I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. "A lot of them seem smart," he said. "What I can't tell is whether they have any kind of taste." -- Paul Graham

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them. -- Aristotle.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. -- John Lennon

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. -- Thomas Edison

Something Confusing about "Hard": It's tempting to think that if it's hard, then it's valuable. Most valuable things are hard. Most hard things are completely useless -- (picture of someone smashing their head through concrete blocks kung-fu style). Hard DOES NOT EQUATE TO BEING valuable. Remember Friendster back in the day? You'd sign in, invite friends, have 25 friends, go to their profile, and then it'd show how you were connected to each one. That's an impressive [some geeky CS jargon] Cone traversal of a tree - 100 million string comparisons per page -- it won't scale. Used to take a minute per page to load, and Friendster died a painful death. MySpace -- not interested in solving problems They use the shortcut of "Miss Fitzpatrick is in your extended network" (i.e. even when you're not even signed up for MySpace) They didn't solve the hard problem. But they make the more relevant assumption that you want to be connected to hot women. [LOL] Shows Alexa graph showing that in early 2005 Myspace took off, and quickly bypassed Friendster and never looked back. -- Max Levchin, PayPal founder, Talk at StartupSchool2007

The reason to do animation is caricature. Good caricature picks out the essense of the statement and removes everything else. It's not simply about reproducing reality; It's about bumping it up. -- Brad Bird, writer and director, The Incredibles

Knowledge is being aware of what you can do. Wisdom is knowing when not to do it. ~Anonymous

Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful. –Joshua J. Marine

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. ~Steve Jobs

Nothing is impossible, the word itself says, “I’m possible!” –Audrey Hepburn