Collection of inspiring quotes

[nelsonic]

Once I have the Maslow (CNC machine) dwyl/workshop#71 setup, I want to make a few quote signs.
e.g: https://forums.maslowcnc.com/t/making-trail-signage/3700

There are quite a few philosophical quotes contained in a classic poem by Rob Van Winkle https://youtu.be/rog8ou-ZepE which I quite like for the emphasises problem solving skills:

"Alright stop, collaborate and listen"

"Anything less than the best is a felony"

"If there was a problem yo I'll solve it"

[nelsonic]

“Get Curious. Talk to People. Try Stuff.”

Designing your Life #534

[nelsonic]

"What the hell are you waiting for?!"

https://youtu.be/yNPECkESPbU

The only "downside" of this quote/lyric is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_Bennington#Death 😞

So perhaps worth finding an alternative source ... https://youtu.be/w-Ng5muAAcg ? 🤔

[nelsonic]

“The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”
~ Dr. Seuss

via: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/learning

Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.
~ Pele

via: https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/learning

[nelsonic]

"Almost all creativity requires purposeful play."
~ Abraham Maslow

"You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have." ~ Maya Angelou

"Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." ~ Banksy

[nelsonic]

"Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is." ~ Dick Guindon

https://www.wired.com/2013/01/code-bugs-programming-why-we-need-specs/

https://twitter.com/hosseeb/status/1043959348664254464

[nelsonic]

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." ~ Alan Kay

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alan_Kay

[nelsonic]

“Never Go To a Doctor Whose Office Plants Have Died” ~ Erma Bombeck

Attribution thanks to: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/12/26/plant-doctor/

[nelsonic]

"Women, like men, should try to do the impossible. And when they fail, their failure should be a challenge to others." ~ Amelia Earhart

[nelsonic]

"Invest in yourself, that's the best investment you can possibly make." ~ Warren Buffet

[nelsonic]

“I don’t think you will ever get brilliant investment decisions out of a committee” https://youtu.be/eIvKaEX_9mk 06:51

[nelsonic]

“Hope is not a strategy. Luck is not a factor. Fear is not an option.” ~ James Cameron

Of these three sentences my favourite is the first one. I don’t feel that anyone can claim they haven’t had any “luck”. But wholeheartedly agree that “hoping” for something good to happen is a terrible strategy; if you go through life hoping instead of systematically working on making it happen, you are destined for disappointment.

[nelsonic]

"Geniuses are made, not born." ~ László Polgár

http://www.creativitypost.com/psychology/geniuses_are_made_not_born

By any measure, Cristano Ronaldo is a "genius" on the football field. ⚽️
He makes plays and scores goals that bewilders other professionals and delights fans.
But was he born a "genius"? Did he inherit his skills from ancestors who played football at a world-class level? Was he born into a family of professional athletes and are all his abilities genetic? or did he spend twenty thousand hours practicing when others gave up and got minumum wage jobs...?!

His mother was a cook and his father was a municipal gardener ... not exactly "elite athletes" ...
see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristiano_Ronaldo#Early_life

The point is that even though he certainly "showed promise" as a child, he only flourished because he persisted. In fact the odds were stacked against him, as he was born with a heart condition that threatened to end his playing career before it even started!

Where most other people give up after "trying" (half-heartedly for a few days or weeks), Ronaldo continued deliberately practicing for more years than his peers. He focussed all his attention on his core skills. He did not get distracted by other activities until he was wildly successful.

Is this relevant to a "normal" person?

It's easy to dismiss the efforts of a "super star" soccer player as being an "outlier".
But the point is that Ronaldo was not born with his skills, he learned them and practiced!
And anyone who is a "genius" in their field has had to work really hard at developing their skills.
Pick any successful professional in any area of expertise and you will see a minimum of 10 years of deliberate/focussed effort towards a specific goal. 🎯
It's not automatic or over night! Anyone that claims they achieved their success without years of effort is either lying or forgetting the time they invested ... or in some cases "down-playing" their efforts for effect.

If you say/think you have "tried", and "can't do it", think again!
Making excuses for why you "can't" do something is exactly that: an excuse!

If you don't want something, that's a different story. Not wanting to invest the time overcome the initial difficulty, be terrible at something and make mistakes for long enough to "get good", is perfectly understandable in a society ruled by instant gratification and chronic impatience.
It's no coincidence that all of the the most popular "Apps" on the iOS App Store are
centred around passive consumption and instant gratification" ...
it's right there in the name "instagram" ...? often abbreviated to just "insta" ... 🙄
see: https://www.businessinsider.com/most-downloaded-iphone-apps-worldwide-tik-tok-q1-2018-5

If you aren't ready to DELETE the time-sucking passive consumption Apps from your phone
(Instagram, Messenger, ANY/ALL Games!) so that you can focus on developing core skills,
then you have not "tried"; you have given yourself the option of failing. In fact you have automatically destined yourself to fail before you have even started.

Yes, Ronaldo is on of the most "popular" users of Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cristiano
But he only joined Instagram (long) after he had won "FIFA World Player of the Year"!
And he uses the platform/app as a tool to achieve his goals of self-promotion (his own brand) and all the other brands that pay him millions to push their products!

What goal is Instagram helping you to achieve in your life? ❓
Is Instagram making you a genius? 💡
Or is it systematically making you sad? 😞
http://time.com/4793331/instagram-social-media-mental-health/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/17/instagram-is-supposed-to-be-friendly-so-why-is-it-making-people-so-miserable

[ghost]

"Genius involves figuring out who you are, and owning yourself. It's about amplifying your best traits and compensating for the rest. Geniuses grab life by the horns, and persevere amidst setbacks. They take control of their lives, instead of waiting for others to open up doors. In this very important sense, greatness is completely, utterly, made."

[nelsonic]

Always Be Proactive.

“People who end up with the good jobs are the proactive ones who are solutions to problems, not problems themselves, who seize the initiative to do whatever is necessary, consistent with correct principles, to get the job done.” ~ Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The book is available for free on YouTube! e.g: https://youtu.be/3gJBD2e3Xjs

Proactive behaviour involves acting in advance of a future situation, rather than just reacting. It means taking control and making things happen rather than just adjusting to a situation or waiting for something to happen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proactivity

[nelsonic]

"The harder I work, the luckier I get."
~ Samuel Goldwyn

If the name isn't familiar, here's a clue:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/21/luck-hard-work/

[nelsonic]

"Nothing will work unless you do." ~ Maya Angelou

[nelsonic]

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right.” ~ Henry Ford

There is a little residual attribution uncertainty: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/02/03/you-can/
But the message is 100% correct.

If you or _anyone else has convinced you that you cannot do something, you need to reset that mindset and give yourself permission to believe.

https://youtu.be/nknzSWDcUgA

[nelsonic]

“Create a life that feels good on the inside, not one that just looks good on the outside.” ~ unknown

[nelsonic]

"Having Money isn't Everything, NOT Having it is!"
~ Kanye

This quote pretty much summarises my view of money/finance.
I worked extra hard to get money from age 13 to 28 (at which point I retired from "employment")
I "skipped" Christmas 4 times in my 20's to work.
Not because I didn't want to spend time with my Family,
but because I had been broke when I was 18-19 and I never want to go back there!

If you have never worked in a different country (where you have no family) on Christmas,
felt lonely and missed your family, try it, it's character building.

"That which does not kill us, makes us stronger." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

When I was at University, I never had fewer than two jobs.
It probably helped that my degree was easy. (someone should probably tell the professors in the Economics/Management/Finance department at Edinburgh University, how easy the program is!)
I basically didn't have to study (except for 3 weeks before the final exams ... more on that later) and I only missed out on a "double first" by 1% because the weekend before the coursework deadline, Inês was in a traffic accident and I spent the weekend taking care of her instead of writing my final essay ... 🙄
(no "regrets" ... being with her when she was in pain was way more important than grades!)

"2:1 is better" he said nonchalantly not wanting to look like he had "worked too hard" in School.

When I graduated I still worked two jobs for the first year:

1. I worked a "day" job for the One World Shop (Fair Trade) store in Edinburgh where I managed the store, worked on the web site (setup the e-commerce and helped with the transition to e-POS) https://www.oneworldshop.co.uk ... I was paid £750/month for this job. (£12k/year before tax was my first job after graduating) My fellow UofE graduates had all got "graduate jobs" earning more than double this salary. I took the OWS job because I believe in Fair Trade and felt I could both contribute and learn a lot more from the experience than joining the "corporate world".

In many respects I wish I had not taken a "corporate job" with Deloitte.
It was soul-destroying and felt like "selling out" ... Deloitte does not work with "startups" or entrepreneurs, their goal is to help big business get bigger, legally avoid taxes or "control risk".
Some of this is useful knowledge but I feel I could have used my time in my mid-twenties much more effectively if I had stuck to my plan of writing Accounting/ERP software instead of being a pawn for the Partners of a "Big Four" firm. I could have written "Fresh Books" or Xero. But instead I was kept busy (distracted) working for "big business" ... 😞

Sadly, it OWS only lasted a year and joining sed "corporate world" was inevitable.
Inês decided to move to London to work for Accenture (despite me pleading and attempting to reason with her not to ... because Accenture is an evil company that stole money from the NHS!)
so my choice was to either attempt to maintain a long-distance relationship where one person has a salary more than 3 times higher than the other person and has "corporate friends" who appear to be "achieving" more ... (but in reality are cogs in the corporate machine syphoning money from the tax payers and working class...) or ... find a job in London and move down to be with her.
The "third option": "break up" which neither of us wanted ...
even though I fundamentally disagreed with her working for "Accent on the Future" ... 🙄
I took the 2^nd option, Hence working for Exploitte.

2. In addition to my (full time + unpaid extra time!) "day job" at One World shop I worked a night job as "night porter", book keeper and website maintainer at the Castle Rock Hostel I was living at https://www.castlerockedinburgh.com Working the night shift from 22:00 - 07:00 was reasonably quiet and meant that I got "free" accommodation in the centre of the city.

For anyone paying attention, this meant I was working 09:50 - 18:00 at the OWS "day job",
sleeping for a few hours (19:00 - 21:30) and then doing the night shift,
then getting a nap from 07:30 - 09:30 ... so not getting much sleep/rest except on my one "day off" per week. When I caught up on a bit of sleep but then spent the rest of the time batch-cooking for the week and reading. It was all carefully choreographed and I was never "late" to either job.
The shop is 6 minutes by Bike from the Hostel (down hill in the mornings): https://goo.gl/maps/KAYh8gjxqo42

I had a "down hill" mountain bike at the time so I took the "short cut" which was 3 minutes 🚵⏱😉
(don't tell my parents ... I'm mean, they know I was an "adrenaline junkie dare devil" as kid - I "free-climbed" 10-story granite faces - ... but this was probably borderline reckless. I did not have the proper protection, just a basic skating helmet - no face protection - and there was plenty that could have gone horribly wrong. I have since learned to take much more calculated approach to all Risk especially personal injury!

My job Title at Deloitte was "Enterprise Risk Consultant" ... I learned everything I could about risk identification, analysis and mitigation. This covered both technology, accounting and investment risk. I hoovered up all the knowledge I could and read voraciously on the topic vastly exceeding the knowledge of my peers.

Even though I never "crashed" my bike, I did fall off and had few "scrapes and bruises".
I no longer take any "low-reward" risks whatsoever.

Before this turns into an autobiographical essay ... I will cut it short by saying this: I agree with Kanye.
Not having money sucks. It's all you think about when you don't have it and need it to pay bills.
I've been there. (no money to pay bills because rent was too high and wages too low)
Figure out how to get to the "creative work" as soon as you can.
Creative work pays much better and is way more enjoyable than the "minimum wage" dollars-for-hours job where you have nothing to show for your time at the end of the month when all the bills are paid but you feel empty.

[nelsonic]

"Learning Never Exhausts the Mind."
~ Leonardo da Vinci

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/13560.Leonardo_da_Vinci

[nelsonic]

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” ~ James Clear, Atomic Habits

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/7327369.James_Clear
GOTO: #611

[nelsonic]

“Action expresses priorities.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

[nelsonic]

"Pain + Reflection = Progress" ~ Ray Dalio

It's really that simple.
If you do everything you can to avoid pain, you simply will not learn anything or make any progress.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/25/bridgewaters-ray-dalio-best-advice-for-new-stock-market-investors.html

[nelsonic]

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” ~ Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1455.Ernest_Hemingway

This is another way of saying:

"ignorance is bliss" ~ Cypher, The Matrix

https://youtu.be/l5y68ErffgM

Full Quote from Restaurant scene in act 2:

Cypher: [talking to Agent Smith] "You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?" [takes a bite of steak]
Cypher: "Ignorance is bliss". ~ https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/matrix/quotes

Completely aside, this video on "Why Cypher Did it": https://youtu.be/VdxAx3kYdWs is a good commentary on Cypher's motive for wanting to be reinserted into the Matrix.
I occasionally (though increasingly rarely) think I would not mind being "ignorant"
because some people who are ignorant to the facts appear to be happier.
For example: most people in Europe/America have easy access to Water and sanitation and as a result they do not actively think about the fact that in many countries as many as 50% of the population do not have access to potable water and people have to spend significant portions of their income (20+%) on water. see: dwyl/phase-three#21
While the thought that hundreds of millions of people don't have access to water does not make me "sad" (because I'm a naturally happy person), it does mean that I constantly think: "there is still a lot of work to be done" (to give everyone access to the same living standards that we often take for granted...) and it's selfish to not consider the needs of people less fortunate than ourselves.

ignorance vs. intelligence

Note: I know that ignorance is not the same as "stupidity" (the opposite of intelligence).
But a person who is wilfully ignorant is almost certainly someone who does not aspire to intelligence.
This is a good summary: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-ignorance-and-stupidity

I have always pursued intelligence and knowledge while others I know chase pleasure.
Learning new and useful things makes me considerably happier than my hedonistic peers who have burned through their 20's (and in some cases 30's!!) and have nothing to show for it!

“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.” ~ Albert Einstein

[nelsonic]

"Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going." ~ Jim Rohn

[nelsonic]

"The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” ~ Warren Buffett

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/756.Warren_Buffett

[nelsonic]

"The secret of change is to focus all of your energy,
not on fighting the old, but on building the new." ~ Socrates

https://www.enclaria.com/2018/10/25/the-secret-of-change-dont-listen-to-socrates

[nelsonic]

“Life isn't about finding yourself.
Life is about creating yourself.”
~ George Bernard Shaw

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/5217.George_Bernard_Shaw

[nelsonic]

"You are the average of the five people
you spend the most time with." ~ Jim Rohn

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1798-you-are-the-average-of-the-five-people-you-spend

Adam Holownia (of The Art of Improvement) has a good video essay on this topic:

https://youtu.be/KdDIPLGKNCI

Or if you prefer reading to video: https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/you-are-the-average-of-the-five-people-you-spend-the-most-time-with-a2ea32d08c72

The people you spend the most time with shape who you are. They determine what conversations dominate your attention. They affect to which attitudes and behaviors you are regularly exposed. Eventually you start to think like they think and behave like they behave.

“According to research by social psychologist Dr. David McClelland of Harvard, [the people you habitually associate with] determine as much as 95 percent of your success or failure in life.”

Guiding principle: Surround yourself with people you admire

This is obviously much easier said than done ... 🙄
But it's what we are trying to do with @home ...
We aren't building a place that anyone can come to, we will be highly selective
to ensure that we are surrounding ourselves with healthy, creative, motivated & hard-working people.

...

It doesn't end at the five people you spend the most time with, your wider network influences you: https://medium.com/the-mission/youre-not-the-average-of-the-five-people-you-surround-yourself-with-f21b817f6e69

if a friend of yours becomes obese, you yourself are 45 percent more likely than chance to gain weight over the next two to four years. More surprisingly, however, Christakis and Fowler found that if a friend of your friend becomes obese, your likelihood of gaining weight increases by about 20 percent — even if you don’t know that friend of a friend. The effect continues one more person out. If a friend of the friend of your friend develops obesity, you are still 10 percent more likely than random chance to gain weight as well.
Your friends make you fat, but so do their friends, and so do their friends of friends.
While the researchers looked for a variety of explanations, the most likely one appears to be norms. If your friend is obese or a friend of a friend is obese, that changes your perception of what is an acceptable body size and your behavior changes accordingly.
And it doesn’t stop at obesity.
if your friend smokes, you are 61 percent more likely to be a smoker yourself. If a friend of your friend smokes, you are still 29 percent more likely to smoke.
Researchers found that happy friends make you happier — no surprise there.But if your friend of a friend of a friend is happy with their life, then you have a 6 percent greater likelihood of being happy yourself.

You’re not the average of the FIVE people you surround with. It’s way bigger than that. You’re the average of all the people who surround you. So take a look around and make sure you’re in the right surroundings.

Ask yourself: Who do you spend the most time with?
Who are the people you most admire?
Are those two groups of people the same?
Why not?

Inês opened an issue for this in: dwyl/home#100

[nelsonic]

"Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself."
~ Groucho Marx

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/43244.Groucho_Marx

[nelsonic]

"Coding for a living is learning for a living."
~ Paul Robinson

https://gist.github.com/scottashipp/c587dd35d253ce7c6a2bbee15abe143c
Fork: https://gist.github.com/nelsonic/e4a3e3ad31f9ead0569e222e965906c1 (in case it disappears)

[nelsonic]

“If you’re doing what everyone else is doing, you’re doing it wrong.” ~ Casey Neistat

https://motivationgrid.com/20-casey-neistat-quotes/

[nelsonic]

"People don’t like to think, if one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant." ~ Helen Keller

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/28850-people-don-t-like-to-think-if-one-thinks-one-must
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller

[nelsonic]

"People don't want to think." ~ Ayn Rand

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/430247-people-don-t-want-to-think

[nelsonic]

“Truth can only be found in one place: the code.”

~ Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/software-engineering

[nelsonic]

“I can tell you the secret to happiness in one word: progress.” ~ Tony Robbins

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/14545796.Tony_Robbins

[nelsonic]

"If I know how you spend your time,
then I know what might become of you."
~ Goethe

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6774650

[nelsonic]

This is how much I like quotes ... https://github.com/dwyl/quotes 😉

[nelsonic]

”What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
~ Richard Feynman

https://simple.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

via: https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x

PR: dwyl/quotes#10

[nelsonic]

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ~ Upton Sinclair

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/23510.Upton_Sinclair

This is especially relevant to people who cannot understand that the company they work for is evil. 🤦‍♂

[nelsonic]

This is an especially long quote and it's not particularly motivating so it does not belong in /quotes
A friend shared it with me and I want to "store" it somewhere so I can refer to it later ... 💭

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
~ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995

[nelsonic]

@RobStallion 😍

[nelsonic]

“If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.”
~ Seneca

[nelsonic]

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/18978-to-be-ignorant-of-what-occurred-before-you-were-born

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
~ Cicero

[nelsonic]

"This city's made us crazy, and we must get out" ~ Adam Levine

"Must Get Out" by Maroon 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Must_Get_Out https://youtu.be/drEmg-zk-JI

GOTO: dwyl/phase-three#116

[nelsonic]

“An adult scientist is a kid who has never lost their curiosity.” ~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

https://youtu.be/AiNh9ZEHXvo?t=1052

[nelsonic]

"Let your life be your message." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

[nelsonic]

“The secret to success is to
do the common things
uncommonly well.”
~ John D. Rockefeller

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/607758-the-secret-to-success-is-to-do-the-common-things

I've always loved this quote even though the person that said/wrote it is a controversial figure.
As the person who founded the Standard Oil Company in 1870, Rockerfeller is probably the single figure in history most responsible for creating global dependence on petroleum products and squashing the early technological R&D into renewable alternatives. He was the textbook definition of a Monopolist as he controlled 90% of all oil in the United States at his peak before the Supreme Court ruled in 1911 that Standard Oil must be dismantled for violation of federal antitrust laws.

The reality is that the "modern" world wouldn't exist without Oil. 🛢️
https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/how-did-oil-come-to-run-our-world/zn6gnrd
We can debate endlessly [without any conclusion!] about whether that's "good or bad" ... 💬 ⏳
I personally think most people are unconscious about how much fossil fuel energy they consume ... 🔥
And that we definitely shouldn't be burning non-renewables for leisure activities. 🏎️ 🙄

But the fact remains: this quote is great because doing the simple things very well is the key to success. 🚀

[nelsonic]

Cristiano Ronaldo: "Só tenho o 6.º ano e a única coisa que sei fazer bem é jogar futebol"

https://observador.pt/2017/08/05/cristiano-ronaldo-so-tenho-o-6-o-ano-e-a-unica-coisa-que-sei-fazer-bem-e-jogar-futebol/

[nelsonic]

"Every man has two lives,
the second starts when he realizes he has just one"
~ Confucius

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10699063-every-man-has-two-lives-and-the-second-starts-when