Marvin Ma

“Make plans like an adult and believe in them like a child”
― Jim Rohn

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that bums with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals - sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.”
― Gary Provost

“Around 2002 I attended a private party for Google—before its IPO, when it was a small company focused only on search. I struck up a conversation with Larry Page, Google’s brilliant cofounder. “Larry, I still don’t get it. There are so many search companies. Web search, for free? Where does that get you?” My unimaginative blindness is solid evidence that predicting is hard, especially about the future, but in my defense this was before Google had ramped up its ad auction scheme to generate real income, long before YouTube or any other major acquisitions. I was not the only avid user of its search site who thought it would not last long. But Page’s reply has always stuck with me: “Oh, we’re really making an AI.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“A 19-year-old with this sort of foresight and life plan was truly unprecedented and typical of his anything-but-average youth, which would explain his drive and obsession to get things done, and now.
‘For every new day, a new invention.’
Surprisingly, Son had managed to pull his invention scheme off, thanks largely to combining pre-existing things into something new. To facilitate this, he had written down random nouns in English – ‘tangerine’, ‘spike’, ‘memory’ – on cards. Once he had amassed a deck of around 300 cards, he would pull three out of the stack, turn them over, and then see whether or not the words he had chosen could be combined into a new product. The three words could be completely nonsensical together, but could still produce good ideas, no matter how eccentric”
― Atsuo Inoue, Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley