Managers should abandon the notion that a ‘best candidate’ must be found. That kind of search amounts to chasing unicorns. Instead, they should focus on hiring well-qualified people who show good promise, and then should invest time, effort, and resources into helping them reach their potential.
Harvard Business Review
Quotes
View as a slideshowIf the truth about your conduct paints you in a bad Iight, the problem isn’t with the truth. Its with your conduct.
Nothing is as permanent as a temporary solution.
– If you’re wrong, admit it.
– If you’re confused, ask questions.
– If you’re stuck, look for help.
– If you make a mistake, learn from it.
– If you learn something, teach others.
Stop letting your potential go to waste because you don’t feel confident or ready enough. People with half your talent are making serious waves while you’re sitll waiting to feel ready.
One of the best things a teacher ever did for me was say “I don’t know the answer to that but I’ll do some research.”
It modeled a more honest intellectual discourse. You don’t have to pretend like you know everything & you don’t always need to have or share an immediate opinion.
You are not working from home; you are at your home during a crisis trying to work.
When you demand respect, you will be shown respect. But that’s usually all it is, a show.
When you deserve and earn respect, you will receive true respect.
Start.
Start now.
Start where you are.
Start with what you have.
Start with all of your insecurities.
Start with what you already know.
Start moving towards the goal.
Start and make mistakes.
Start small.
Start now.
Just start.
F–E–A–R has two meanings:
Forget Everything And Run
or
Face Everything And Rise
In the end, it will be impossible to know if we over-reacted or did too much, but it will be QUITE apparent if we under-reacted or did too little.
If you don’t do it this year, you will be one year older when you do!
Warren Miller
Find a way to get in the way. To find a way to get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble.
John Lewis, US congressman and civil rights leader
Give yourself permission to do it badly at first. Improve as you go. Don’t aim for perfection– it doesn’t exist. Perfectionism is a form of procrastination. If you give into it, it will hold you hack from fully expressing yourself and kill your creative energy.
Ruben Chavez
You wouldn’t plant a seed and then dig it up every few minutes to see if it has grown.
So why do you keep questioning yourself, your hard work, and your decisions?
Have patience, stop overthinking, and keep watering your seeds.
Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence boils down to curiosity.
Aaron Swartz
The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe. For the ax was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was wood, he was one of them.
“Money can’t buy happiness” means “the mindless accumulation of excess wealth ultimately leads to diminishing returns on happiness.”
It does not mean “poor people should learn to be content without basic necessities or financial security.”
I didn’t grow up having role models, I grew up having people I didn’t want to be like and seeing situations I’d never want to be in. Not all of us are dealt the “right” cards, but that doesn’t mean you can’t reshuffle your deck for a better outcome.
You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.
Johnny Cash
If Internet Explorer is brave enough to ask you to be your default browser, you should feel brave enough to do anything.
If you had $86,400 and someone stole $10 of it, would you throw away $86,390 to get revenge or move on and live?
Move on and live, right?
See, you have 86,400 seconds each day. Don’t let someone’s negative 10 seconds ruin the remaining 86,390. Life is bigger than that and so are you.
Be the reason someone believes in good people.
I hate to say I told you so, but it’s a point I’d like to make.
Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, without shortening the life of the original candle.
Happiness never decreases by being shared.
When you can’t control what’s happening, challenge yourself to control the way you respond to what’s happening.
That’s where the power is.
One day you will tell your story of how you’ve overcome what you’re going through now, and it will become part of someone else’s survival guide.
ctrl + alt + delete
Control yourself.
Alter your thinking.
Delete negativity.
None of us are getting out of here alive, so please stop treating yourself like an after thought. Eat the delicious food. Walk in the sunshine. Jump in the ocean. Say the truth that you’re carrying in your heart like hidden treasure. Be silly. Be kind. Be weird. There’s no time for anything else.
Anthony Hopkins.
If you are not willing to learn, no one can help you.
If you are determined to learn, no one can stop you.
Sometimes the greatest gift you can give another person is to simply include them.
You know, my motto is “Excelsior.” That’s an old word that means “upward and onward to greater glory.” it’s on the seal of the state of New York. Keep moving forward, and if it’s time to go, it’s time. Nothing last forever.
Stan Lee
You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common:
Doctor Who, Face of Evil Episode, Jan 1977
They don’t alter their views to fit the facts.
They alter the facts to fit their views.
When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.
The space cloud from Futurama
One moment of patience, in a moment of anger, can save a thousand moments of regret.
Watch your thoughts, they become words; watch your words, they become actions; watch your actions, they become habits; watch your habits, they become character; watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.
Frank Outlaw
Advice from a tree:
Stand tall and proud
Go out on a limb
Be content with your natural beauty
Remember your roots
Drink plenty of water
Enjoy the view
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell
Simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability.
Edsger W. Dijkstra
It’s important to be kind.
You can’t know all the times that you’ve hurt people in tiny, significant ways. It’s easy to be cruel without meaning to be. There’s nothing you can do about that.
But you can choose to be kind. Be kind.
“Little Old Lady“
It’s very hard to have ideas. It’s very hard to put yourself out there, it’s very hard to be vulnerable, but those people who do that are the dreamers, the thinkers and the creators. They are the magic people of the world.
Amy Poehler
Great people do things before they’re ready. They do things before they know they can do it. Doing what you’re afraid of, getting out of your comfort zone, taking risks like that — that’s what life is. You might be really good. You might find out something about yourself that’s really special and if you’re not good, who cares? You tried something. Now you know something about yourself.
Amy Poehler
People talk about caterpillars becoming a butterflies as though they just go into a cocoon, slap on wings, and are good to go.
Jennifer Wright
Caterpillars have to dissolve into a disgusting pile of goo to become butterflies.
So if you’re a mess wrapped up in blankets right now, keep going.
Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right thing.
Peter Drucker
A truly inquisitive mind will never ask a question until they are sure they do not know the answer, and once they learn the answer, they ask the question a hundred times over to be certain.
Don’t promise when you are happy,
don’t reply when you’re angry,
and don’t decide when you are sad.
You don’t have to attend every argument you’re invited to.
We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.
Abraham Lincoln
Don’t be impressed by money, followers, degrees, and titles. Be impressed by humility, integrity, generosity, and kindness.
When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new.
Dalai Lama
Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when we look back, everything is different.
C.S. Lewis
There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
C.A.R. Hoare, 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture
With suggestive memory-retrieval techniques, participants were induced to generate criminal and noncriminal emotional false memories…
After three interviews, 70% of participants were classified as having false memories…
Shaw, Julia & Porter, Stephen. (2015). Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime. Psychological science. 26. 10.1177/0956797614562862.
The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Be brave. Live.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Satire is meant to ridicule power. If you are laughing at people who are hurting, it’s not satire, it’s bullying.
Terry Pratchett
Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another world.
Bill Bullard
You are bigger than what is making you anxious.
You can be strategic AND kind. You can be transparent AND successful. You can make great products/services AND support an open web.
Chris Hardie
Advice to Managers:
Chris Maddern
1. Earn trust by giving it
2. Inspire, don’t tell
3. Eat lunch with your team
4. Show their work matters
5. Be a player-coach
6. Feedback in private, praise in public
7. In victory, lead from back
8. In crisis, lead from front
9. Be the manager you wish you had
Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it. Look for people who will aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine.
David Ogilvy
Top management should publish a resolution that no one will lose his job for contribution to quality and productivity.
W. Edwards Deming
To manage one must lead. To lead, one must understand the work that he and his people are responsible for.
W. Edwards Deming
Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.
Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!
Ms. Frizzle
Sometimes you have to make peace with the fact that you are the villain in someone else’s story even if you thought you were doing the right thing. You don’t get to tell them how to narrate their experience.
You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.
C.S. Lewis
In most cases, being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way.
Tina Fey
If you quit now, you’ll end up right back where you first began.
And when you first began, you were desperate to be where you are right now.
Keep going!
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.
Niels Bohr
People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.
Thomas Sowell, American Economist
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.
Thomas Edison
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Don’t cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.
Aubrey De Graf
Don’t ever be ashamed of loving the strange things that make your weird little heart happy.
Elizabeth Gilbert
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but it can roll pretty far, given the right environment.
“Can I just work on my projects and what I was hired to do, minus the ‘touchy-feely’ stuff?”
Actually, establishing, building, and maintaining relationships are all part of your job.
Emotional Intelligence 2.0
People appreciate transparency and openness, even though the decision may negatively impact them
Emotional Intelligence 2.0
If I do a job in 30 minutes, it’s because I spent 10 years learning how to do that in 30 minutes. You owe me for the years, not the minutes.
Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.
Eckhart Tolle
Don’t be an impervious ‘sh*t umbrella’. Be a heat shield:
Nickolas Means
Keep most of the heat away from the team, so they can remain happy & productive, but let them feel just enough heat so they don’t lose context or connection.
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Overworking is like a toll road. What currency will you use to pay?
Emotional: relationship/family strain, stress, depression, anxiety
Physical: illness, lack of sleep, substance abuse, cardiovascular problems
To this day, I put away my tools and sweep up at the end of every day. … And all I see, if that stuff is not cleaned up before I come in the next morning, is arrested momentum.
Adam Savage, Every Tool’s a Hammer
In my professional life, I have worked with every conceivable type of client and collaborator, from those who were makers with the same or greater expertise as me, to clients who couldn’t glue two blocks of wood together if you put the blocks in their hands, covered with glue, and told them to clap.
Being able to communicate your ideas to clients and collaborators is one of the most important skills to possess as a maker, otherwise some of your projects may never get off the ground.
Adam Savage, Every Tool’s a Hammer
Master craftspeople are confronted with all the same problems and pitfalls as any other maker, they just have the experience (hard won via hardship—nature’s primary learning tool) to see these hazards coming from farther away than the newbie.
Adam Savage, Every Tool’s a Hammer
No plan survives first contact with implementation.
Helmuth von Moltke
Mistake by mistake, success by success, I learned more about moving metal and the rhythm of lathework that afternoon than any amount of reading would have taught me. I’m not saying that empirical knowledge and intuition replace reading, I’m saying they augment it. They fulfill an area of knowledge that reading can’t reach. Doing puts the kind of knowledge in your body that can only be gained through an iterative process.
Adam Savage, Every Tool’s a Hammer
Trust is a peculiar resource; it is built rather than depleted by use.
Unknown
If you do not help the people “behind you” on the journey, it is so much harder to find your path ahead. Pay the help others gave you forward or start a new virtuous cycle.
Dwayne McDaniel
Do not underestimate the amount of time good leadership and management takes.
Rebecca Hill
Most people need consistency more than they need intensity.
Intensity:
-run a marathon
-write a book in 30 days
-silent meditation retreatConsistency:
-don’t miss a workout for 2 years
-write every week
– daily silenceIntensity makes a good story. Consistency makes progress.
@JamesClear
Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine.
Robert M. Carter
If every porkchop were perfect, we wouldn’t have hot dogs!
Greg & Steven Universe
This meeting should have been an email.
Author: Unknown
— Sentiment felt by: Everyone
Jamie would often joke that if each of us had four hours to do a project, he’d spend three and a half of those hours drawing and planning out everything he needed to build something once, whereas I would spend almost no time planning, then try five different solutions until I found one that worked, and we’d both come to the same result in the same amount of time.
Adam Savage, Every Tool’s a Hammer
Your job as a creator is to take as many of the wrong turns as necessary, without giving up hope, until you find the path that leads to your destination. It doesn’t matter if you’re a model maker, a potter, a dancer, a programmer, a writer, a political activist, a teacher, a musician, a milliner, whatever. It’s all the same. Making is making, and none of it is failure. It is an iterative process. It is how you learn new skills. It is how you gain knowledge and experience. It’s how you improve yourself. It is how you make new things. And the key to it all is tolerance. Both literal and figurative.
Adam Savage, Every Tool’s a Hammer
People will say to me, “Oh, I’m not a visual communicator,” but everybody is. Everybody’s a visual communicator, everybody is a speaker, everybody’s a writer, everybody’s an artist to varying degrees, and we shouldn’t just allow for that needle to be so close to zero that they feel like they aren’t that person.
Gever Tulley, via Adam Savage, Every Tool’s a Hammer
The thing lists solve for—the beast they tame—is complexity.
Adam Savage, Every Tool’s a Hammer
When we say we need to teach kids how to “fail,” we aren’t really telling the full truth. What we mean when we say that is simply that creation is iteration and that we need to give ourselves the room to try things that might not work in the pursuit of something that will. Wrong turns are part of every journey.
Adam Savage, Every Tool’s a Hammer
Nothing we make ever turns out exactly as we imagined; that this is a feature not a bug; and that this is why we do any of it. The trip down any path of creation is not A to B. That would be so boring. Or even A to Z. That’s too predictable. It’s A to way beyond zebra. That’s where the interesting stuff happens. The stuff that confounds our expectations. The stuff that changes us.
Adam Savage, Every Tool’s a Hammer
CODING IS MAKING! … Putting something in the world that didn’t exist before is the broadest definition of making, which means all of us can be makers, creators.
Adam Savage, Every Tool’s a Hammer
Almost always we are all experiencing the same problems as everyone else, and pretending we don’t, so that every one of us thinks we are alone.
Joseph Fink, Welcome to Night Vale
(see definition: pluralistic ignorance)