I Am > I's Quotes

“Everything not saved will be lost. —Nintendo “Quit Screen” message”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“The three habits most important to your Second Brain include: Project Checklists: Ensure you start and finish your projects in a consistent way, making use of past work. Weekly and Monthly Reviews: Periodically review your work and life and decide if you want to change anything. Noticing Habits: Notice small opportunities to edit, highlight, or move notes to make them more discoverable for your future self.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“When you enter the professional world, the demands on your notetaking change completely. The entire approach to notetaking you learned in school is not only obsolete, it’s the exact opposite of what you need. In the professional world: It’s not at all clear what you should be taking notes on. No one tells you when or how your notes will be used. The “test” can come at any time and in any form. You’re allowed to reference your notes at any time, provided you took them in the first place. You are expected to take action on your notes, not just regurgitate them.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“To guide you in the process of creating your own Second Brain, I’ve developed a simple, intuitive four-part method called “CODE”—Capture; Organize; Distill; Express.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie; in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“Making work visible is one of the most fundamental things we can do to improve our work because the human brain is designed to find meaningful patterns and structures in what is perceived through vision. Thus, it makes sense that when we can’t see our work, we have a hard time managing it.”
― Dominica Degrandis, Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

“Learning, thinking, and writing should not be about accumulating knowledge, but about becoming a different person with a different way of thinking. This is done by questioning one’s own thinking routines in light of new experiences and facts.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.” (Steve Jobs)”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Problems rarely get solved directly, anyway. Most often, the crucial step forward is to redefine the problem in such a way that an already existing solution can be employed.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“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.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“So if you want to go fast, if you want to get done quickly, if you want your code to be easy to write, make it easy to read.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“You should name a variable using the same care with which you name a first-born child.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“A long descriptive name is better than a short enigmatic name. A long descriptive name is better than a long descriptive comment.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“One difference between a smart programmer and a professional programmer is that
the professional understands that clarity is king. Professionals use their powers for good and write code that others can understand.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Nothing is more important than to see the sources of invention which are, in my opinion, more interesting than the inventions themselves.”
― George Pólya, How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method

“Good problems and mushrooms of certain kinds have something in common; they grow in clusters.”
― George Pólya, How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method

“If you cannot solve the proposed problem...try to solve first some related problem.”
― George Pólya, How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method

“Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be.”
― Temple Grandin

“Unfortunately, most people never observe the natural cycle of birth and death. They do not realize that for one living thing to survive, another living thing must die.”
― Temple Grandin, Thinking In Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life with Autism

“Suppose you woke up one morning to discover that you were the last person on earth. [...] In the situation described, you could satisfy many material desires that you can't satisfy in our actual world. You could have the car of your dreams. You could even have a showroom full of expensive cars. You could have the house of your dreams - or live in a palace. You could wear very expensive clothes. You could acquire not just a big diamond ring but the Hope Diamond itself. The interesting question is this: without people around, would you still want these things?”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“when someone says they’re ‘good at multitasking,’ they’re really saying they’re inefficient. It’s like publicly admitting you’re going to make it a habit to screw up multiple things at the same time. “And, ironically, people who consider themselves great at multitasking are statistically more likely to be the worst at it.”
― Dave Crenshaw, The Myth of Multitasking: How “Doing It All” Gets Nothing Done

“Any day spent with you is my favorite day. So today is my new favorite day.”
― A.A. Milne

“Routine and habit are our everyday life. Some are aware of their habits, others are not. If one becomes aware of habits—the repetitious movement of the hand or of the mind—one can put an end to them with comparative ease. But what is important in all this is to understand, not intellectually, the mechanism of habit-forming which gradually destroys or blunts all feeling.

The fear of change strengthens habit, not only physically but also in the very brain cells themselves. So having once become established in a routine, we keep going, like a tramcar along its rails. We take things for granted in all relationships, and this is one of the major factors of insensitivity. So habit becomes a natural thing. Then we say: why should one pay attention to these things that one does every day? And so inattention cultivates habit; and then we are caught. Then the problem begins of how to be free of habit. And then there is conflict. And thus conflict becomes the way of life we accept naturally!”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society