Quotes About Tools

Does this technology directly support something that I deeply value? This is the only condition on which you should let one of these tools into your life.

I've become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.

For each such tool, go through the key activities you identified and ask whether the use of the tool has a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity. Now comes the important decision: Keep using this tool only if you concluded that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweigh the negative impacts.

Once you break free from this mind-set, however, and begin seeing new technologies simply as tools that you can deploy selectively, you're able to fully embrace the second principle of minimalism and start furiously optimizing—enabling you to reap the advantages of vaulting up the return curve. Finding useful new technologies is just the first step to improving your life. The real benefits come once you start experimenting with how best to use them.

Let's begin with the first ability. To start, we must remember that we've been spoiled by the intuitive and drop-dead-simple user experience of many consumer-facing technologies, like Twitter and the iPhone. These examples, however, are consumer products, not serious tools: Most of the intelligent machines driving the Great Restructuring are significantly more complex to understand and master.

what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.

Theodore you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. I am giving you the tools, but it is up to you to make your body.

As Tom Limoncelli describes, "When I was at Google, we had one official compiled language, one official scripting language, and one official UI language. Yes, other languages were supported in some way or another, but sticking with 'the big three' meant support libraries, tools, and an easier way to find collaborators.

Anthropologists describe tools as a cultural artifact.

human error is not our cause of troubles; instead, human error is a consequence of the design of the tools that we gave them.

The masses are only to be regarded as one of three things: either as copies of great personalities, bad copies, clumsily produced in a poor material, or as foils to the great, or finally as their tools.

Life in zero gravity is hard to simulate. We practice on the ground what we call 'the day in the life' simulations, but it's just practicing some of the tests. It can't prepare you for the fact that all of your tools float if you don't pay attention to where they are! If you don't Velcro things down, they're gonna float away.

You need a screwdriver for screws and a hammer for nails. Anybody that's trying to screw in a nail with a screwdriver... that ain't too smart.

The best stories in our culture have some sort of subversiveness - Mark Twain, 'Catcher in the Rye.' You provide kids with great stories and teach them how to use the tools to make their own.

In my novels, there are twelve ancient 'memory tools,' all now lost. Each of the 'Reincarnationist' books revolves around a different tool.

I been in jail twice. The first time was reform school: they got me for carrying burglar's tools, something like that. The morals charge was a frame-up.

I build the individual modules to meet a demand. If I need the music to change direction, I want to have the tools to be able to do that.

Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It's a question of how those tools are used by people.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people's capacity to build and maintain relationships.

Friendship provides the ideas, tools, comfort, and motivation that nothing else can give or offer.

Felling a single four-foot tree with an indigenous stone axe would take 115 hours—nearly three weeks of eight-hour days. With a steel axe, workers could topple the same tree in less than three hours.

Steel tools, he told me, "had a major, transformative effect on all the trade and marriage relations in a whole area. They led to new trade networks, they led to new political alliances, they even led to war.

Idealism couldn't coexist with so many other people's ideals, betrayed in their execution by the tools they'd chosen.

I get an especially acute case of agita at the thought of a mortar and pestle.