Quotes About Effort

Doing a thing well is often a waste of time.

Learning to write clean code is hard work. It requires more than just the knowledge of principles and patterns. You must sweat over it. You must practice it yourself, and watch yourself fail. You must watch others practice it and fail. You must see them stumble and retrace their steps. You must see them agonize over decisions and see the price they pay for making those decisions the wrong way.

The tragedy is that the architects, by making a premature decision, multiplied the development effort enormously.

The promise to try is an admission that you've been holding back, that you have a reservoir of extra effort that you can apply.

If only we could pull this off one more time. If only we could just say we were done with implementation. But we can't, because the thing about implementation is that is actually has to be done. Analysis and design are not binary deliverables. They do not have unambiguous completion criteria. There's no real way to know that you are done with them. So we might as well be done on time.

That these acts are simple doesn't mean that they are simplistic, and it hardly means that they are easy.

To build a system with a design and an architecture that minimize effort and maximize productivity, you need to know which attributes of system architecture lead to that end.

Science does not work by proving statements true, but rather by proving statements false. Those statements that we cannot prove false, after much effort, we deem to be true enough for our purposes.

The measure of design quality is simply the measure of the effort required to meet the needs of the customer. If that effort is low, and stays low throughout the lifetime of the system, the design is good. If that effort grows with each new release, the design is bad. It's as simple as that.

Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. ...[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write.

If you're good at the debugger it means you spent a lot of time debugging. I don't want you to be good at the debugger.

Not only was he appealing to the urge prevalent in the party to concentrate attention and effort on the tasks of Soviet development, he was hinting that a fully socialist economy could be created in a comparatively short time.

an effort to galvanize the lagging grain procurements campaign, the party leaders fanned out to the main grain-growing regions.

The one kind of organizing activity that really engaged his interest and aroused his effort was "organizational work" in the special Bolshevik sense of personnel placement.

Some researchers had even concluded that the effort to understand the brain was necessarily doomed—that consciousness cannot comprehend consciousness any more than a box may contain itself. "This

Results are important, but the way they are achieved, the process, is equally important.

people get the mind and quality of brain that they deserve through their actions in life.

Everything we've got, or so we think, comes from natural talent and hard work. But with other people, we are quick to ascribe to them all kinds of Machiavellian tactics. This allows us to justify whatever we do, no matter the results.

They come to accept things that are made cheaply and quickly. The idea that they might have to expend much effort to get what they want has been eroded by the proliferation of devices that do so much of the work for them, fostering the idea that they deserve all of this—that it is their inherent right to have and to consume what they want.

The very desire to find shortcuts makes you eminently unsuited for any kind of mastery. There is no possible reversal to this process.

Those who make assumptions from far away, based on universal theories, do not see the whole picture. It takes great time and effort to see the differences, to participate in a culture. And because it is much harder to percieve these differences, culture has not been given its due as one of the primary shaping forces for language and for how we experience the world.

A través de una exposición continua a la gente y tratando de pensar dentro de ella podemos obtener una sensación creciente de su perspectiva, pero esto requiere un esfuerzo de nuestra parte.

What will seduce a person is the effort we expend on their behalf, showing how much we care, how much they are worth. Leaving things to chance is a recipe for disaster, and reveals that we do not take love and romance very seriously.

To make a discovery, to invent something that connects with the public, to fashion a work of art that is meaningful, inevitably requires time and effort. This often entails years of experimentation, various setbacks and failures, and the need to maintain a high level of focus. You must have patience and faith that what you are doing will yield something important.