Various Sayings by James

Here are some of my favorite sayings, all of which are mine:

You don’t have to be the smartest person in the world on a subject. You just have to be smart enough to figure out who the smartest person in the world is, and then copy the hell out of him.
If you look at what people do, rather than what they say, you will have a clarity of insight that few people could ever dream of.
What’s the point of being intelligent if you act like an idiot most of the time?
To some extent, money and time can be traded off. In theory, if you have enough money, you can increase how much time you have to live, by consulting the best doctors, hiring a really good personal trainer, changing your diet, etc., but this can only take you so far. So once your income reaches a certain level of income, you should be consciously make time/money tradeoffs very frequently.
The difference between entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs is that entreprenuers make less distinction between their personal and work lives.
There are some people whose intellectual depth is so shallow that one might say, “He just reads the headlines, not the articles.” Actually, for some of the people I know, a more accurate characterization would be that they skim the headlines, they don’t actually read every word of the headline.
My standards for quality are what I call the Scalia-U.S. Supreme Court test. Imagine it is 2030 and you are attorney, representing a client who is on death row. After a decade of losing every appeal you have filed in every conceivable court, the U.S. Supreme Court has granted certiorari hear your last ditch, totally desperate appeal. That’s the good news. The bad news is that since the Obama one-term debacle, the Republicans have been in charge of the White House and the U.S. Senate and the court is now comprised of Justice Antonin Scalia and eight clones of Scalia. All of them hate death penalty appeals and each of them looks for any reason to deny such petitions. So any typo, any grammatical error, any miscite, any error in logic, no matter how subtle, and your appeal is denied and your client fries the next day, along with you. So when you turn work in to me, assume it should be of sufficiently high quality that it can withstand scrutiny by nine Justice Scalias, and if you do, you will not fry.
Most people underestimate how lazy the average person is. Take your best guess and then multiply by 1 million, and you will be reasonably close.
Patience is a “virtue” that is vastly overrated. I like people who get things done now.
I don’t mind that you are a total absolute idiot, literally one of the dumbest people on the planet. Really, I don’t mind, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Someone has to be in the bottom 1 percent of the IQ bell curve and apparently God has chosen you for that role. Congratulations. What I DO mind is that you do not realize you are a total absolute idiot and you won’t shut the fuck up.
Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” (Plato, Dialogues, Apology) If that is the case, I know several people who should commit suicide immediately.
The Bible says, “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” (Matthew 5:5) I see little emperical evidence to support that assertion.
The smarter, the more intelligent and the more accomplished a single woman is, the less likely she is to understand men. I meet lots and lots of secretaries who seem to have men figured out, while the women CEOs I know are much more likely to be clueless about men.
Most girls are crazy. If you are a straight guy, unless you find one of the few that are not, you have to accept this and decide what kind of crazy you are willing to live with. Alternatively, you could become gay, but presumably that is not an attractive option.
Most girls are crazy. If you’re female, are not crazy, and are able to communicate that to men, everything else equal, a lot of men will be interested in you, as most men would prefer not to date crazy women.
The number of highly feminine, girly girl women is vastly smaller than the number of men who desire such women. Even more interestingly, the more successful and more educated a man is, the stronger his preference is likely to be for feminine women. Thus, if you were take, say, straight men at Harvard Business School, a very high percentage of them prefer highly feminine women, much higher than, say, truck drivers. Since demand is substantially greater than the supply, girly girl women who are reasonably attractive and who are not totally crazy can usually have their pick of the litter when it comes to dating men.
Within a relationship, women see sex as icing on the cake. Men see it as the entire desert, in fact the whole five-course meal.
Dating coaches say, “There is a lid for every pot.” All I can say is that there are lot of very strange pots out there.
Older man to much younger woman: “I totally love you, you are the love of my life, you are the most amazing girl in the world, where have you been all of my life?”Much younger woman: “Well, for most of your life, I was not born yet.”
Men are from Earth, women are from an alternative universe.
Now and then, women friends of mine tell me they will be attending a class on “How to give better blow jobs.” I keep telling them, “To teach such a class, you need men to practice on. How do I volunteer?”
Most people would agree that gay men are, on average, more attractive, in better shape, better educated, more successful professionally, more interested in culture, and more emotionally communicative than the average straight guy. If I were a straight girl, this would really piss me off.
There is a saying, “All’s fair in love and war.” Actually, this is not quite true. Since the beginning of recorded history, there have been international laws concerning how warfare is conducted (e.g., you do not kill enemy soldiers who are willing surrender), how prisoners of war are to be treated, and so on. Several treaties have been ratified by almost all of the countries in the world, most notably the Geneva Convention, and in general such treaties are abided by. Love is a different matter, as there are no commonly accepted rules or understandings. Basically, anything goes. So a more accurate statement would be, “All’s fair in love.”
Men and women being equal makes as much sense as fish and bicycles being equal. They are so different that the concept is ludicrous on its face.
There are hundreds of reasons for men not to date a femininst. One of them is that if you do, you will most likely have a constant discussion of gender roles and the relationship. That is not what men are looking for. Dating should be like when a guy asks a girl to dance — the guy asks, the girl says yes (hopefully), the guy leads, the girls follows, there is no analytical discussion of gender roles or what each person is supposed to do, you just dance and have fun.
Feminists are always telling younger women, “You should be grateful to your older feminist sisters. It is because of our efforts and sacrifice that you now have so many more opportunities than existed in the 1950s.” In evaluating what these older feminists have actually contributed, one should consider not only the positive aspects but also the negative aspects. Let’s be candid here, the feminist movement has done some good but far more harm: illogical thinking, shrillness, intellectual dishonesty, hypocrisy. So when younger women evaluate how grateful they should be to their older feminist sisters, they should consider both the harm they have done as well as well the good they have done.
One of the mistakes people make in evaluating feminism is they fail to disaggregate their lives. Let’s divide your life into three categories: work/professional, personal, social, and romantic/love/dating. Feminism has and done make sense in some ways in the work/professional realm. It usually does not make sense in the other aspects of one’s life.
George Bernard Shaw said, “I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” I feel the same way about debating with feminists, it’s better to just avoid the debate. Instead, tell them how cute they are when they get mad, they always like to hear that.
It’s best to think of feminism as a disease. The smartest people are never infected, others are infected when they are young and stupid but as they gain widom they outgrow it, and an unfortunate few are infected their entire lives.
Debating feminists is like shooting fish in the barrel. Yes, you are certain to win, but where is the challenge?
What is the correlation between feminism and IQ? It is not a straight line, either positively or negatively correlated. Rather, it is more complicated. Below, say, 105 IQ, one will find few feminists, because people below a certain IQ are usually not capable of conceptual, abstract thinking. So feminism flourishes between those with an IQ of, say, 105 and 120, people capable of understanding simple conceptual paradigms but not smart enough to notice feminism’s intellectual bankruptcy. The higher you are in IQ above 120, the less likely you are to be a feminist.
Psychological research suggests that people generally choose mates with a similar level of attractiveness. I have a different philosophy: Not matter how attractive or unattractive I might be, I want to date the hottest girl I can. If the most beautiful girl in the world is willing to go out with me, why would I say no?
If Harvard College offered a class on sex, every undergraduate would clamor to take it, there would be a long waiting list, and within a year, the entire campus would be celibate. (on Harvard’s ability to make an interesting subject tedious and boring)
If you choose to attend Harvard College, you will spend four years in Cambridge, Massachusetts. If you choose Yale College, you will spend four years in New Haven, Connecticut. What else do you need to know? (advice given to those fortunate enough to be dual admits to Harvard and Yale and who are trying to decide which college to attend)
The best investment Yale University could make out of its $16 billion endowment (as of December 2009) would be to move the entire university to New York City.
Of the thousands of people I know, without a doubt the people with the least amount of courage — in other words, the biggest cowards — are those who work for colleges and universities, whether as faculty or administrators. I have not met more cowards per capita in any other sector.
I know several highly successful CEOs who have never had an original thought in their entire life. There are a ton of thinkers out there who have insightful and creative ideas about how to run a company, and all an CEO has to do is to be aware of current management theory and then choose which approach makes sense under his particular circumstances. If you want to be a spectacularly successful CEO, then you will have to have original thoughts; you cannot become a centimillionaire copying other people’s ideas. But this approach does work is you just want to be highly successful.
The quality of education offered by a graduate school of business is directly proportional to the number of years of work experience they require of their applicants. Take the University of Chicago, which regularly admits students with no work experience , and thus admits students who are clueless about business. Since you learn more from your fellow students than you do from your professors, the quality of education offered will be substantially inferior to schools such as Stanford and Harvard, which almost always require several years of significant work experience before you are admitted.
In business, be wary of the pundit who has never been to bat. Just as you do not take seriously anything said about sex by a virgin priest, one should be skeptical of anything said about business by someone who has not been in the trenches.
Everything that is insightful that has been written by corporate finance professors can be written down on a few pieces of paper, with plenty of blank pages left over. The same is true of computer science professors.
There are an infinite number of commentators who constantly tell us, “Virtual teams are the wave of the future.” What’s particularly interesting is that none of them have ever once in their life actually managed a team, let alone a virtual team. If they had, I suspect they would not be so quick to sing the praises of virtual teams. Instead, they would be praising the virtues of old fashioned, in person non-virtual teams. I know of no high impact project that was staffed with a virtual team. The lack of such emperical data is not an anomoly, it’s emperical proof that in almost all cases, virtual teams simply are less productive.
It’s better to have customers than to have clients. Clients are a total pain in the neck.
No matter how good of a swimmer you are, if you swim against the tide, the tide will eventually win. I prefer to swim with the tide. It makes me look like a great swimmer, even though I am not.
I spend far too much of my time teaching and coaching “adults” on matters they should have figured out in high school. If I wanted to be a baby sitter, I would advertise my availability as a babysitter on Craigslist and make $10 an hour performing these services. I have no interest in being a nursery school teacher; I want to deal with adults.
There is being different because you refuse to accept conventional wisdom when it is clearly wrong. And there is being odd simply for the sake of being odd. It’s important to know the difference.
Rather than being called a computer or geek, I prefer “computer guru.”
Almost all of the companies I am involved with are extensive users of Microsoft software, and most of them are enrolled in various Microsoft software programs, such as Action Pack and Bizspark. Every year when we renew our subscriptions, it literally takes weeks for the database in one Microsoft department to notify another database that we have renew. Perhaps if Microsoft used the Oracle DBMS rather SQL Server, the notification would take one second rather than a few weeks.
Every prediction about artificial intelligence that has been made, no matter how pessimistic, has turned out in retrospect to be wildly optimistic.
In Does IT Matter? Nick Carr argues that computers and information systems will become a commodity that is provided by outside vendors, with little need for involvement by senior management. They will become like electricity, you simply plug the cord into the wall, it works, and you pay based on usage. Just as we do not have Chief Electricity Officers, 50 years from now we will not have Chief Information Officers. Actually, given the increasing costs of energy, power and electricity, perhaps we should have more Chief Electricity Officers today.
When purchasing software, less is rarely if ever more. Rather, more is more. In almost all cases, you are better off purchasing a full-featured, even high software package or service that you will never outgrow, rather than software with training wheels and no features whose capabilities you will quickly exhaust. Switching software packages is difficult and expensive and it makes much more sense to choose sensibly and correctly the first time, even if the learning curve is a bit steeper for the full featured package. Thus, it is in most cases simply dumb to choose packages or services such as 37 Signals, which offer essentially no features and whose limitations you will quickly become frustrated with.
If 37 Signals published a word processing package in 2010, they would not offer styles, keep with next, footnotes, kerning, mail merge, table of contents, sections, track changes, sequences, bookmarks or cross references, and they would certainly not include Visual Basic for Applications. They would argue that since they do not need those features, and since writing such features is hard and what is most important is that their software developers work a 4 day work week rather than busting ass to develop a great word processor, you do not need those features, you only think you do. They would offer the equivalent of Easy Writer, a program that IBM sold along with the first IBM PC in 1981. IBM chose Easy Writer because it was so underpowered that IBM did not need to worry about canabilizing sales of its more profitable dedicated word processing stations. And like the several dozen competitors of Microsoft Word that tried such a feature-lite approach in the 1980s, 37 Signals would quickly be put out of business.
37 Signals is emperical proof that P.T. Barnum was correct. There is a sucker born every minute.
The problem with most software developers is not that they cannot see the forest for the trees. The problem is that they cannot see even one lousy tree because they can barely see a branch of a tree. If you find a developer who can see an entire tree, hire him on the spot.
If you did not know how to tie your shoes, would you expect someone else to come over to your house every day and tie them for you? Hell no! You would quickly learn how to tie your own shoes. If a friend of yours called you and said, “I’ve never been very good at this tying my shoes thing, would you mind coming over every day and tying them for me,” would you agree? Hell no! You would tell them to learn how to tie their own [expletive deleted] shoes. So why are computers different? Sure, they are a bit harder to master than tying your shoes, but anyone with a three digit IQ can learn how to use them reasonably well if they spend the necessary time and energy. So why are we as a society so tolerant of those who are complete idiots in using computers? Why are we not telling them, “Stop being a lazy idiot! Go learn how to use them. Take a class, read a book! Now!” Instead, we hand hold them, baby sitting them as we show them how to do things they should have learned decades ago.
Christians tell us that St. Peter is the gatekeeper to Heaven, with admission to Heaven based on whether you have lived a life of honesty and integrity. The problem is that such an evaluation in inherently subjective and St. Peter’s computer records may not be as complete as they should be. After all, how do we know if God hired the right computer consulting and implementation firm? Instead, let’s base admission to Heaven on computer skills and knowledge. We can eliminate subjective assessments completely and simply have a test (written by me, of course) that is administered when you seek admittance. It should not be an either/or decision, but rather Heaven should have different zones. Those who are true computers gurus would get the best spots, such as a penthouse suite with ten rooms on the beach, while those who barely pass would live in a small apartment with lots of roommates.
God did not put me on Earth for me to spend my scarce and valuable time providing technical support to computer idiots.
No doubt you have often wondered, “What do computer gurus talk about among themselves?” (OK, maybe you have never wondered about this, but let’s assume you have.) Yes, a large part of our conversations involves more acronyms that you will ever be able to understand. But we also spend quite a lot of time talking about how many computer idiots they are and how we would like all of them to be moved to another planet.
Assuming you regularly do complex intellectual work, not being good at computers is like running a race with a 90 lb. napsack on your back. Yes, you still might finish the race but most likely every other runner will finish ahead of you.
Many people claim that I believe that anyone over 21 who does not know how to program in C++ should be sentenced to five years in prison. This is a totally untrue and unfair characterization of me. In fact, I am quite willing for anyone over 21 to demonstrate competency in any programming language, not just C++, in order to avoid jail time.
I used to think that people who are inept with computers should be executed by a firing squad. In the last few years I’ve mellowed quite a bit and now I am willing to be kind and merciful, allowing them the option of lethal injection. I’m even willing to let them choose the traditional three drug cocktail or the newer one drug cocktail. So why are so many people saying I am a hardass on this issue? If anything, it appears to me that I have become too soft.
If ignorance of how to use computers was a crime, several of my friends would be on Death Row.
One definition of “acting like a lawyer” is that the less important the issue, the more time you spend worrying about and negotiating an issue.
I have always found it striking how clueless so many lawyers are about so many things. Why is this? It is because most lawyers are so ordinary in so many ways. I spend most of my time with people who are not ordinary, people of extraordinary intelligence and talent and drive, people who bring a lot to the table. And then I spend some of my time with lawyers, people who have sufficent intellectual capability to pass the bar exam (which does require a certain level of analytical ability) but who often have very little else to offer. That is why lawyers are so clueless about so many things, you are dealing with people that are average in so many ways.
Various people have said various things about; a few of them are even true. Not one person, not even the dumbest idiot on the planet, has ever said I am subtle. I am the most unsubtle person you will ever meet. With me, you will not have to guess what I am thinking, I will simply tell you, in very simple and plain English. If after that you still don’t understand, you need a new brain.

As for other people’s sayings:

Never trust a man who does not drink. — W.C. Fields
Economics is as much a communicable disease as it is a discipline. — Richard B. McKenzie
99 percent of politicians give the rest a bad name.
The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it. — P.J. O’Rourke
On a bench lined with solemn gray figures who often sit as silently as pigeons on a railing, [Antonin] Scalia [of the U.S. Supreme Court] stands out like a talking parrot. — Professor Jerry Goldman of Northwestern University
It’s better to ask for forgiveness than for permission.
When all is said and done, a lot more is said than is done.
You had me at hello. — Tom Cruise in the movie Jerry Maguire
The secret to success is constancy of purpose. — Benjamin Disraeli
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. — Mark Twain
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made. — Groucho Marx
In the battle of the wits, you come unarmed.
Free sex is the most expensive sex. — Woody Allen
What do a Harvard College and a Yale College student have in common? Both got into Yale.
In the social sciences, if you can measure it, that’s not it.
Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?A: That’s not funny.
Venture capitalists practice the Golden Rule — He who has the gold makes the rules.
One should always aim at being interesting rather than exact. — Tadpole
A consultant is someone who knows 372 ways to make love, but doesn’t know any girls.
The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The realist adjusts the sails. — William Arthur Ward
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. — George Bernard Shaw
It’s better to keep your mouth shut and give the impression that you’re stupid than to open it and remove all doubt. — Ranis Belson
That which does not kill us makes us stronger. — Nietzsche
Nothing is easier than the expenditure of public money. It doesn’t appear to belong to anyone. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody. — Calvin Coolidge
Forecasting is hard, particularly when the future is involved. — Yogi Berra
If you love someone, set them free. If they come back, they’re yours forever. If they don’t, hunt them down and kill them.
It’s no great shame to be poor, but it’s no great honor either. — Tevye the milkman in “Fiddler on the Roof”
Good artists copy, great artists steal. — Picasso
And we have always been shameless about stealing good ideas. — Steve Jobs
My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub. — Grover Norquist
The odds are good, but the goods are odd. — A saying among MIT women, since at MIT men substantially outnumber women, at least in graduate programs
The government teaches these witnesses not only how to sing, but how to compose. — Alan Dershowitz, on prosecutor’s deals with criminal defendants in which the defendant agrees to testify against other defendants in exchange for a reduced criminal charge
The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is the difference between living fully and just existing. — Michael E. Gerber
The efficient market hypothesis is the most remarkable error in the history of economic theory. — Lawrence Summers
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. — John Maynard Keynes
There is no such thing as people, just men and women. — George Gilder
Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price. — Samuel Johnson
What matter is not experience per se but “effortful study,” which entails continually tackling challenges that lies beyond one’s competence. — Ericsson
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand. — Milton Friedman
A successful economy depends on the proliferation of the rich, on creating a large class of risk-taking men who are willing to shun the easy channels of a comfortable life in order to create new enterprise, win huge profits, and invest them again. — George Gilder
If you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. — L.B. Johnson
It’s true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance? — Ronald Reagan
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. — John Kenneth Galbraith
Friends come and go but enemies accumulate.
When all you have is a hammer, everything lools like a nail.
But much of the cost difference can be attributed to the fact that it is more enjoyable to live in Manhattan or San Francisco than Peoria. Being around smart people is a huge luxury. Intelligent, well-educated people are much more interesting than people with low IQs who haven’t read or studied too much. Unfortunately for those who are retired on a fixed income, smart people tend to find clever ways to make money and this drives up the cost of housing in areas where they congregate. If New Yorkers weren’t so damn good at skimming money from Midwestern mutual fund investors and looting from public corporations, you wouldn’t find that larger apartments in Manhattan had been bid up to $10 million. — Philip Greenspun
California does not have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem — Philip Greenspun (discussing California’s fiscal crisis in 2010)
Being President of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery; there are many people under you, but no one is listening. — Mark Yudof
The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. – Margret Thatcher
People who view life as anything more than pure entertainment are missing the point. – George Carlin
The Internet — where the men are men, the women are men, and the 13-year-old girls are FBI agents.
Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it. – Charles R. Swindoll
You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, will prove the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. – Dr. Adrian Rogers
Technology doesn’t make an idiot any smarter. It just makes him more dangerous. – Brian Rivard
I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. — Isaac Newton
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievement; and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither defeat nor victory. — Theodore Roosevelt
I have always lived in freedom; let me end my life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: “He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any régime except the régime of liberty.” — Gustave Courbet
Comfortable with Our Stupid Children. Researchers have found that generic American parents, faced with a child who can’t do math or science, will say “Don’t worry, Johnny, because you have so many other talents.” Asian parents, supposedly, will say “Since you aren’t apparently naturally gifted at math or science you’ll have to study extra hard in these areas,” and not stop nagging until the kid is doing well. This evening I encountered a woman talking about her kids. “They’re just not numbers people. I tell them it doesn’t matter if they can’t do math or work with numbers because we’re English and Social Studies people.” — Philip Greenspun
Here’s to the crazy ones.The misfits.The rebels.The troublemakers.The round pegs in the square holes.The ones who see things differently.They’re not fond of rules.And they have no respect for the status quo.You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.Because they change things.They push the human race forward.And while some see them as the crazy ones, We see genius.Because the people who are crazy enough to thinkthey can change the world,Are the ones who do. — Apple’s “think different” ad
Get Into the Groove — We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into “flow”, also known as being “in the zone”, where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration … trouble is that it’s so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers – especially interruptions by coworkers – all knock you out of the zone. If you take a 1 minute interruption by a coworker asking you a question, and this knocks out your concentration enough that it takes you half an hourto get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble. — Joel Spolsky, software developer, Fog Creek Software (from Where do These People Get Their (Unoriginal) Ideas?)
An Organized Mind — Good writing skills are an indicator of an organized mind which is capable of arranging information and argument in a systematic fashion and also helping(not making) other people understand things. It spills over into code, personal communications, instant messaging (for those long-distance collaborations), and even such esoteric concepts as professionalism and reliability. — Dustin J. Mitchell, developer
Clear Writing Leads To Clear Thinking — Clear writing leads to clear thinking. You don’t know what you know until you try to express it. Good writing is partly a matter of character. Instead of doing what’s easy for you, do what’s easy for your reader. — Michael A. Covington, Professor of Computer Science at The University of Georgia(from How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily)
If your competition is faster, you must be cheaper. If they sell the story of health, you must sell the story of convenience. Not just the positioning x/y axis sort of “We are cheaper” claim, but a real story that is completely different from the story that’s already being told. — Seth Godin, Be a Better Liar
Communication flows more easily on small teams than large teams. If you’re the only person on a project, communication is simple. The only communication path is between you and the customer. As the number of people on a project increases, however, so does the number of communication paths. It doesn’t increase additively, as the number of people increases, it increases multiplicatively, proportional to the square of the number of people. – Steve McConnell, Chief Software Engineer at Construx Software BuildersInc. (from Less is More: Jumpstarting Productivity with Small Teams)
Don’t Follow the Leader — Marketers (and all human beings) are well trained to follow the leader. The natural instinct is to figure out what’s working for the competition and then try to outdo it – to be cheaper than your competitor who competes on price, or faster than the competitor who competes on speed. The problem is that once a consumer has bought someone else’s story and believes that lie, persuading the consumer to switch is the same as persuading him to admit he was wrong. And people hate admitting that they’re wrong. Instead, you must tell a different story and persuade listeners that your story is more important than the story they currently believe.If your competition is faster, you must be cheaper. If they sell the story of health, you must sell the story of convenience. Not just the positioning x/y axis sort of “We are cheaper” claim, but a real story that is completely different from the story that’s already being told. — Seth Godin, Be a Better Liar
Cut Out the Middle Man — Almost all Campaign Monitor development, support and marketing are performed by two people. Even if we’re forced to expand the team, we’ll never separate support from development. By personally responding to every request, we force ourselves to sit in our customers shoes and see things from their perspective. It’s important to understand why your customer needs something, not just what it is they need. That context often has a direct impact on how we design something. Cut out the middle man. It’s much easier to give your customers what they want when your ears are that close to the ground. I’ve discussed this setup with loads of people and the first response is often“shouldn’t you just hire a junior to handle your support?” Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. If you want your steak cooked just how you like it, would you rather talk to the bus boy or the chef that’s actually cooking it? — David Greiner, founder, Campaign Monitor
The Devil’s in the Details — I really got over the “get into details right away” attitude after I took some drawing classes. If you begin to draw the details right away you can be surethat the drawing is going to suck. In fact, you are completely missing the point. You should begin by getting your proportions right for the whole scene. Then you sketch the largest objects in your scene, up to the smallest one. The sketch must be very loose up to this point. Then you can proceed with shading which consists of bringing volume to life.You begin with only three tones (light, medium, dark). This gives you a tonal sketch. Then for each portion of your drawing you reevaluate three tonal shades and apply them. Do it until the volumes are there (requires multiple iteration). Work from large to small. Always. — Patrick Lafleur, Creation Objet Inc. (from Signal vs. Noise)
Be An Executioner — It’s so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an nda to tell me the simplest idea.) To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.Explanation:Awful idea = -1Weak idea = 1So-so idea = 5Good idea = 10Great idea = 15Brilliant idea = 20No execution = $1Weak execution = $1000So-so execution = $10,000Good execution = $100,000Great execution = $1,000,000Brilliant execution = $10,000,000To make a business, you need to multiply the two. The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000.That’s why I don’t want to hear people’s ideas. I’m not interested until I see their execution. — Derek Sivers, president and programmer, CD Baby and HostBaby
You Never Get A Second Chance — Another aspect of the Mac OS X user interface that I think has been tremendously influenced by Steve Jobs is the setup and first-run experience. I think Jobs is keenly aware of the importance of first impressions. I think Jobs looks at the first-run experience and thinks, it may only be one-thousandth of a user’s overall experience with the machine, but it’s the most important onethousandth, because it’s the first one-thousandth, and it sets their expectations and initial impression. — John Gruber, author and web developer ( from Interview with John Gruber)
Do or do not. There is no try. – Yoda
Tragedy is when I cut my little finger. Comedy is when you fall into a sewer and die. — Mel Brooks
Well, I’m not gonna quit drinking, I’m not gonna quit smoking, and maybe you’re not the doctor for me. — Frank Sinatra, reminding us that the customer is king.

Bismarck has several good sayings:

Some people learn from their mistakes. I prefer to learn from the mistakes of others.
Who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart; who is still a socialist at age 40 has no brain.
Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.
Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.

Henry Kissinger has several good quotes:

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
Even a paranoid has some real enemies.
Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.

There are some sayings in the software industry that I’m particularly fond of:

Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute. — Donald Knuth
Bad programming is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are dummies. — Matthias Felleisen et al.
The Ninety-Ninety Rule — “The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the time it takes to develop a software product. The remaining 10 percent accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.” — Tom Cargill of Bell Labs
The first release of Intuit’s QuickBooks was supposed to be a nine-month project. We were correct in estimating that the development project would be the same as a gestation period, but we picked the wrong species: It took almost two-and-a-half years, the gestation period for the elephant. — Ridgely Evers of Intuit.
How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time. — Fred Brooks
Add people to a late software project makes it later. — Fred Brooks
Real artists ship. — Steve Jobs
You have to revisit anyway — The fact is that everyone has scalability issues, no one can deal with their service going from zero to a few million users without revisiting almost every aspect of their design and architecture. — Dare Obasanjo, Microsoft
Smaller Tasks and Smaller Timelines — Software developers are a special breed of optimist: when presented with a programming task, they think, “That’ll be easy! Won’t take much time at all.” So, give a programmer three weeks to complete a large task, and she’ll spend two and a half procrastinating, and then one programming. The off-schedule result will probably meet the wrong requirements, because the task turned out to be more complex than it seemed. Plus, who can remember what the team agreed upon three weeks ago? Give a programmer an afternoon to code a small, specific module and she’ll crank it out, ready to move onto the next one. Smaller tasks and smaller timelines are more manageable, hide fewer possible requirement misunderstandings, and cost less to change your mind about or redo. Smaller timelines keep developers engaged and give them more opportunities to enjoy a sense of accomplishment and less reason to think, “Oh I’ve got plenty of time to do that. For now, let me finish rating songs in my iTunes library.” — Gina Trapani, web developer and editor of Lifehacker, the productivity and software guide
If programmers got paid to remove code from sofware instead of writing new code, software would be a whole lot better. — Nicholas Negroponte
Complexity Does Not Scale Linearly With Size — The most important rule of software engineering is also the least known: Complexity does not scale linearly with size. A 2000 line program requires more than twice as much development time as one half the size. — The Ganssle Group (from Keep It Small)
The Paradox of Standards — Even though you may assume that rigid standards and flexibility are opposed to each other, sometimes rigid standards at one level of a system promote more freedom and flexibility at other levels of the system. The best example of this is the Internet itself, where the IP protocol is an extremely rigid standard. It is absolutely the same everywhere in the world, anywhere anyone connects to the Internet. It’s particularly because of the rigidity of the definition of that standard that all the other flexibility and all the other decentralization that we associate with the Internet are possible. — Thomas W. Malone, MIT Sloan School of Management
The best software is software you never have to write in the first place.
Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork.
They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction. — Janet Reno
If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside. — Robert X. Cringely
I’ve noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS. — Larry DeLuca
Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window. — Steve Wozniak
Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves. — Alan Kay
I’ve finally learned what “upward compatible” means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes. — Dennie van Tassel
There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence. — Jeremy S. Anderson
Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the “most reliable Windows ever.” To me, this is like saying that asparagus is “the most articulate vegetable ever.” — Dave Barry
Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is nothing like Shakespeare. — Blair Houghton
The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry. — Henry Petroski
It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets. — Alan Cooper
No matter how slick the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience, the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved. — Mark Gibbs
Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration. — Ray Ozzie
There’s an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone. — Bjarne Stroustrup
Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter. — Eric Raymond
The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability. — Randall E. Stross
A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer. — Bill Gates
Programming and Mozart’s Requiem — A single good programmer working on a single task has no coordination or communication overhead. Five programmers working on the same task must coordinate and communicate. That takes a lot of time. The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce. Five Antonio Salieris won’t produce Mozart’s Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years. — Joel Spolsky, Hitting the High Notes
Emacs is a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor. — Advocates of vi, the main competitor to Emacs
Linux is free only if your time is worthless. — Jamie Zawinski
Why does open-source fail to reach critical mass anywhere but the server closet? Easy: because open-source software is, incontrovertibly, a total usability clusterfuck. — Benjamin Pollack

Alan Perlis has collected some good quotes on computers:

A [computer] language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.
Optimization hinders evolution.
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
Whenever two programmers meet to criticize their programs, both are silent.

Alex Kozinski has some great quotations.

Last but certainly not least, Winston Churchill has some of the greatest quotes in the history of the English language.

Read James’ essay, The Process Should Go Smoothly.

List of other essays written by James Mitchell | Copyright notice