mastery quotes from influential philosophers, authors and people
"It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness."
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."
"The love of anything is the fruit of our knowledge of it, and grows as our knowledge deepens."
"The knowledge of all things is possible."
"A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."
"In our culture we tend to equate thinking and intellectual powers with success and achievement. In many ways, however, it is an emotional quality that separates those who master a field from the many who simply work at a job."
"Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than shear reasoning powers."
"Feeling motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything. Feeling bored and restless, our minds shut off and we become increasingly passive."
"First, you must see your attempt at attaining mastery as something extremely necessary and positive... Second, you must convince yourself of the following: people get the mind and quality of brain that they deserve through their actions in life."
"In moving toward mastery, you are bringing your mind closer to reality and to life itself."
"Anything that is alive is in a continual state of change and movement. The moment that you rest, thinking that you have attained the level you desire, a part of your mind enters a phase of decay."
"Among his various possible beings each man always finds one which is his genuine and authentic being. The voice which calls him to that authentic being is what we call 'vocation.' But the majority of men devote themselves to silencing that voice of the vocation and refusing to hear it."
"At your birth a seed is planted. That seed is your uniqueness. It wants to grow, transform itself, and flower to its full potential. It has a natural, assertive energy to it. Your Life's Task is to bring that seed to flower, to express your uniqueness through your work."
"The process of realizing your Life's Task comes in three stages: First, you must connect with your inclinations, that sense of uniqueness. The first step then is always inward. You search the past for signs of that inner voice or force. You clear away the other voices that might confuse you- parents and peers. You look for an underlying pattern, a core to your character that you must understand as deeply as possible."
"Our evolution as a species has depended on the creation of a tremendous diversity of skills and ways of thinking. We thrive by the collective activity of people supplying their individual talents. Without such diversity, a culture dies."
"You must understand the following: In order to master a field, you must love the subject and feel a profound connection to it. Your interest must transcend the field itself and border on the religious."
"A false path in life is generally something we are attracted to for the wrong reasons- money, fame, attention, and so on. If it is attention we need, we often experience a kind of emptiness inside that we are hoping to fill with the false love of public approval."
"Extraordinary people are not a different category; the workings of this engine engine in them are simply more transparent."
"..it is essential that you begin with one skill that you can master, and that serves as a foundation for acquiring others. You must avoid at all cost the idea that you can manage learning several skills at a time. You need to develop your powers of concentration, and understand that trying to multi-task will be the death of the process."
"..the initial stages of learning a skill invariably involve tedium. Yet rather than avoiding this inevitable tedium, you must accept and embrace it. The pain and boredom we experience in the initial stage of learning a skill toughens our minds, much like physical exercise."
"Too many people believe that everything must be pleasurable in life, which makes them constantly search for distractions and short-circuits the learning process. The pain is a kind of challenge your mind presents- will you lean how to focus and move past the boredom, or like a child will you succumb to the need for immediate pleasure and distraction?"
"..you must meet any boredom head-on and not try to avoid or repress it. Throughout your life you will encounter tedious situations, and you must cultivate the ability to handle them with discipline."
"The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways."
"If anything is worth doing, do it with all your heart."
"True love is born from understanding."
"Should you find a wise critic to point out your faults, follow him as you would a guide to hidden treasure."
"I didn't fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong."
"Strain, I now accepted, was good. Instead of seeing discomfort as a sensation to avoid, I began to understand it the same way that a body builder understands muscle burn: a sign that you're doing something right."
"If you're not focusing on becoming so good they can't ignore you, you're going to be left behind."
"If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset ('what can the world offer me?') and instead adopt the craftsman mindset ('what can I offer the world?')."
"When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on."
"To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career. It's more general than a specific job and can span multiple positions. It provides an answer to the question, What should I do with my life? Missions are powerful because they focus your energy toward a useful goal, and this in turn maximizes your impact on your world - a crucial factor in loving what you do."
"A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough - it's an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field. If you want to identify a mission for your working life, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edge - the only place where these missions become visible."
"There's nothing like the satisfaction of knowing you're doing something well, that you've worked and practiced hard to achieve your own standards of excellence. That's what mastery is: the drive to improve our skills or knowledge in areas we're passionate about."
"Talent praise only reinforces the notion that success or failure rests on an inborn, unchangeable, static, and stagnant trait. Process praise applauds the effort and work - the action that's taken to get to the next step. You want to reinforce the idea that talent is unimportant, whereas effort is everything."
"True greatness will be achieved through the abundant mind that works selflessly - with mutual respect, for mutual benefit."
"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
"Be happy, but never satisfied."
"Don’t fear failure. Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail."
"Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own."
"Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."
"First, solve the problem. Then, write the code."
"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes."
"In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different."
"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away."
"Code is like humor. When you have to explain it, it’s bad."
"Fix the cause, not the symptom."
"Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming: feedback is the treatment."
"Simplicity is the soul of efficiency."
"Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable."
"Start with something simple and small, then expand over time. If people call it a ‘toy’ you’re definitely onto something."
"If you’re waiting for encouragement from others, you’re doing it wrong. By the time people think an idea is good, it’s probably too late."
"User interface is the process of shifting from chaotic complexity to elegant simplicity."
"If we want users to like our software, we should design it to behave like a likeable person."
"Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it."
"A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human."
"The art of debugging is figuring out what you really told your program to do rather than what you thought you told it to do."
"No one in the brief history of computing has ever written a piece of perfect software. It’s unlikely that you’ll be the first."
"All software you write will be tested—if not by you and your team, then by the eventual users—so you might as well plan on testing it thoroughly."
"One hundred years from now, our engineering may seem as archaic as the techniques used by medieval cathedral builders seem to today’s civil engineers, while our craftsmanship will still be honored."
"We can be proud of our abilities, but we must own up to our shortcomings, our ignorances and our mistakes."
"There is no such thing as a best solution, be it a tool, a language, or an operating system. There can only be systems that are more appropriate in a particular set of circumstances."
"Great software today is often preferable to perfect software tomorrow. If you give your users something to play with early, their feedback will often lead you to a better eventual solution."
"One broken window — a badly designed piece of code, a poor management decision that the team must live with for the duration of the project — is all it takes to start the decline. If you find yourself working on a project with quite a few broken windows, it’s all too easy to slip into the mindset of ‘All the rest of this code is crap, I’ll just follow suit.’"
"In an abstract sense, an application is successful if it correctly implements its specifications. Unfortunately, this pays only abstract bills. In reality, the success of a project is measured by how well it meets the expectations of its users."
"If you don’t hear any complaints from users, they are not using the software – or your support email is broken."
"A key principle of any effective software engineering, not only reliability-oriented engineering, simplicity is a quality that, once lost, can be extraordinarily difficult to recapture."
"The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it’s pointless."
"Periodic reminder that the tech stack you use to ship a product only matters to other devs. End users only care that it’s fast enough and does enough to let them get work done. That is your top priority as a dev. Ship working maintainable things that solve people’s problems."
"Don’t decide on the tech you’re gonna use before you understand the project and the customer’s needs."
"Everything should be made as simple as possible. But to do that you have to master complexity."
"Some people are good programmers because they can handle many more details than most people. But there are a lot of disadvantages in selecting programmers for that reason — it can result in programs that no one else can maintain."
"Complain less. Build more."
"As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture. We overthrow the programming of advertising, movies, video games, magazines, TV, and MTV by which we have been hypnotized from the cradle."
"We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc., but only by doing our work."
"The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them."
"Grandiose fantasies are a symptom of Resistance. They're the sign of an amateur. The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work."
"The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like."
"An amateur lets the negative opinion of others unman him. He takes external criticism to heart, allowing it to trump his own belief in himself and his work."
"There's no mystery to turning pro. It's a decision brought about by an act of will. We make up our minds to view ourselves as pros and we do it. Simple as that."
"Metaphors contribute to a greater understanding of software-development issues in the same way that they contribute to a greater understanding of scientific questions."
"A common denominator of programmers who build high-quality software is their use of high-quality practices. Such practices emphasize quality at the beginning, middle, and end of a project."
"The goal of all software-design techniques is to break a complicated problem into simple pieces."
"Avoid making 'clever' designs. Clever designs are usually hard to understand. Instead make 'simple' and 'easy-to-understand' designs. If your design doesn't let you safely ignore most others parts of the program when you're immersed in one specific part, the design isn't doing its job."
"If you're developing a program for Microsoft Windows, for example, why limit yourself to the Windows environment? Isolate the Windows calls in a Windows-interface subsystem. If you later want to move your program to MAC OS or Linux, all you'll have to change is the interface subsystem."
"All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking."
"No man is free who is not a master of himself."
"The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it."
"The further one goes, the less one knows."
"There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent."
"Knowledge is a treasure, but practice is the key to it."
"Quality is not an act, it is a habit."
"Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach."
"Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing."
"Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work."
"Learning is not child’s play; we cannot learn without pain."
"Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value."
"Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow."
"Excellence is not a gift, but a skill that takes practice. We do not act rightly because we are excellent, in fact we achieve excellence by acting rightly."
"It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket."
"Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive and determination of the people who do it as it is about the product they sell."
"It's very important to like the people you work with, otherwise life [and] your job is gonna be quite miserable."
"It is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary."
"When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor."
"There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering."
"When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars, people said, ‘Nah, what's wrong with a horse?’ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked."
"Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up."
"Don’t delude yourself into thinking something’s working when it’s not, or you’re gonna get fixated on a bad solution."
"I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior. I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad."
"People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working."
"People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else."
"If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it’s not."
"Constantly seek criticism. A well thought out critique of whatever you’re doing is as valuable as gold."
"Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time."
"Great companies are built on great products."
"Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death."
"You want to have a future where you’re expecting things to be better, not one where you’re expecting things to be worse."
"The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur."
"I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better."
"You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve."
"Any product that needs a manual to work is broken."
"Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."
"I take the position that I’m always to some degree wrong, and the aspiration is to be less wrong."
"I could either watch it happen or be a part of it."
"Constantly think about how you could be doing things better."
"Those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world usually do."
"Ambition is enthusiasm with a purpose."
"Discipline is not a punishment. It’s a practice of self-control and self-mastery."
"The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is the willingness to do what others won’t."
"Discipline is the key to success. Absolutely is. If you cannot force yourself to do something that you do not want to do, how are you ever gonna put yourself through the suffering required for greatness?"
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."
"Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible."
"Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do."