“Business and life are built upon successful mediocrity.

I would rather have a man who was born frail, and has overcome his frailty by careful living, than take one whose natural strength has never known its limits. The athlete, like the genius, frequently disappoints; while the man who has had to fight for his health knows how to value and preserve it.

“The reason you love something is greater than the thing itself. Introspect and you’ll find the underlying reason you love what you do. And that insight will give you directions to push the envelope on what you do.

“Restraint is not the only component of good, but it is the component that improves most with experience.

“Make all visual distinctions as subtle as possible, but still clear and effective.

“Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.

“A well-written program in an abstract language like Ocaml or Lisp has the quality of an elegant mathematical proof: beautiful and concise, but you can’t change anything without breaking it. Most programs in C++ are more like an elaborate model train layout, supporting endless tinkering without actually stopping the train from going ‘round.

The ideal language would let you write functionality quickly and concisely like a high-level language, but let you tinker and optimize to your heart’s content. To support these two goals, it needs to read two separate sets of source code: a high-level part and an optional low-level part that guides compiler optimizations.

“A satisfied customer isn’t necessarily a loyal customer; today’s satisfied customer might find even more satisfaction in your competitor’s offerings tomorrow.

“If you’re the district manager for the Yukon Territory and the company stops serving the Yukon, you’re going to get fired, aren’t you? It’s no wonder groupthink and politics and natural defenses kick in every time strategy is discussed.

The thing is, in most organizations, when the Yukon gets shut down, the district manager does get laid off. Big mistake. As soon as management starts conflating people with tasks, they’ve guaranteed that the organization is going to get stuck.

A better plan: rotate your people and continually reward and promote and challenge them. Make a big deal when someone makes the case for shutting down her task. Make it really clear through your actions that tasks come and go, but good people stay.

“I wrote this blog for a year in utter obscurity, but I kept at it because I enjoyed it. I made a commitment to myself, under the banner of personal development. My schedule was six posts per week, and I kept jabbing, kept shipping, kept firing.

“The notion of going on a hike, camping, fishing or backpacking is foreign to a growing number of young people in cities and suburbs around the nation. Nature is increasingly an abstraction you watch on a nature channel. If so, it’s unlikely you will have many qualms about pulling the loaded gun’s trigger. It’s just another mashup.