Fundamental truths, proverbs, and guiding principles that I try to live and work by. I’m not always the best steward, but I wake each day prepared to try like hell.

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Everything and nothing

Everything is something. No thing is everything.

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Worth doing right

No idea where my father got it, but he always said, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

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How do you do

How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Users are not designers

Period.

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Truly iterative

What is the most important thing we need to learn? Then, what is the least amount of work needed to learn the next most important thing? Because…

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Tiny changes

Continuous improvement. Dave Brailsford’s Aggregation of Marginal Gains. The “1 percent margin for improvement in everything you do.”

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Buffet on habit

The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.
–Warren Buffet

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Management vs. leadership

“Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.”
–Peter Drucker

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Rise or fall?

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
–James Clear

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Learning is like compound interest

Daily dividends simply distributed in a different currency.

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Beware of motion

Take action. Motion does not produce a result.

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Be curious

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
–Thomas Henry Huxley

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Complementary

First, James Michener:
The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both.

…pairs well with…

Jack Kerouac, from On the Road:
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “AWWW!”

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For growth’s sake

Only two things grow for the sake of growth: tumors and companies.

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