“What doesn’t make you stronger kills you.”
—
June 2012
4 posts
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself !”
—George Bernard Shaw
“What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
—Herbert Simon
March 2012
12 posts
“
Those 7s can actually be highly addictive. They’re addictive because you only get rewarded some of the time. Its the same reason gambling is addictive.
Intermittent positive reinforcement yields a stronger conditioning effect then than consistent positive reinforcement.
” —Steve Pavlina
“When you have a startup idea then do this:
- Build your product
- Sell it to a customer
- Start shipping
- Then quit your job” —
- Build your product
- Sell it to a customer
- Start shipping
- Then quit your job” —
“When focusing focus, when resting rest. Stop being in the gray zone.”
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“When you switch away from a primary task to do something else, you’re increasing the time to finish that task by an average of 25 per cent.”
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“The quickest way to validate your value proposition is to give it away.”
—Rob Fitz
“As an entrepeneur you should blog for your customers not for your peers.”
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“If you can ignore all the haters and focus on continual progress, you’ll be better off than the majority of people trying to do what you are doing.”
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“An athlete should do the least amount of properly timed, specific training that brings continual improvement.”
—Joe Friel in The Cyclist Training Bible
“Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”
—Ron Swanson
“Getting good at painting is more about the attention, dedication, and mentoring you receive in your work, and not so much about the house you choose to paint.”
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“The largest room in the world is the room for improvement.”
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“For every way you can use the internet to make progress, there are 1000 ways you can use the internet to keep you from making progress.”
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February 2012
12 posts
5 whys
Want to get to know the root cause of a problem or defect ? Ask why 5 times !
More info : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys
“Put customer development before writing code.”
—Jason Creek
“Take your time. Developing expertise doesn’t happen overnight and the world will wait. Give yourself a solid foundation and grow it step by step.”
—Michael Alexis on the blog Expert Enough
“You’re life has fewer rules then you think. There is room for creativity in everything you do. There is room for your own unique approach.”
—Seth Leonard
“It’s never too late to start heading in the right direction.”
—Seth Godin
“We’re limited by being human. We want results fast and discount the future.”
—Nobelprize winner Saul Perlmutter
“The three things that motivate us are Autonomy (being self-directed), Mastery (getting better at something) and Purpose (xhy you’re doing something).”
—Danial Pink in “Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us” quoted in a Viperchill blogpost.
“Unless you decide to do something with your passion, how can you expect it to go anywhere.”
—A Viperchill blogpost.
“The most important thing is to find a balance between your own happiness and your effect on the world (others people’s happiness).”
—Joshua Goldmann and Jason Shen in the ChangeThis manifesto Success-Driven Philosophy: Finding Clarity of Purpose and Achieving Arete Through Philosophical Examination
“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
—Howard Thurman
“If you really want to live passionately, you’ll need to consider leaving nearly everything you’re not passionate about.”
—Clay Collins in blog post Quitting Things and Flakiness: The #1 Productivity Anti-Hack
“Smile, breath and go slowly.”
—Thich Naht Hanh, Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk
January 2012
32 posts
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Better Than Free:
When copies are free, you need to sell things that can not be copied.
8 generatives better than free :
- 1 Immediacy
- 2 Personalization : You can’t copy the personalization that a relationship represents. Marketers call that “stickiness” because it means both sides of the relationship are stuck (invested) in this generative asset, and will be reluctant to switch and start over.
- 3 Interpretation : a couple of high proile companies, like red hat, apache, and others make their living doing exactly that. They provide paid support for free software. The copy of code, being mere bits, is free-and becomes valuable to you only through the support and guidance.
- 4 Authenticity
- 5 Accessibility : ownership often sucks. you have to keep your things tidy, up-to-date, and in the case of digital material, backed up
- 6 Embodiment : at its core the digital copy is without a body. and nothing gets embodied as much as music in a live performance, with real bodies. The music is free-the bodily performance expensive.
- 7 Patronage : Audiences WANT to pay creators. But they will only pay if it is very easy to do, a reasonable amount, and they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators.
- 8 Findability : A zero price does not help direct attention to a work, and in fact may sometimes hinder it. But no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen; unfound masterpieces are worthless. When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of ilms, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention—and most of it free—being found is valuable.
In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.
I think ads are only one of the paths that attention takes, and in the long-run, they will only be part of the new ways money is made selling the free.
“If you don’t love it you’ll never work hard enough to be great.”
—Danial Coyle in “The Talent Code” quoted in a Viperchill blogpost.
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Create New Habits
* Do only one habit at a time. Do not break this rule, because I assure you that if you do multiple habits at once, you will be much less likely to succeed. Trust me — I’ve tried both ways many times, and in my experience there is 100% failure for forming multiple habits at once, and a 50-80% success if you do just one habit at a time — depending on whether you follow the rest of these rules.
* Choose an easy goal. Don’t decide to do something really hard, at least for now. Later, when you’re good at habit changes, you can choose something harder. But for now, do something you know you can do every day. In fact, choose something easier than you think you can do every day. If you think you can exercise for 30 minutes a day, choose 10 minutes — making it super easy is one of the surest ways to ensure you’ll succeed.
* Choose something measurable. You should be able to say, definitively, whether you were successful or not today. If you choose exercise, set a number of minutes or something similar (20 minutes of exercise daily, for example). Whatever your goal, have a measurement.
* Be consistent. You want to do your habit change at the same time every day, if possible. If you’re going to exercise, do it at 7 a.m. (or 6 p.m.) every day, for example. This makes it more likely to become a habit.
* Report daily. You could check in every 2 or 3 days, but you’ll be more likely to succeed if you report daily. This has been proven over and over again in the Challenges.
* Keep a positive attitude! Expect setbacks now and then, but just note them and move on. No embarrassment in this challenge.
” —Leo Babauta in a guest post promoting his book The Power of Less.
“Stop waiting for happiness. Happiness is right here, right now.”
—Leo Babauta on his blog Zen Habits
“We like to practice what we know, stretching out in the warm bath of familiarity rather than stretching our skills. Those who overcome that tendency are the real high performers.”
—Deakin and Cobley quoted in the book Expert performance in sports.
“1. Ask questions
Few people can resist trying to see if they know the answer to a question. This lead asks three questions about hay fever. Readers who are not certain about an answer-or certain they don’t know the answer-are likely to be motivated to read further.
2. Start with a controverse
3. Provide concentrated information
You may not know what will interest an individual reader. However, by putting a lot of clear, concise, dense information right at the beginning, you can be virtually certain that every reader will find something to attract his or her attention.
4. Make a microcosm into a universe
Something that appears to be of little or no general interest can be made more vital by putting it into a broader political, cultural, social, economic, or philosophical context
5. Personalize the situation” —
Few people can resist trying to see if they know the answer to a question. This lead asks three questions about hay fever. Readers who are not certain about an answer-or certain they don’t know the answer-are likely to be motivated to read further.
2. Start with a controverse
3. Provide concentrated information
You may not know what will interest an individual reader. However, by putting a lot of clear, concise, dense information right at the beginning, you can be virtually certain that every reader will find something to attract his or her attention.
4. Make a microcosm into a universe
Something that appears to be of little or no general interest can be made more vital by putting it into a broader political, cultural, social, economic, or philosophical context
5. Personalize the situation” —
Philip Yaffe in article How to generate reader interest in what you write.
“Release early and often. The phrase, “If you aren’t embarrassed, you waited too long to release,” was very helpful to me. My first release was the tiniest sliver of what I imagined, but it gave me market validation (even if Erik and Saff were the only two people to buy it) and, more importantly, energy. The rapid release cycle let me experiment with features that I hoped would drive sales (none did) and fix blocking defects.
Ship it and fix it. The product needs to provide value from the first, but it doesn’t need to provide everyone with value all the time. Early sales answer questions about the market size. Early users accept some rough edges if they get to be first and you fix the problems. Not reflexively fixing every defect was a hard transition for me, but, often, answering the next business question was tmy highest priority. I would recommend installing real-time remote error reporting for anyone bringing client software to market. It was nerve-wracking at first to see all the errors, but in the end the feedback was invaluable.” —Kent Beck in his blogpost Putting Max on the Back Burner.
Ship it and fix it. The product needs to provide value from the first, but it doesn’t need to provide everyone with value all the time. Early sales answer questions about the market size. Early users accept some rough edges if they get to be first and you fix the problems. Not reflexively fixing every defect was a hard transition for me, but, often, answering the next business question was tmy highest priority. I would recommend installing real-time remote error reporting for anyone bringing client software to market. It was nerve-wracking at first to see all the errors, but in the end the feedback was invaluable.” —Kent Beck in his blogpost Putting Max on the Back Burner.
“1. First, you must learn it by reading or listening to others who know how to do it, but most especially by doing.
2. Then do some more. At this point, you’ll start to understand it, but you’ll suck. This stage could take months.
3. Do some more. After a couple of years, you’ll get good at it.
4. Do some more. If you learn from mistakes, and aren’t afraid to make mistakes in the first place, you’ll go from good to great.” —Leo Babauta in blog post The Only Way to Become Amazingly Great at Something.
2. Then do some more. At this point, you’ll start to understand it, but you’ll suck. This stage could take months.
3. Do some more. After a couple of years, you’ll get good at it.
4. Do some more. If you learn from mistakes, and aren’t afraid to make mistakes in the first place, you’ll go from good to great.” —Leo Babauta in blog post The Only Way to Become Amazingly Great at Something.
“Startups have to be product companies, in the sense of making a single thing that everyone uses.”
—Paul Graham in his essay Ramen Profitable
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Fortunately [sustaining focus for a long period of time] can be acquired and sharpened through training.
Focus hard. In reasonable bursts. One day at a time.
With this in mind, think about how you spent your time this past week. How many of your work hours were worth what they cost? How would your schedule and habits change if you eliminated low-value work from your life altogether?
” —3 quotes found on Cal Newport’s blog Study Hacks.
“Launch something fast, listen to users, and then iterate; that startups required resilience because they were always an emotional rollercoaster; and that most VCs were sheep.”
—Kate Courteau talking about what surprised her most in the startup world in an article by Paul Graham (What Kate Saw in Silicon Valley).
5x5 the squat, the bench, the deadlift, stretching and competing regularly.
Fitness advice from Mehdi Hadim on stronglifts.com
“The only thing worse than starting something and failing … is not starting something.”
—Seth Godin in blogpost Nothing
“(1) Get started; (2) Keep going.”
—Friend of Cal Newport quoted in blogpost The Myth of the Big Break
The only rules and limits are those we set for ourselves.
Do something that matters.
“After you accept the situation you find yourself in, assume 100% responsibility for it. Even if someone else is supposedly in charge, your life is still your own. If someone else makes a decision that affects you, you have to live with the consequences.”
—Steve Pavlina in blogpost Smarter Than Your Parents
“So in order to get paid to exist, you have to do something you absolutely love and find a way to provide value to others while you’re doing it.”
—Jonathan Mead in The Zero Hour Workweek
“1) Action
2) Teaching is the definitive learning experience. And it’s the quickest way to expertise.” —Rebecca Thorman in blogpost Become an expert quickly
2) Teaching is the definitive learning experience. And it’s the quickest way to expertise.” —Rebecca Thorman in blogpost Become an expert quickly
“We need less information in our lives, fewer choices, and more depth.”
—Tony Schwartz in blog post Three Powerful Lessons I Learned When I Got Offline
“We must work on our life the way we would work on any other project. Instead of knowledge, pleasure or happiness, the purpose of life is to create something meaningful that will endure after we’re gone.”
—Chris Guillebeau in his manifesto The Tower.
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If you knew then what you know now about the fact that this piece of code is broken, how would you have organized this piece of the routine.
Programs have to make sense and there are very, very few inherently hard problems.
