Life.md

Life

• Surround yourself with smart and inspiring people, and if you're the smartest person in the room, maybe it's time to move on.
• Don't promise when you're happy. Don't reply when you're angry. Don't decide when you're sad.
• Nothing is worth more than your personal health. Live a healthy lifestyle, and go to annual check-ups if possible.
• Get enough sleep every night. Sleep is really important to so many facets in life, be it regeneration, attentiveness or physical health.
• Getting up 15-30 minutes earlier every morning is not that much, but the effect on your available time in the morning is great!
• Don't waste any time on jealousy.
• What other people think about you is none of your business.
• Don't be afraid to ask someone if you're not sure, no matter what topic, what time or place.
• Finish one project before you start another.
• Smile often, even to complete strangers.
• Apologize when you should.
• Be curious. This is certainly more important than just being intelligent.
• Either at work or in your freetime, do something that makes you proud.
• "I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying." (Michael Jordan)
• Make peace with your past so it won't disturb your present.
• Don't compare your life to others'.
• Don't text with your mobile phone when you're drunk.
• "A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for." (William G. T. Shedd)
• A calm sea does not make a skilled sailor.
• "People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." (Maya Angelou)
• "Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore." (André Gide)
• "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken." (Oscar Wilde)
• "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." (Eleanor Roosevelt)
• "Be the change you want to see in the world." (Mahatma Gandhi)
• Success is like being pregnant, everybody congratulates you, but nobody knows how many times you have been fucked.
• "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." (Thomas Edison)
• "Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught not to. So it is with great people in all fields." (Unknown)
• "Count your blessings, not your troubles." (Dale Carnegie)
• "Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys." (Fyodor Dosteoevsky)
• "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; show him how to catch fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." (Proverb)
• "I always wonder why birds stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere. Then I ask myself the same question." (Harun Yahya)
• "People become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I can't do something, it makes me incapable of doing it." (Mahatma Gandhi)
• "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards." (Steve Jobs)
• "Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it." (Joshua Foer)
• "Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives." (Joshua Foer)
• Journalistic principle: If a (newspaper) headline asks a question, the answer is usually 'no'. (Andrew Marr)
• "I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it." (Thomas Jefferson)
• When you are teaching or explaining something, never say "just do" or "it's easy". It's confusing and alienating to new learners.
• "Opportunists have always been held in disrepute -- especially by those who had the same opportunities and didn't take them." (Rhett Butler)
• "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." (Laozi)
• "Determination is really two separate things: resilience and drive. Resilience keeps you from being pushed backwards. Drive moves you forwards." (Jessica Livingston)
• "[W]e see our future selves as strangers. Though we will inevitably share their fates, the people we will become in a decade, quarter century, or more, are unknown to us. This impedes our ability to make good choices on their — which of course is our own—behalf. [...] We might choose to procrastinate, and let some other version of our self deal with problems or chores. Or, as in the case of [a] smoking boy, we can focus on that version of our self that derives pleasure, and ignore the one that pays the price." (Alisa Opar)
• "Part of being optimistic is keeping one's head pointed toward the sun, one's feet moving forward. [...] I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death." (Nelson Mandela)
• "I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it." (Nelson Mandela)
• "The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." (Nelson Mandela)
• "There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered." (Nelson Mandela)
• "The first step isn't as hard as we make it out to be. ['Just do it']. Stop over-thinking it." (Jon Bell)
• McDonald's Theory: "[W]hen we're trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas, I recommend McDonald's. An interesting thing happens. Everyone unanimously agrees that we can't possibly go to McDonald's, and better lunch suggestions emerge. [...] It's as if we've broken the ice with the worst possible idea. [...] [P]eople are inspired to come up with good ideas to ward off bad ones. [...] The second step is easier than the first." (Jon Bell)
• "Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise." (Cato the Elder)
• "Have the argument clear in your mind; the words will follow naturally." (Cato the Elder)
• "We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick." (Tim Cook)
• "In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm ... in the real world all rests on perseverance." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
• "Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did." (Newt Gingrich)
• "Perseverance is failing 19 times and succeeding the 20th." (Julie Andrews)
• "No one succeeds without effort ... Those who succeed owe their success to perseverance." (Ramana Maharshi)
• "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
• Learn to distrust your negative emotions. Later, they usually seem overstated or unfounded. (Giovanni Tirloni)
• "You work in the sales department of your own career. Sell your ability to solve problems." (duggan)
• "Don't spend your precious time asking 'Why isn't the world a better place?'. It will only be time wasted. The question to ask is 'How can I make it better?' To that there is an answer." (Leo Buscaglia)
• "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened." (Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Seuss Geisel)
• "The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing." (Alan Watts)
• "The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." (Alan Watts)
• "A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion." (Alan Watts)
• "Existence, [Alan Watts] says, is fundamentally playful. It's less like a journey, and more like a piece of music or a dance. And the point of dancing isn't to arrive at a particular spot on the floor; the point of dancing is simply to dance." (Kevin Simler)
• "I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics ... then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that's what I wanted to do." (Steve Jobs)
• "Before cofounding GitHub I applied for an engineering job at Yahoo and didn't get it. Don't let other people discourage you." (Chris Wanstrath)
• Survivorship bias, a type of selection bias, is the error of concentrating on subjects that "survived" some process or selection and thereby overlooking all the others due to their lack of visibility.
• If you believe that music in the past was better than today's music, it may be because only the most popular music from one generation "survives" and, in a form of survivorship bias, distorts the comparability for you.
• In the area of highly competitive careers (e.g. with singers, movie stars and athletes), one does generally overlook the myriad of people that may have been similarly skilled and determined as the victorious ones, but who did ultimately fail because they were not as lucky. This causes a survivorship bias.
• "Once you've accepted your flaws, no one can use them against you." (George R. R. Martin)
• "A bruise is a lesson ... and each lesson makes us better." (George R. R. Martin)
• "We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas." (Noam Chomsky)
• "[As an astronaut, you] develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch'." (Edgar D. Mitchell)
• "Adulthood is emailing 'sorry for the delayed response!' back and forth until one of you dies." (Marissa Miller)
• "Inherit (or luck into) a large fortune, and give a couple million to a good cause -- never mind that it will affect your quality of life not at all -- and you'll be lionized as a hero. The great and the good will invite you onto their podiums -- but a poor person who takes in a foster kid gets virtually no recognition, even if fostering involves real sacrifice on their part." (Cory Doctorow)
• "Don't forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor." (John Dickinson ("1776"))
• "Meritocracy is a tautology, of course. There's no objective measure of merit so there's no way to know whether your society is meritocratic or not. Every famous, powerful, rich person owes their status to a combination of skill, luck, and persistence. The best luck of all is to be born to fortunate circumstances, well fed and well educated and well loved. We know for a fact that billions lack some or all of these forms of luck, and among those people are innumerable potential Stephen Hawkings and Steve Jobses and Albert Einsteins. The fact that Jobs was born to a Syrian refugee and that Hawking struggles with a debilitating illness just shows you how fickle luck is -- unless you believe that evolution produced exactly one brilliant tech entrepreneur in the ranks of Syrian refugees and one brilliant scientist with ALS, then you have to believe that the others just didn't get quite so lucky." (Cory Doctorow)
• The "Rule of 72" allows you to estimate the effect of growth rates: Divide 72 by the growth rate as an integer (i.e. the actual rate multiplied by 100) and you'll get the number of years it takes the base quantity to double.
• It's easy to complain, blame, resent, judge and take. It's hard to inspire, teach, trust, love and believe. Do the hard work. (Vala Afshar)
• "Service is supposed to be about making the world a better place or helping people who are less fortunate, but [when] it's done for the resume, it really just becomes about yourself." (William Deresiewicz)
• "The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten." (Unknown)
• If you can't pay cash, you can't afford it.
• "[W]ages and income are about what the job is worth, not the individual. [...] Your income potential isn't about what you need or what the employer can afford; it's about the value of what you do." (Ron Rule)
• “Plans are of no particular value, but planning is indispensable.” (Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1950) – or – “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” (Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957)