To see with eyes unclouded by hate Eboshi: What exactly are you here for? Ashitaka: To see with eyes unclouded by hate. Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke hateseeing
There's a demon inside of you There's a demon inside of you – it's inside both of you. Look, everyone! This is what hatred looks like. This is what it does when it catches hold of you. It's eating me alive and very soon now it will kill me. Fear and anger only make it grow faster. Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke hatefear
When you're interested in what you're working on It's never hard to work when you're interested in what you're working on. But what if you hate what you're working on? It helps to examine the content of your loathing. What is it you hate? Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing hatework
On Talent I observed something fairly early on at Apple, which I didn’t know how to explain then, but I’ve thought a lot about it since. Most things in life have a dynamic range in which [the ratio of] “average” to “best” is at most 2:1. For example, if you go to New York City and get an average taxi cab driver, versus the best taxi cab driver, you’ll probably get to your destination with the best taxi driver 30% faster. And an automobile; what’s the difference between the average car and the best? Maybe 20%? The best CD player versus the average CD player? Maybe 20%? So 2:1 is a big dynamic range for most things in life. Now, in software, and it used to be the case in hardware, the difference between the average software developer and the best is 50:1; maybe even 100:1. Very few things in life are like this, but what I was lucky enough to spend my life doing, which is software, is like this. So I’ve built a lot of my success on finding these truly gifted people, and not settling for “B” and “C” players, but really going for the “A” players. And I found something… I found that when you get enough “A” players together, when you go through the incredible work to find these “A” players, they really like working with each other. Because most have never had the chance to do that before. And they don’t work with “B” and “C” players, so it’s self-policing. They only want to hire “A” players. So you build these pockets of “A” players and it just propagates. Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview Waste as little effort as possible on low competenceA small team of committed coworkersBuild projects around motivated individualsIndividuals matter talent