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 human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public. -- Anonymous

Ce n’est que par les beaux sentiments qu’on parvient à la fortune ! -- Charles Baudelaire, Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. -- William Strunk, Jr. (The Elements of Style)

The job of a leader today is not to create followers. It’s to create more leaders. -- Ralph Nader

Talkers are no good doers. -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI"

The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary. ~Vidal Sassoon

If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat! Just get on. –Sheryl Sandberg

The mind is everything. What you think you become. –Buddha

When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it. –Henry Ford