“Freedom lies in our ability to discern truth and choose right actions. Leadership, courage, hope, conscience, character, faith, critical thinking, magnanimity–all those things are available to those who take and read–but only if we develop the vocabulary to understand.”

Reminds me of this Quote of the week that Scott Berkun posted:

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. - John F. Kennedy”

Start reading.

If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success. – James Cameron, director of Terminator and Titanic, from The New Yorker [via SvN]

“Designs take a leap forward when you kill the things you didn’t know you were holding on to.” – Ryan @ SvN

“I embrace change like I trust confidence.” @Rands

“1-size-fits-all mission stmnt: We provide best of breed productivity solutions that help maximize ROI for your strategic initiatives.” @jeffpatton

“In agile we plan and we plan to replan” – Ronica Roth [via @dwhelan]

“[When robots attack,] I don’t think you want to be known as a human being that is against computers.” — Peter Thiel [via @dcurtis]

“Flow is the New Center” – Leif Larson

“To understand good leadership, think about how far you’ll go when someone you like asks you for a favor.” @Rands

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” – Winston Churchill

“frustration is just passion being slowed down by a conversation” @alshalloway

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”  —Benjamin Franklin, 1755

The importance of a task is inversely proportional to the time you need to ignore it to render it moot. —Hugh Greenway

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. —Daniel Patrick Moynihan

1 good test is worth a 1000 expert opinions–coined at Grumman Aerospace during 60s lumbar module dev pgm. [via @dwhelan]

“Don’t call your defects ‘bugs’. Call them ‘time bombs’ instead.”
- Watts S. Humphrey

From Wikipedia: “Watts S. Humphrey (born 1927) is an American software engineer, key thinker in the discipline of software engineering, and is often called the father of software quality.”

He has a recent book out that looks like it could be good, Reflections on Management: How to Manage Your Software Projects, Your Teams, Your Boss, and Yourself.  Has anyone read it?

[via @jurgenappelo]

“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s the things we know that ain’t so.” – Artemus Ward

“The beatings will continue until morale improves”

“Documentation is not understanding, process is not discipline, formality is not skill.” – Jim Highsmith

“Instincts are your experience speaking without all that bothersome thinking.” – rands

“If monkey + typewriter + infinite time = Shakespeare, then I bet monkey + an IDE could get you MS Word in half the time.” – Jeff Patton

“pro tip: if people can glean what your presentation is about just by looking at your slides – you have a boring presentation.” – Garrick Van Buren

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” — Mahatma Gandhi

The currency of today’s economy is knowledge. — President Obama (Education Speach, 11/2009)

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” – Marcus Aurelius

Projects fail at the beginning, not at the end. – Pat Reed

Bob Marshall (@flowchainsensei):
“You really have no clue as to how much your business success depends on software, do you?” #neversaid

Ben Simo (@QualityFrog):
“Compliance with standards makes sense when & where interoperability is more important than innovation & improvement.”

Wil Harris (@wilharris)
“New Apple mouse proves not only does Steve think we are too dumb for two buttons, we can’t even handle one. A mouse with no buttons. Nice.”

Jared M. Spool (@jmspool):
“Remember, if you torture data long enough, you can get it to confess to anything you want.”

Jeff Patton (@jeffpatton)
“Requirements are the boundary between what I get to decide and what you get to decide. It’s a fuzzy discussion, or DMZ”

Esther Derby (@estherderby)
“ppl talk about commitment as if it is an act of will. commitment requires will AND time, resources, skill, authority”

Bob Marshall (@flowchainsensei):
“So you’re all far too busy politicking and CYA-ing to actually bother about delivering stuff to the paying customer?” #neversaid

37signals (@37signals)
“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” -Linus Pauling

Naresh Jain (@nashjain)
“Consistency is over-rated. Consistency is a big innovation killer. Let diversity & positive deviance help us explore better ways”

Uncle Bob Martin

• “I’m not religious about TDD [Test Driven Development], I’m dogmatic; there’s no diety involved.”

Neil Ford

• “The problem with software is that there is no credit limit on technical debt”

“give me a challenge & I work harder, keep pushing right past that to Totally Unreasonable & watch productivity dive bomb”

Some challenges are OK. And they can be downright fun if you have the time to investigate, learn, and resolve them in an intelligent way.

Given the right environment, people will often rise to the challenge and do great things. But just because a some challenges lead to greater productivity in certain environments doesn’t mean that a) it’s sustainable, or b) that it works in every situation, or c) that its the best way to achieve greater productivity.

Build a collaborative environment that has reasonable goals, a good diversity of projects, supportive co-workers, and managers that mentor more than they measure, and I guarantee you’ll have productive employees.

And don’t even get me started on inane concepts like “stretch” goals.

“There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.”

I couldn’t agree more, and as far as it goes, think that good taste and thoughtful design trump features, marketing, and just about everything else.

[via Tim Elliott]

“The average knowledge worker switches tasks every three minutes, and, once distracted, a worker takes nearly a half-hour to resume the original task, according to Gloria Mark, a leader in the new field of “interruption science.”

Interruptions and the requisite recovery time now consume 28 percent of a worker’s day, the business research firm Basex estimates. The risks are clear. As one top executive told me, “Knowledge work can’t be done in sound bites.” “

From Fighting a War Against Distraction via The Practice of Leadership

It’s amazing that people have so much time to fret about today’s emergency but almost no time at all to avoid tomorrow’s.

Agreed. I’ve got a number of emergencies just waiting to happen … and I’m not doing anything about it today, because it won’t be a problem till tomorrow. This is not good planning at all.

It is certain that every organization has too many meetings, and far too many poorly designed ones. The main reason we don’t make meetings more productive is that we don’t value our time properly. The people who call meetings and those who attend them are not thinking about time as their most valuable resource. - Reid Hastie [via SvN]

It’s easy to be against something … that you’re afraid of. And it’s easy to be afraid of something that you don’t understand. [via Seth Godin]

and

Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance. [Daniel Davies via Paul Krugman via Daring Fireball]

Instead of acting on a Good Idea, I find there is often opposition, prejudices and misunderstandings.

Occasionally an idea will be acted on, but only after a protracted waiting period – where the misunderstandings are cleared up, the prejudices are corrected. This can be days, months, and regularly – years. So, like a balanced free market:

The greatest friend of truth is time  -Charles Caleb Colton

But is waiting the only way to get a idea confirmed as good? How do you make the time go faster? Revving up a marketing machine with brochures, power points, and celebrity endorsements doesn’t seem right. How do you accelerate the time between having a good idea and having it recognized and acted on?

Multitasking is the art of distracting yourself from two things you’d rather not be doing by doing them simultaneously.

Mr. Mann says:

“Multi-taskers” are really just splitting their time and attention into smaller slices than you; no one can really do more than one thing at a time.

Be sure to check out the related podcast episode on the topic, or the post How Doing It All Gets Nothing Done over at Get Rich Slowly.

Update: on a reread of the post, it appears that I said “Merlin” one to many times. It’s fixed now.

Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.

Without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable.

It is the responsibility of leadership to provide opportunity, and the responsibility of individuals to contribute.

Too often new ideas are studied and analyzed until they are suffocated.

“With my patented “Ignore for a Week, Then Just Delete” system, you’ll get through your email faster than with any other system, guaranteed.” John Gruber via Twitter

“Let’s just have some ridiculous touchy-feely resolution.” Merlin Mann MacBreak Weekly #42

Aaron Mentele via Twitter

“A great way to think about what your principles are is to complete this sentence: “I would give others totally free rein to do this as long as they …” – what?” Getting Things Done by David Allen p66

“Fear, in other words, is a tax, and al-Qaeda and its ilk have done better at extracting it from Americans than the Internal Revenue Service…Never before have so few terrorized so many with so little.” Here’s How America Looks to the World By Josef Joffe

“everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.” Robert Rauschenberg

“A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.” George Patton

If you like Van Halen and think your next computer might be a Mac, be sure to check out the MacRumors Buyer’s Guide for the right time to purchase. If you are unsure, check out Apple’s Get a Mac Guide it answers just about every concern you may have about the platform.

“I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.”
- William Gibson

“I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
- Stephen Leacock

“I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”
- Pablo Picasso

“There is a time when panic is the appropriate response.”
- Eugene Kleiner

“PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.”
- The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce

“When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.”
- Kevin Kelly in Better Than Free