Quotes About Challenge

To overcome a fear, here's all you have to do: realize the fear is there, and do the action you fear anyway.

You must use your head when figuring out this challenge, and that is the best part.

Rules? You don't even know what game we're playing, mister.

It was the first rough travelling I'd done on my African adventure and it felt good. South Africa had been too easy. I simply turned up at a minivan station and there was a death trrap waiting for me. Now I was on a painfully slow truck that shuddered and groaned in a manner that suggested it wasn't long for this world.

To build strength and flexibility, we should open our minds to people and ideas we don't like, and pick fights with those we do.

A satisfactory translation is not always possible, but a good translator is never satisfied with it. It can usually be improved. (Newmark)

Once Is Enough, Miles Smeeton's thrilling (and even funny) account of his two separate and disastrous capsizes aboard his yacht Tzu Hang in the Southern Ocean west of Cape Horn.

Dumas's book, Alone Through the Roaring Forties

With the last sentence Blyth stumbles across the credo of all adventurers, be they sailors, mountaineers, or explorers. The where and how is simply the means to burrow as deeply as posssible into oneself. It's the answer to the relentless question that floods the mind when the exercise becomes painful and severe: What am I doing here? What's the point?

So I lowered the sails ... and once I had lowered them there was nothing more I could do except pray. So I prayed. And between times I turned to one of my sailing manuals to see what advice it contained for me. It was like being in hell with instructions." 50

I will not be a common man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony. I do not crave security. I wish to hazard my soul to opportunity.

The composer Stravinsky had written a new piece with a difficult violin passage. After it had been in rehearsal for several weeks, the solo violinist came to Stravinsky and said he was sorry, he had tried his best, the passage was too difficult, no violinist could play it. Stravinsky said, "I understand that. What I am after is the sound of someone trying to play it." —Thomas Powers

For the blessing that God bestowed upon Jacob brings us face to face with the fact that God wants a fight.

This vision fundamentally challenges what Peter holds to be the command of God and opens up a difficult dilemma: in order to obey the command of God he must disobey the command of God.

What is important about revelation is not that we seek to interpret it in the same way but rather that we all love it and are transformed by it. To fail to recognize this would be similar to an art critic saying that what is important when considering a piece of art is that we interpret it correctly rather than loving it and being challenged by it.

Be willing to tolerate the discomfort necessary for growth.

parece que hace falta una crisis de extremo quebranto para hacer que cambien otros de nosotros que hemos estado en la iglesia durante mucho tiempo.

We change our behavior when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing."6

Sarà più difficile per noi abbattere il muro che abbiamo in testa che per una impresa demolitrice distruggere quello vero.

And there is, of course, a filter within yourself. When a book, or magazine article, or idea makes you uncomfortable, notice your exact reaction. If you're bored, move on. If you feel threatened, stay with it and see what troubles you.

I think the primary limitation on software is not the speed of computers but our ability to get our heads around what it's supposed to do.

Peyton Jones: For me, part of what makes programming fun is trying to write programs that have an intellectual integrity to them. You can go on slapping mud on the side of a program and it just kind of makes it work for a long time but it's not very satisfying. So I think a good attribute of a good programmer, is they try to find a beautiful solution. Not everybody has the luxury of being able to not get the job done today because they can't think of a beautiful way to do it.

When you're debugging something and then you figure out that not only is the map wrong but the tools are broken—that's a good time.

I think test-driven design is great. I do that a lot more than I used to do. But you can test all you want and if you don't know how to approach the problem, you're not going to get a solution.