Futurists always measure their batting average by how many of things they have predicted came true. They never count how many of the important things that came true they did not predict.
Peter Drucker

If you had a manager that talked to you the way you talked to you, you’d quit. If you had a boss that wasted as much as your time as you do, they’d fire her. If an organization developed its employees as poorly as you are developing yourself, it would soon go under.

I’m amazed at how often people choose to fail when they go out on their own or when they end up in one of those rare jobs that encourages one to set an agenda and manage themselves. Faced with the freedom to excel, they falter and hesitate and stall and ultimately punt.

Seth Godin “The world’s worst boss

Some of the highlights:

“Pre-dodgeball I went thru 3-4 years thinking I was going to meet some magical engineer who would build all the stuff I was thinking about.  But I never met that person, so I taught myself ASP and MS Access (yikes! eventually PHP an MySQL) out of a book and got to work just hacking stuff together.  I’m still a really shitty programmer”

“Don’t let people tell you your ideas won’t work…If you’re passionate about an idea that’s stuck in your head, find a way to build it so you can prove to yourself that it doesn’t work.”

Someone who gets better whenever he fails will always outperform someone who responds to failure by getting worse.

Seth Godin, Embracing the upcycle instead of the downcycle

He goes on to give some advice:

“When the lizard pushes you to recoil in fear, that’s your cue to embrace the trembling fear and do precisely the opposite of what it demands. This won’t work the first time or even the tenth, but it’s the path to an upcycle, one where each negative input leads to more productivity, not less.”

In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not the man to whom the idea first occurs.
physician Sir William Osler from @GoogleBooks

The problem with putting it all on the line…

Is that it might not work out.

The problem with not putting it all on the line is that it will never (ever) change things for the better.

Not much of a choice, I think. No risk, no art. No art, no reward.

Seth Godin
What made it click for me was programming in anger. Programming because I needed to. Programming because I gave a damn about what I was writing and I wanted it done sooner rather than later.
David from 37 Signals on how he learned programming. This is great advice for how to get motivated to learn anything.
Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; Nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with Talent; Genius will not; Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and Determination alone are omnipotent.
Calvin Coolidge
Some employees make products, some make sales; the CEO makes decisions.
If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business school. After Warren Buffett, you don’t hit another MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only 5 MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.
Paul Graham in a 2005 Essay “How to Start a Startup