by Jeffrey Veen
As an adult, you may think you’ve roughly mapped the continent of love and relationships. You’ve loved your parents, a few of your friends, eventually a significant other. You have some tentative cartography to work with from your explorations. You form ideas about what love is, its borders and boundaries. Then you have a child, look up to the sky, and suddenly understand that those bright dots in the sky are whole other galaxies.
– Jeff Atwood , On Parenthood
The simplest way to extend our life, squeezing more experience out of this mortal coil, is to be more attentive, more sensitive to the everyday details of the world.
– Johan Lehrer, In Search of Time
Maybe ‘I downloaded but didn’t share’ will be the new ‘I smoked, but didn’t inhale.’
– Andy Baio, No Copyright Intended
When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.
– Steve Jobs, via Wikiquote
Having a dissenting opinion on movies, music or clothes, or owning clever or obscure possessions is the way middle-class people fight each other for status. They can’t out-consume each other because they can’t afford it, but they can out-taste each other.
– David McRaney, Selling Out
There’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make.
– Steve Jobs quoted by Philip Elmer-DeWitt, The parable of the stones
Ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.
– Derek Sivers, ideas are just a multiplier of execution
A tool converts what we can do into what we want to do. A great tool is designed to fit both sides.
– Bret Victor, A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
– David Foster Wallace, Life and Work
Someone feeling wronged is like someone feeling thirsty. Don’t tell them they aren’t. Sit with them and have a drink.
– Lemony Snicket, Occupy Writers
