Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. -- Mark Twain

Always dive down into a problem and get your hands on the deepest issue behind the problem. All other considerations are to dismissed as "engineering details"; they can be sorted out after the basic problem has been solved. -- Chris Crawford

The direct pursuit of happiness is a recipe for an unhappy life. -- Donald Campbell

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

You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right. -- Richard Feynman

When you’ve got the code all ripped apart, it’s like a car that’s all disassembled. You’ve got all the parts tying all over your garage and you have to replace the broken part or the car will never run. It’s not fun until the code gets back to the baseline again. -- Gary Kildall (inventor of CP/M, one of the first OS for the micro).

Believe you can and you’re halfway there. –Theodore Roosevelt

People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily. –Zig Ziglar

If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat! Just get on. –Sheryl Sandberg

Teach thy tongue to say, I do not know, and thous shalt progress. –Maimonides