Quotes

People who can't laugh at themselves will always be outwitted by people who can.

Talent sets the floor, character sets the ceiling.

When people speak in a very elaborate and sophisticated way, they either want to tell a lie, or to admire themselves. You should not believe such people. Good speech is always clear, clever, and understood by all.

A problem well stated is a problem half solved.

What seems expensive is often cheap in the long run.

My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.

Competence > Credentials

Followers are like frequent flier miles - great until you try and use them for something.

Airbnb's product would be 25% better with one new feature: WiFi speed tests. (they actually did it)

Difficult learning is durable learning.

There are no solutions, only trade-offs.

Everyone has talent. What’s rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.

The Creative Adult is the Child Who Has Survived.

The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.

Don't fear moving slowly. Fear standing still.

You are successful if you wake up every morning excited about the upcoming day.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka' but 'That's funny...'

The problem with genius is that you have to tolerate madness.

Sophisticated minds adopt simplified lifestyles; simplistic minds are drawn to overly sophisticated lifestyles.

Feed a man a fish, feed him for a night. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to make AI, the AI does all the fishing and everyone is fed forever. Then the AI accidentally kills all the people and the fish win.

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

Game developers: with enough if statements and while loops I can do literally anything. Web developers: I will use graph theory and a hand crafted functional state management framework to create this sign up form.

He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night.

Creativity needs criticism.

Most people in their life reduce risk to the point where the probability of success goes higher but the consequence of success is inconsequential.

Don't assume malice when stupidity will suffice.

Tutto ciò che è miope si paga a caro prezzo.

Clear thinkers take feedback from reality, not society.

The advice I would give the younger me — or any young person — would be: Keep your head up in failure and your head down in success.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all.

A flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget.

La ricchezza non è equamente distribuita, ma nemmeno il coraggio.

People want you to be successful until you are successful and then they don’t want you to be successful anymore. It’s a curious thing.

More importantly, it’s unwise to allow a third-party to define your long-term brand identity; sure, Facebook is huge now, but then so was the T-Rex.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind.

Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.

If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.

Le grandi storie sono nel passato, o nel futuro

The overeducated are worse off than the undereducated, having traded common sense for the illusion of knowledge.

The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.

Il creativo lavora mentre gioca e gioca mentre lavora.

While you can't see it or touch it, the most valuable thing you have is your attention.

The best "gift for the person who has everything" is to teach them something new.

Judge your level of freedom by how long you can turn off your phone.

Personality is what you do when someone is watching. Character is what you do when no one is watching.

A meeting assumes everyone’s time is equal. Rarely true.

It’s harder to be kind than clever.

Developers are students for life.

Non ho mai compreso chi si vanta con fragorosa risata di esser sempre stato una frana in matematica. Ma che si vergogni, piuttosto.

Ultimately the job of a frontend developer is to make people’s lives better, or at least not make it worse.

Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.

Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

You have to start from the customer experience and work the technology backwards.

Si offre il caffé a chi ti trova l'errore.

It's particles all the way down.

Avoid stupidity before seeking brilliance.

Are you really living or just dying very slowly over seventy years.

Facebook did to our parent's generation what they thought video games would do to us.

Quando l'autore è più importante dell'opera, l'autore non vale niente.

Chi ha talento fa cose diverse perché il talento glielo permette.

Be great at what you do and you won't need a resume.

If tobacco companies get in trouble for selling products that give people cancer, then universities should get in trouble for selling student debt to students with worthless degrees.

Clear thinkers take feedback from reality, not society.

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.

Education is the job of a lifetime.

Of course, fancy writing doesn't just conceal ideas. It can also conceal the lack of them. That's why some people write that way, to conceal the fact that they have nothing to say. Whereas writing simply keeps you honest. If you say nothing simply, it will be obvious to everyone, including you.

Be married to the problem, not the technology. If you're married to technology, you might easily give up due to stress induced by setbacks or boredom. Being married to the problem will motivate you to have the perseverance to continue through hard times or tedious work.

Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all.

“Take no one’s word for it.” In other words, figure it out yourself. That’s the only way to know anything.

Creativity is a lifelong endeavor.

You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

Better roughly right than precisely wrong.

Focusing is about saying no.