Quotes About Progress

People don't engage merely to remind one another of the status quo. Instead, they eagerly engage when they want something to improve. This microleadership is essential to the health of your organization.

Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, told me, "We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on it, and we knew that sooner or later, everyone was going to try it. So our feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we'd make a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better.

Hoy en día no empezar es muchísimo peor que equivocarse.

The first step is write down the due date. Post it on the wall. It's real. You will ship on this date, done or not.

Pero el reto está en centrarse en el trabajo, no en el miedo que te causa hacerlo.

The person who leans forward the most wins the race.

Everything in our culture is part of a hierarchy between yesterday, today, and tomorrow. We don't get to jump all the way ahead.

Dips don't last quite as long when you whittle at them.

Things that grow don't grow forever—but that's okay, because the experiences we collect stick with us, and we get to take those experiences wherever we go.

Think for a second about the people you know who are engaged, satisfied, eager to get to work. Most of them, I'll bet, make change. They challenge the status quo and push something forward—something they believe in. They lead.

We're hitting an asymptote, a natural ceiling for how cheaply and how fast we can deliver uninspired work. Becoming more average, more quick, and more cheap is not as productive as it used to be.

Shipping an idea went from taking a month by boat to a few days by plane to overnight by Federal Express to a few minutes by fax to a moment by e-mail to instantaneous by Twitter. Now what? Will it arrive yesterday? So, what's left is to make—to give—art. What's left is the generosity and humanity worth paying for. What's left is to take that resistance (the very same resistance we embraced and rewarded for decades) and destroy it.

Organizations that destroy the status quo win. Individuals who push their organizations, who inspire other individuals to change the rules, thrive. Again, we're back to leadership, which can come from anyone, anywhere in the organization.

There's a gap in the market where your version of better can make a welcome change happen.

Or win by being faster

Changing things—pushing the envelope and creating a future that doesn't exist yet (at the same time you're criticized by everyone else)—requires bravery.

Si no acabas, es como si no hubieras empezado; y si no empiezas, no avanzas

lifehacker.com

The best way to overcome your fear of creativity, brainstorming, intelligent risk-taking, or navigating a tricky situation might be to sprint.

Hay dos errores que podemos cometer en el camino hacia la verdad.   No recorrer todo el camino, y no empezar.»   Siddha¯rta Gautama

Hope is not the same as reassurance. Hope is trusting yourself to have a shot to make things better. But we can hope without reassurance. We can hope at the same time that we accept that what we're working on right now might not work.

Perfect closes the door. It asserts that we're done, that this is the best we can do. Worse, perfect forbids us to try. To seek perfection and not reach it is a failure.

We're humans. Our work isn't us. As humans, we can choose to do the work, and we can choose to improve our work.

Of course, kiasu is actually about fear and insufficiency. And it couldn't exist if we trusted ourselves enough to know that we're already on a path to where we seek to go.