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Ask HN: What is your favorite motto?

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101–110 of 472 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite motto?

#101

"You can only change yourself" (internet pop wisdom) “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

These days, people would settle for RSU or Stock Options.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite motto?

#103
post #63

A decision is either easy, or it doesn't matter

I'm surprised by this one. What about things like marriage or a career change?

I kind of take the quote to mean “if it isn’t a hell yes! Then it’s a no” sort of a thing. If I don’t say “hell yes!” To the prospect of marrying my girlfriend, then perhaps proposing to her now is the right move.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite motto?

#105

I live life by the following words: "If you are the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room"

I disagree so much with this popular motto that I have difficulty putting it into words. It reeks of egoism. Please, please replace it with: "If you are the smartest person in the room, teach until you no longer are."

Thank you so much for rephrasing that terrible original motto, it always has bothered me as well.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite motto?

#108
post #63

A decision is either easy, or it doesn't matter

That's a saying that I find incredibly wrong viewed in crisp binary logic but better through the lens of fuzzy logic (that is, on its face it's a giant case of the fallacy of the excluded middle, but if you phrase it as “a decision’s fuzzy membership in the set of easy decisions is the fuzzy negation of it's fuzzy membership in the set of consequential decisions” it's not as flagrantly wrong (it still ignores curable informatiom problems, though.)

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite motto?

#109
post #28

When I was in my 20s I lived on a bicycle for a year, going around the lower 48 and Canada, and then up to Alaska. I lived for two weeks in Joshua Tree with a guy named Tom, who slept in a cave the whole time. One morning we were sorting our gear and a piece of paper fell out of his wallet. As I handed it back to him, I read the three lines on it: Work hard. Be strong. Don't complain. I asked him about it, and he sai…

That’s exactly the principles my grandfather thought me. But I tend to discuss, if it is still valid today.
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