Collection of inspiring quotes

[nelsonic]

Once I have the Maslow (CNC machine) nelsonic/learn-cad-cam-cnc#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]

“Routine, in an intelligent man is a sign of ambition.” ~ W. H. Auden

[nelsonic]

"No amount of money ever bought a second of time"
~ Tony Stark, Avengers: Endgame

Obviously, this quote is both true and simultaneously false. Tony said it to his own father in relation to spending quality time with loved ones. In that sense, it's true. No matter how much money you have or spend, you cannot "buy back" a second of lost time with a loved person. Or an opportunity you missed out on for that matter. This is evident from all the mizerable and depressed rich kids who attempt to fill the void left by their over-working parents by spending their lives on Instagram seeking approval/recognition/validation from strangers.

But in a the same vein, having money (even a comparatively modest amount above destitution) and investing it wisely can absolutely buy the present because you can afford to delegate your chores like housework to someone else and re-invest that time in your relationships.

One thing is for sure (and I know from both personal experience and plenty of empirical evidence) that when money is "tight", it can severely impact relationships. Sure, an often overlooked fact is that some people thrive on the constraint of a tight budget, but for the vast majority of people having a year of disposable income in the bank buys almost complete "freedom".

What people choose to do with that freedom is a topic for another quote/post. If you are in any way uncertain about what time-draining activities you should delegate, you need create an "Offload List" of all the work that does not require your creativity or judgement: https://youtu.be/JIWzZHiYPCo

But the fact is that Money absolutely can buy you time if you have the right (abundance) mindset and stop dwelling on the past! Focus on now! Make the most of the present! Tell/remind people you love them often and invest time in being with them. If you earn more than minimum wage for your craft/skill, hire a house keeper immediately and use the time saved wisely.

Decide how much cash you need to achieve your goals sustainably and don't burn through your time chasing more money because it will not bring you any incremental joy.

Buy time. Re-invest it wisely.

[nelsonic]

"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." ~ Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes)

[nelsonic]

“Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.” ~ Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

https://www.ted.com/talks/atul_gawande_want_to_get_great_at_something_get_a_coach

[nelsonic]

“Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results." ~ Peter Drucker

The Effective Executive > https://youtu.be/JIWzZHiYPCo ❤️

[nelsonic]

“When you strike at a king, 👊👑
you must kill him.” 💀
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

This might not appear to be an "inspirational" or life lesson" quote on the surface, but it absolutely is a quote that everyone should know and understand.

A more colloquial version of this quote was said by Stewie Griffen in Family Guy: "If you're going to hit the king, you better kill the king" The idea is that you don't hit the king unless you are going to kill him, because if you don't kill him, he's definitely going to kill you.

[nelsonic]

"In most projects, the first system built is barely usable...
Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow."

Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks
• https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks
• https://course.ccs.neu.edu/cs5500f14/Notes/Prototyping1/planToThrowOneAway.html

[nelsonic]

“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself;
but talent instantly recognizes genius.”
~ Arthur Conan Doyle

[nelsonic]

"There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle."
~ Albert Einstein

Even though I think of myself as a highly rational and often sceptical person, I chose to live by the second mindset; I see miracles everywhere. I love understanding science and consider myself a scientist. Test-Driven Software development is "Computer Science". It's 100% logical, systematic and repeatable not random chance. But if you go down to the sub-atomic level of why computers work, quantum mechanics is indistinguishable from a "miracle".

"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it." ~ Niels Bohr

"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."
~ Richard Feynman

Luckily we have access to the world's knowledge at our fingertips and can learn anything for free! https://youtu.be/Usu9xZfabPM

After learning physics in school and further pursing my understanding over the years, I feel that I have a decent grasp of the current state of human understanding; I could explain particle-wave duality to someone else on paper.

To be clear, whenever I don't understand something I automatically think "it's a miracle" and stop thinking about it, of course not! I always want to understand how everything works! And I don't stop searching until I understand it! But even when I fully understand something in physics, chemistry or biology I still don't take it for granted. I understand how photosynthesis works, but I still think it's miraculous that plants can turn water, carbon dioxide and Sun light into Oxygen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_photosynthesis

Science explains how things work, but it does not explain why.

Why did Marine Cyanobacteria spontaneously start photosynthesising? Was it "random chance"? Is "random chance" anything other than more scientific way of saying "it's a miracle"?

Documentary: https://youtu.be/q4ONRJ1kTdA

[nelsonic]

“A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.”
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1324527-a-smooth-sea-never-made-a-skilled-sailor

[nelsonic]

This is a bit of a long quote, but I want to keep it in a safe place. https://medium.com/the-self-taught-programmer/the-ten-greatest-self-taught-programmers-of-all-time-b59b1b3bb9e6

“Don’t expect it to be easy, you will have to work at it. Get a few more books from the library that cover beginning programming to go with the ones you have — sometimes a different author explaining the same thing will help a concept click. Go through all of them at least twice. Try to do every problem and exercise, don’t just read them and think you get it. Lots of people that want to program will talk a lot about programming, but not actually write that many programs. You should write hundreds of programs.” ~ John Carmack (3D Graphics pioneer. Creator of Doom and Quake)

[nelsonic]

“Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary.” ~ Jim Rohn

“If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.” ~ Roald Dahl

“books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.” – Roald Dahl

“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.” ~ Socrates

https://bookroo.com/blog/the-100-best-quotes-about-reading

[nelsonic]

"Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days." ~ Zig Ziglar

"You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want." ~ Zig Ziglar

https://youtu.be/3irmfCEhFJQ https://youtu.be/g4hQJfaxyOw https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zig_Ziglar https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/50316.Zig_Ziglar

[nelsonic]

“Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.”
~ Jerzy Gregorek

From Tim Ferriss' TED Talk: "Why you should define your fears instead of your goals"

https://youtu.be/5J6jAC6XxAI

Watch it if you haven't already. Re-watch it if you haven't yet implemented the fear-setting steps.

[iteles]

Also from the same youtube video:

[nelsonic]

"I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is." ~ Greta Thunberg

https://youtu.be/EAmmUIEsN9A

Solar panels are just the start: https://github.com/dwyl/home/issues/20

[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: https://github.com/dwyl/home/issues/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: https://github.com/dwyl/quotes/pull/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: https://github.com/dwyl/phase-three/issues/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