A hacker on a roll may be able to produce–in a period of a few months–something that a small development group (say, 7-8 people) would have a hard time getting together over a year. IBM used to report that certain programmers might be as much as 100 times as productive as other workers, or more. -- Peter Seebach

Mastering isn’t a survival instinct; it’s an urge to excel. Mastering is one of the experiences that delineates us from animals. It is striving to be more tomorrow than we are today; to perfectly pitch the ball over home plate; to craft the perfect sentence in an article; to open the oven and feel the warm, richly-scented cloud telling you dinner is going to be absolutely extraordinary. We humans crave perfection, to be masters of our domain, to distinguish ourselves by sheer skill and prowess. -- Joesgoals.com

It(mastering)’s knowing what you are doing. -- Joesgoals.com

We are the sum of our behaviours; excellence therefore is not an act but a habit. -- Aristotle.

Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want. -- Cited by Randy Pausch

C++ is like teenage sex: Everybody is talking about it all the time, only few are really doing it. -- unknown

Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter. ~Francis Chan

An unexamined life is not worth living. –Socrates

Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great. ~John D. Rockefeller

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absense of fear. ~Mark Twain