1–10 of 58 posts
One for me is this article on the "Design Document" by Rex Parker of StreetSmartinc.com
http://streetsmartinc.com/design_doc.php
I believe this encapsulates the dangers of perfectionism, the importance of iterating, and the reason we should risk failure. And I find the concept difficult to apply in some aspects of my life. I believe as you progress down a particular route in life your mind's pattern recognition will find meaning in particular quotes, books because you are trying to. And by extension, you will meet like-minded people the more committed you are. Like buying a new car and suddenly seeing it everywhere. Until we have immersive VR, I believe that some experiences must be learned first-hand - and emotionally.
"It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ Yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ Of what is found there." - William Carlos Williams
"The Fountainhead" - gave me the gift of self-confidence
"The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution" - helps me understand where I come from and where I fit in the Biosphere
"The Use of Knowledge in Society" - This, along with other pieces on economics and capitalist anarchism, gave me an appreciation for distributed non-hierarchical systems. (http://www.econlib.org/Library/Essays/hykKnw1.html)
Paul Graham's stuff - Got me to the point where I'm quitting my job in two weeks.
I read a ton of fantasy, sci fi, and historical fiction growing up. I'm sure that has something to do with my grand imagination, distaste for authority, and idealism.
PG & Joel Spolsky, the Alchemist, the Little Prince.
The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0884270610). Most real-world systems have a single constraint that limit the system's ability to achieve goal units. The best way to improve the system is to (0) define the system's owners and their goal for the system, (1) identify the constraint (2) improve the situation at the constraint in a way that does not require significant investment; (3) if the improvement resulting from the previous is not sufficient, decide how to improve the constraint in a way that does require significant investment; (4) subordinate everything else in the system to the decision arrived at in the previous step; (5) start over at step 1.
The Game, by Neil Strauss (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060554738)
Discovering Lisp was a big one. This was in 1983, when the default programming language was Pascal. Lisp seemed (and in retrospect was) startlingly better. There was no one single book or quotation, but I remember how excited I was to get my hands on a photocopy of the InterLisp manual.
Kenneth Clark's documentary series Civilisation (and the accompanying book) impressed me a lot. In fact, it was clearly the model for Connections. I've never read anything else better about art. His ideas are extremely subversive, but few get it because he usually speaks in code. And he had access to stuff like no one else ever will again.
I also learned a lot from his book The Nude.
One of the biggest influences on my ideas about startups was an essay by TJ Rogers, the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor. I don't remember the title, but it cut through the usual corporate bullshit like a knife. For me the important thing was not just what he said, but that one could even be that candid.
Of all the books I've read in the last 5 years or so, Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology is probably the one that stuck most in my head.