Quotes About Challenge

If you can't solve a problem, it's because you're playing by the rules

Risks are a measure of people. People who won't take them are trying to preserve what they have. People who do take them often end up having more. Some risks have a future, and some people call them wrong. But being right may be like walking backwards proving where you've been. Being wrong isn't in the future, or in the past. Being wrong isn't anywhere but being here. Best place to be, eh?

Start taking bad decisions and it will take you to a place where others only dream of being.

Here we say that life is a cliff, and you must never turn around and look back when you're climbing.

Youth was not made for pleasure, but for heroism.

if your training isn't gradually lessening the pain in your life, you're doing something wrong.

Serious circumstances remind us that the difficulty of finding the truth is no excuse for not looking.

Tackling Old Testament ethics is a challenge. Besides a lot of territory to cover, the ancient Near East seems so strange and even otherworldly! We need a good bit of background discussion to help make better sense of this world and of certain Old Testament texts.

DI Cartwright: The cat is booby trapped? DI Quill: Welcome to my world.

Here, as so often, the best defense is a good offense. If you can develop technology that's simply too hard for competitors to duplicate, you don't need to rely on other defenses. Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice.

So if you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they'll never be able to keep up with you. These opportunities are not easy to find, though. It's hard to engage a big company in a design war, just as it's hard to engage an opponent inside a castle in hand-to-hand combat.

If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get exceptional, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.

Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.

This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what's the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.

Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him.

And you had better have a convincing explanation of why your technology would be hard to duplicate. Otherwise as soon as some big company becomes aware of it, they'll make their own, and with their brand name, capital, and distribution clout, they'll take away your market overnight. You'd be like guerillas caught in the open field by regular army forces.

First, if we fail to meet the challenge of climate change, with catastrophic results—which seems all too likely—it won't be the result of an innocent failure to understand what was at stake. It will, instead, be a disaster brought on by corruption, willful ignorance, conspiracy theorizing, and intimidation.

A lawyer who's afraid of jail is like a surgeon who's afraid of blood.

The world is your oyster... ...too bad you're allergic to shellfish.

You're the enemy. You're the one who's going to defeat yourself.

There are risks and costs to a program of action but they are far less than the long range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.

the one thing to which the human spirit could always accommodate itself was chaos and misfortune.

Unfortunately, there is always an unmapped area of dangerous fallibility between a policy and its pursuit.

To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.