On the back cover of Stripe Press's Poor Charlie's Almanack -
Other ideas I've gotten a lot of mileage out of
- Make yourself proud - extremely powerful idea. When you're doing things, make it a rule to not settle for short-term gratification. I promise you you'll feel better about it.
- In decisions big and small, do things that scare you. I'm working on this, and stole this from Derek Sivers. I recommend all his books.
- Courage really might just be the #1 quality I'm after - maybe JK Rowling was onto something with Gryffindor being the 'protagonist' house at Hogwarts.
- Motivation is that which is scarce. Fear is really the bottleneck with most things.
- In relationships, either you are compatible with someone or you are not. No one person is better than any other person, we're all unit vectors - the relationship is all about taking the dot product of the two vectors, and that is largest when the angle between them approaches zero (full compatability).
- Believe people when they show you who they are, it's the hardest thing to do. Actions speak so so so much louder than words.
- Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. CS190 drilled this in for me. It is well worth your time to plan before you act. In software and maybe more generally.
- You are responsible for every single thing that happens to you.
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