Retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
-- Jim Collins in Good to Great paraphrasing Stockdale
Do not rock the boat
You've got five apes in a cage. You've got a banana hanging by a string in the middle of the cage. You've got some stairs going to the banana. Now pretty soon one of those apes is going to go for the banana and as soon as he hits the stairs you take a hose and you spray all five apes with freezing cold water for five minutes.
Now, some time passes and pretty soon another one of the apes is going to make the same attempt with the same result. All five apes get sprayed with a cold water. Now you turn off the cold water. You never use it again. One of the apes is going to go for the banana. He hits the stairs, the other four apes pounce on him and beat the shit out of him. Right? Okay, understandable.
Now you replace one of those original apes with a new ape. After a while that new ape is going to spy that banana and when he goes for the stairs, the other four apes are going to jump on him and beat the shit out of him. Right? Now, time passes, you replace another one of the original apes with a new ape. That new ape is going to go for the banana. The other four apes beat the shit out of him. Right? Including the first new ape who has no idea why he's so enthusiastically beating the shit out of this poor guy nor why he himself had the shit beat out of him. Okay?
Now you keep replacing these original apes with new apes until finally you've got a cage filled with fives apes who have never had the freezing cold water sprayed on them and never the less not one of those apes will never attempt to climb those stairs again. Why not? Because that's the way it's always been done around here.
-- Jackson Evans, The Contender
Statistics
A statistic should tell a story
-- Margaret Thatcher
Be Boring
Be boring and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
-- Gustave Flaubert
Excellence is Habbit
Happiness
Happiness is associated with being passionate about something.
-- George Plimpton
Boredom
The killer and the bore are both marked by their fatal agbsence of empathy with the other person, their chilling dullness and mediocrity, and a thirst for power and attention that conceals their despair at having nothing to offer.
-- Phil Baker
Taste and Microsoft
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste, and what that means is - I don't mean that in a small way I mean that in a big way. In the sense that they they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product, and you say why is that important - well you know proportionally spaced fonts come from type setting and beautiful books, that's where one gets the idea - if it weren't for the Mac they would never have that in their products and, so I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success - I have no problem with their success, they've earned their success for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third rate products.
-- Steve Jobs
Taste
Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I'll tell you who you are. A thing is worth precisely what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.
-- John Ruskin
Boldness
Until there is commitment there is hesitancey, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sort of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe