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You don’t make great products because you want to make great products; you make great products by creating the conditions where great products can be produced

https://stratechery.com/2016/apples-organizational-crossroads/

The U.C.L.A. basketball coach John Wooden, at the first squad meeting each season, even had his players practice putting their socks on. He demonstrated just how to do it: he carefully rolled each sock over his toes, up his foot, around the heel, and pulled it up snug, then went back to his toes and smoothed out the material along the sock’s length, making sure there were no wrinkles or creases. He had two purposes in doing this. First, wrinkles cause blisters. Blisters cost games. Second, he wanted his players to learn how crucial seemingly trivial details could be. “Details create success” was the creed of a coach who won ten N.C.A.A. men’s basketball championships.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/03/personal-best

What we think of as coaching was, sports historians say, a distinctly American development. During the nineteenth century, Britain had the more avid sporting culture; its leisure classes went in for games like cricket, golf, and soccer. But the aristocratic origins produced an ethos of amateurism: you didn’t want to seem to be trying too hard. For the Brits, coaching, even practicing, was, well, unsporting. In America, a more competitive and entrepreneurial spirit took hold. In 1875, Harvard and Yale played one of the nation’s first American-rules football games. Yale soon employed a head coach for the team, the legendary Walter Camp. He established position coaches for individual player development, maintained detailed performance records for each player, and pre-planned every game. Harvard preferred the British approach to sports. In those first three decades, it beat Yale only four times.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/03/personal-best

Votes, even ones incomprehensible to us, rise out of real lives, out of the distance between what we have and what we hope for ourselves.

https://newrepublic.com/article/131936/lost-trumplandia

Self-help is just the gateway. The real goal is: Save the world.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/magazine/the-happiness-code.html?hn=1&_r=0&referer=https://news.ycombinator.com/

Parr’s new hall would be a way of meeting the visitor on his own terms, in his own world, and showing him how that known world was also the world of the museum. It would make the museum familiar and empower the visitor to engage with it. The process needed to be mediated. Like slowly acclimating to a hot bath, or depressurizing a deep-sea diver so he can safely breathe. Daily life has us all pressurized; science is the fresh air.

http://blog.longreads.com/2016/01/14/the-fullness-of-a-moment/

Important things are often unremarkable and small.

http://blog.longreads.com/2016/01/14/the-fullness-of-a-moment/

Nobody gets into the space business because they’ve done an exhaustive analysis of all the industries they might invest in and they find that the one with the least risk and the highest returns on capital is the space business.

Jeff Bezos (http://fortune.com/amazon-jeff-bezos-prime/)

"As Rob Pike put it, “complexity is multiplicative”: fixing a problem by making one part of the system more complex slowly but surely adds complexity to other parts. With constant pressure to add features and options and configurations, and to ship code quickly, it’s easy to neglect simplicity, even though in the long run simplicity is the key to good software."

from "The Go Programming Language (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)" by Alan A. A. Donovan, Brian W. Kernighan

I’m not trying to imply here that length has anything whatsoever to do with quality; I’m just saying that I wanted to write an epic, and in some ways, I succeeded. If you were to ask me why I wanted to do that, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe it’s a part of growing up American: build the tallest, dig the deepest, write the longest. And that head-scratching puzzlement when the question of motivation comes up? Seems to me that that is also part of being an American. In the end we are reduced to saying It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Stephen King, introduction to The Gunslinger

In the end, I think the most essential part of the punk D.I.Y. ethos is to get as close to the source as you can, and do it as well as you can, with the least amount of bullshit in between. I only feel closer to that as time goes on.

http://www.antigravitymagazine.com/2016/01/aimee-argote-of-des-ark-waking-up-early/

...when code-paths are untested, they usually don’t work.

Joe Duffy - The Error Model http://joeduffyblog.com/2016/02/07/the-error-model/

To ride the bus across the country is to realize how lonely it is, the true scale of its emptiness.

http://www.theawl.com/2016/02/vagabond-express

I was not riding for a purpose, particularly, but because motion gives shape to purposelessness.

http://www.theawl.com/2016/02/vagabond-express

Nonetheless, character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.

Joan Didion, "On Self-Respect"

More generally, I learned -- again -- about the importance of establishing rules that can safeguard ourselves from ourselves.

Dan Ariely, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

The cost of an interruption is not just the time it takes, but that it breaks the time on either side in half. You probably only have to interrupt someone a couple times a day before they're unable to work on hard problems at all. I've wondered a lot about why startups are most productive at the very beginning, when they're just a couple guys in an apartment. The main reason may be that there's no one to interrupt them yet. In theory it's good when the founders finally get enough money to hire people to do some of the work for them. But it may be better to be overworked than interrupted. Once you dilute a startup with ordinary office workers—with type-B procrastinators—the whole company starts to resonate at their frequency. They're interrupt-driven, and soon you are too.

http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

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