davemorin:

46 seconds on life from Steve Jobs.

"Don’t try to be original. Just try to be good.” That sounds sort of naive but it’s true."

Paul Rand, quoting Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (via)

"We sit down every day, and you do need to sit down every day if you wanna really write. When you sit down to do it, it doesn’t matter what you wrote before. Like the monk that doesn’t get to stick his food in his fridge.. you’re as good as what you did that day."

Merlin Mann

I have a rubber band on my wrist […] I wear it to remember I’m alive. Every time I see it I remember I’m alive. And I’m here. Is that cheesy? I don’t care. I remember I’m alive. And I think a lot of people are terrified to remember that they’re alive. Because they have to feel. And they have to think. And they have to make decisions. And they have to go: “you know what, one day I’m not going to be alive and nobody is going to remember which iPhone I had”. I’m here today. There is nothing but today […] You’ve got to do what you can every day. You’ve got to do what you can and you’ve got to keep moving.

Merlin Mann, Back to Work #3: The Second Arrow

Ernest Hemingway said this:

You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.

He was talking about writing books, but I find his advice perfectly apt for what I’m doing with Daring Fireball. Without having a boss or editor, I could do anything at the start of the day. Leaving off the day before with something specific in mind for what to do next is an enormous aid to getting going.

From an interview with John Gruber

What productivity tip have you discovered that now you can’t live without?

Keep a to-do list.

A real one. One that you actually use and update throughout the day. It doesn’t need to be fancy, like the getting-things-done task managers — I use TaskPaper, which is essentially a text editor with optimized syntax highlighting for to-do lists, against a text file on Dropbox.

From Interview: Marco Arment

Some of the best advice I’ve seen regarding how to write essays is from Paul Graham. He says writing is thinking, and, insightfully, that writing forces you to think better. He wrote, “Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well.”

My other suggestion (also, I think, stolen from Graham) is to concentrate on writing things with lasting value.

From an interview with John Gruber

"What’s the best thing you could be working on, and why aren’t you?"

Paul Graham, Good and Bad Procrastination

"Spend time, don’t waste time"

Marco Arment

And what I like best about a conference is walking out with an opinion on something that is different than my opinion about that topic when I walked in. Convince me to change my mind about something. I’m sure I’m wrong about many things — a good speaker is someone who helps me figure out what some of those things are.

From The speaker interviews: John Gruber

"Tim, like Steve, is like a metronome who sets the pace for the rest of Apple"

Meet the man filling in for Steve Jobs

Best Writing Advice for Engineers I’ve Ever Seen. Period.

How to make engineers write concisely with sentences? By combining journalism with the technical report format. In a newspaper article, the paragraphs are ordered by importance, so that the reader can stop reading the article at whatever point they lose interest, knowing that the part they have read was more important than the part left unread.

State your message in one sentence. That is your title. Write one paragraph justifying the message. That is your abstract. Circle each phrase in the abstract that needs clarification or more context. Write a paragraph or two for each such phrase. That is the body of your report. Identify each sentence in the body that needs clarification and write a paragraph or two in the appendix. Include your contact information for readers who require further detail.

— William A. Wood, September 8, 2005

Simple five step plan for just about everyone and everything

1. Go, make something happen.
2. Do work you’re proud of.
3. Treat people with respect.
4. Make big promises and keep them.
5. Ship it out the door.

When in doubt, see #1.

Why intelligent people fail

1. Lack of motivation. A talent is irrelevant if a person is not motivated to use it. Motivation may be external (for example, social approval) or internal (satisfaction from a job well-done, for instance). External sources tend to be transient, while internal sources tend to produce more consistent performance.

(via Kottke)

Motivation is on every single page

Head First authors and editors assume that every single page needs to provide an explicit motivation that will keep the reader continuing. And “This material is interesting for its own sake” is not an adequate motivation. Nor is “Trust me, you need to know this.” The motivation has to relate to a clear, specific functional goal (in Brett’s words, something that might actually get you off work early on a Friday). And I’m not kidding when I say that every single page has to have one of these.