If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to make it faster? "If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?" [Jobs] asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Max, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. "Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster," Atkinson recalled. "Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture." Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs performancemotivation
Flow interesting (The Meander) The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn't do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea. The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course. Paul Graham, The Age of the Essay www.paulgraham.com Always produce interest