the obstacles you had to overcome to reach your goals. ~Booker T. Washington

I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. –Michael Jordan

You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction. ~George Lorimer

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time. ~George Bernard Shaw