I Think

  • “I will lead you in the way of wisdom and guide you along the right path.” – Proverbs 4:11
  • “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” – Thomas Jefferson
  • “People should pursue what they are passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.” – Elon Musk
  • “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing you are not innovating.” – Elon Musk
  • “I read books and talked to people. I mean that’s kind of how one learns anything. There’s lots of great books out there and lots of smart people.” – Elon Musk
  • “…boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there as opposed to reasoning by analogy.” – Elon Musk
  • “Those who shy away from addressing the elephant in the room are doomed to carry the weight of it.” – Onyi Udeh
  • “Now that you have listened to all the experts. What do you think?” – George Mutale
  • ”Some people will chew off their left arm just to prove a point.” – George Mutale
  • “If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children.” – Confucius
  • “Testing an idea will teach you more in one day than spending a year thinking about it.” – Nolan Bushnell, the co-founder of Atari
  • “Keeping your mind too busy is a kind of prison. Think about it. Have you ever tried getting the attention of your kids while they are watching TV?” – George Mutale
  • “Wealth is about having options.” – George Mutale
  • “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” – Mike Tyson
  • “If God is in the details then so is our humanity, and it’s found in the small acts of kindness and decency that cost us nothing but give us everything.” – Kon Karapanagiotidis, Founder and CEO Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC)
  • “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” – William Gibson
  • “This too will be automated.” – George Mutale
  • “This too is stupid.” – George Mutale
  • “Do not be afraid to ask for help and know that most people want to help, they are just often not asked to.” – Kon Karapanagiotidis, Founder and CEO Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC)
  • A lack of Wisdom is not our biggest problem. To illustrate: “Love your, neighbour, as you Love Yourself.” – George Mutale
  • “Practice Makes Learning.” – George Mutale
  • “This is a wonderful day, I have never seen this one before.” – Maya Angelou
  • “We know so much wisdom, but without being very wise.” – George Mutale
  • “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” – Benjamin Disraeli
  • “Hello Worlds! are like breaking the ice.” – George Mutale
  • “Virtue is enough.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.” –
    Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “Insulting Africa is like insulting your Mother, everyone despises that.” – George Mutale
  • “What makes you rich is an informal education about financial literacy and learning from entrepreneurs.” – Stephen Akintayo
  • “Being a businessman just to be rich is a waste of time.” – Amancio Ortega Gaona
  • “The seed to the development of every community lies within that community.” – Morry Alberston, via Toyin Saraki
  • “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.” – Frantz Fanon
  • The greatest breakthrough in our modern times is going to come when we help the rich understand that they are already rich. – George Mutale
  • “The future has no experts.” – Jack Ma
  • “Certainty is the enemy of change.” – Salvador Minuchin
  • “The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives.” – Esther Perel
  • If education or being educated does not involve or result in solving your own problems, then I’m not quite sure what “education” is for. – George Mutale
  • “Develop enough courage so that you can stand up for yourself and then stand up for somebody else.” – Maya Angelou
  • I’m not a designer, but I know what good looks like. – George Mutale
  • I’m a better person when I look after myself. – George Mutale
  • “When two men in a business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.” – William Wrigley, Jr.
  • “The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance.” – Peter Drucker
  • The rich look towards the rich to give. – George Mutale
  • The Future is already here, we are just in denial. – George Mutale
  • “Anything that is worth memorizing, is worth looking up.” – Seth Godin
  • “Never memorize something that you can look up.” – Albert Einstein
  • Sometimes, being great is doing the small things like calling your Mother or committing your code changes to source control. – George Mutale
  • “Being listened to and heard is one of the greatest desires of the human heart. And those who learn to listen are the most loved and respected.” – Richard Carlson
  • Incompetence is overflowing. – George Mutale
  • “Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” – Carl Gustav Jung
  • “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – Carl Gustav Jung
  • “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” – Carl Gustav Jung
  • “Luck is where hard work meets opportunity.” – ?
  • We are going to do this properly. – George Mutale
  • “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.” – W. Somerset Maugham
  • “Show me that the good life doesn’t consist in its length, but in its use, and that it is possible—no, entirely too common—for a person who has had a long life to have lived too little.” – Seneca
  • “Talk depletes us. Talking and doing fight for the same resources.” – Ryan Holiday
  • “The scariest moment is always just before you start.” – Stephen King
  • “I don’t complain about the lack of time…what little I have will go far enough. Today — this day — will achieve what no tomorrow will fail to speak about. I will lay siege to the gods and shake up the world.” – Seneca
  • “How you do anything is how you do everything.” – ?
  • “Those obsessed with glory attach their well-being to the regard of others, those who love pleasure tie it to feelings, but the one with true understanding seeks it only in their own actions…. Think on the character of the people one wishes to please, the possessions one means to gain, and the tactics one employs to such ends. How quickly time erases such things, and how many will yet be wiped away.” – Marcus Aurelius
  • The answers to the challenges a community faces lie within the community. – George Mutale
  • “Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
  • “Who then is invincible? The one who cannot be upset by anything outside their reasoned choice.” – Epictetus
  • “Reflect, then, that your ancestors set up those trophies, not that you may gaze at them in wonder, but that you may also imitate the virtues of the men who set them up.” – Demosthenes
  • To be disruptive, it just needs to be enough. – George Mutale
  • “Principles are ways of successfully dealing with reality to get what you want out of life.” – Ray Dailo
  • “Let us therefore set out whole-heartedly, leaving aside our many distractions and exert ourselves in this single purpose, before we realize too late the swift and unstoppable flight of time and are left behind. As each day arises, welcome it as the very best day of all, and make it your own possession. We must seize what flees.” – Seneca
  • Treat everyone like little children, with patience and understanding. – George Mutale
  • “God laid down this law, saying if you want some good, get it from yourself.” – Epictetus
  • “The noblest art is that of making others happy.” – P.T. Barnum
  • “Comfort is the enemy of progress.” – P.T. Barnum
  • “All learning is understanding relationships.” -George Washington Carver
  • “No significant learning can occur without a significant relationship.” – Dr. James Comer
  • We stopped listening. We just want more advice. – George Mutale
  • “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.”- Abraham Lincoln
  • It’s all about connections. Everything will eventually wear out, break, stop working or even get stolen. What we get to keep, hopefully, are the connections we make with others.
  • Fear is Darkness. – George Mutale
  • “Everything is figureoutable.” – Marie Forleo
  • “…the fruit of this life is a good character and acts for the common good.” – Marcus Aurelius
  • Is it not enough that I’m trying to be a better person? – George Mutale
  • “This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.” – Psalm 118:24
  • “If you don’t get what you want, it’s a sign either that you did not seriously want it, or that you tried to bargain over the price.” – Rudyard Kipling”
  • “I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way did not become still more complicated.” – Poul Anderson, Anderson’s Law
  • “Act as if others are interesting and you will eventually find them so.” – Sarah Mei
  • “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” – General Eric Shinseki
  • “Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.” – Federico Fellini
  • “Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony” – Mahatma Gandhi
  • “Willpower is the space between observing and reacting.” – George Mutale
  • “A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.” – Mary Karr
  • “80% or a good percentage of Project Management is following up.” – George Mutale
  • “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” – Bertrand Russell
  • “I decided to travel light, so I bought a new Windows 10 laptop and only installed PuTTY.” – George Mutale
  • “Have you ever had God whisper in your ear? When he does, you let me know whether you were able to sleep after that.” – George Mutale
  • “Stickability is 95 percent of ability.” – David J. Schwartz from The Magic of Thinking Big
  • “You should get a bit of bullshit in your life every now and then, if only to remind you of the important things in life.” – George Mutale
  • “There should only be one way to do this and it should be obvious. Don’t make me think.” – George Mutale
  • “On your Programming deathbed, will we remember which framework or library you used? #ship” – George Mutale
  • “Shall I show you photos of my plumbing? Great plumbing is great, but it’s not what sells houses. #Backend #Frontend #Design #UX” – George Mutale
  • “Great plumbing is great, but it does not sell houses? #Backend #Frontend #Design” – George Mutale
  • “Great plumbing is great, but it does not sell houses?” – George Mutale
  • “The last action for (some?) Computer Programmers will be to automate a lot more of their work or even use AI to reduce their work load and enjoy their last few months of employment. Step-by-step type of work = algorithm = automation = no more jobs.” – George Mutale
  • “People who use words like, will only, just, simple, easy in computer programming don’t write code.” – George Mutale
  • “My production server and I have a healthy relationship, I deploy to it daily, sometimes multiples times a day.” – George Mutale
  • “On your Programming deathbed, will we remember which programming language you used?” – George Mutale
  • “No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.”- Helmuth von Moltke
  • “The backlog is where work goes to die.” – George Mutale
  • “The point is to make change happen.” – Seth Godin
  • “Persistence guarantees that results are inevitable.” – Paramahansa Yogananda
  • “If you are not monitoring it right now, then it must not be that important.” – George Mutale
  • “Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress.” – Seth Godin
  • “It’s human nature to quit when it hurts. But it’s that reflex that creates scarcity.” – Seth Godin
  • “What works for you is a design pattern.” – George Mutale
  • “What works for me is a design pattern.” – George Mutale
  • “There are so many (breaking) dependencies now, a one-click install could take you all day to complete.” – George Mutale
  • “What’s the one thing you can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” – Gary Keller
  • “Knowing what is possible is a super power.” – George Mutale
  • On way that people deal with complexity is to pretend it doesn’t exist. Sounds silly, until you realise just how widespread this is.” – George Mutale
  • “Expectation is a great source of suffering.” – George Mutale
  • “Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.” – Albert Camus
  • “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.” – Bertrand Russell
  • “Perhaps, composing a good life is the point.” – George Mutale
  • “That which hinders your task is your task.” – Sanford Meisner
  • “Options, but not too many.” –
  • “We suffer more in our imagination than in reality.” – Seneca
  • “We don’t let our servers reach 100% capacity, why do we let our people? — Dominica DeGrandis
  • “If you feel like you are missing out on Pair programming, just step away from your code for a short while and then come back to it.” – George Mutale
  • “Every technology decision is eventually regrettable.” – Rebecca Murphey
  • “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of old ideas” – John Cage
  • “Don’t fight stupid. You are better than that. Make more awesome.” – Jesse Robbins
  • “Don’t fight stupid; make more awesome.” – Jesse Robbins
  • “We are the sum total of our experiences.” – B.J. Neblett
  • “Change is the result of action, and action is the result of a decision.” – via Kerry Thomas
  • “Give God something to bless.” –
  • “Clutter is postponed decisions.” – Barbara Hemphill
  • “High on miracles. To the point that we don’t even see them anymore.” – George Mutale
  • “We find our path by walking it.” – Maya Angelou
  • “Simplify to amplify.” –
  • “Start with gratitude, and then acceptance.” – George Mutale
  • “Start with gratitude.” – George Mutale
  • “All models are wrong but some are useful.” – George Box
  • “Getting distracted is letting your brain do what it wants to do.” – George Mutale
  • “It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” – Carl Sagan
  • “The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” – Martin Heidegger
  • “Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.” – George E. P. Box
  • “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” – Carl Sagan, Cosmos
  • “The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language. The desire is to have the idea clearly communicated to the other person. It is only necessary to be precise when there is some doubt as to the meaning of a phrase, and then the precision should be put in the place where the doubt exists. It is really quite impossible to say anything with absolute precision, unless that thing is so abstracted from the real world as to not represent any real thing.” – Richard Feynman
  • “The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.” – Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
  • “Make it correct, make it clear, make it concise, make it fast. In that order.” – Wes Dyer
  • “The World makes a lot more sense as soon as you realise that we don’t know what we are doing” – Dave Farley
  • “I made a mistake, but notice that nobody died. Not even me.” – George Mutale
  • “Once you have thought about it, any more thought may undo the lot.” – George Mutale
  • “I know there’s a proverb which that says ‘To err is human,’ but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries.” – Agatha Christie, Hallowe’en Party
  • “How about if it’s all made up?” – George Mutale
  • “Simplicity is a feature.” – ?
  • “Which matters more, what other people believe about you, or what you believe about yourself?” – George Mutale
  • “Make a commitment to something and stick to it because that ultimately is what will set you free.”
    Jacqueline Novogratz
  • “Tabs and spaces are not the point.” – George Mutale
  • “Text editors and IDEs are not the point.” – George Mutale
  • “Programming languages are not the point.” – George Mutale
  • “What you know is not the point.” – George Mutale
  • “Knowing more is not the point.” – George Mutale
  • “More features is not the point.” – George Mutale
  • “(New) technology is not the point.” – George Mutale
  • “Software is not the point.” – George Mutale
  • “Don’t worry about knowing everything, no one knows everything.” – George Mutale
  • “To achieve greatness, start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.” – Arthur Ashe
  • “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – Nelson Mandela
  • “Reading and planning a lot (too much!) is the new hiding. And buying many books and not reading them. #ShipSomething” – George Mutale
  • “Crossing the river by feeling the stones.” – Deng Xiaoping
  • “Trying to find meaning where there is none is so painful.” – George Mutale
  • “Action expresses priorities.” – Mahatma Gandhi
  • “Be stubborn on vision and flexible on journey.” – Noramay Cadena
  • “We don’t have a talent shortage, we have a shipping shortage.” – Seth Godin
  • “WordPress is a business application, not a Computer Science project.” – George Mutale
  • “This too will change.” –
  • “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” – Peter Drucker
  • “Dignity is more important than wealth.” – Jacqueline Novogratz
  • “Illness is a bullshit magnifier.” – George Mutale
  • “Having seen a lot of issues counts as experience.” – George Mutale
  • “Having seen a lot of problems counts as experience.” – George Mutale
  • “Having seen a lot of errors counts as experience.” – George Mutale
  • “Real artists ship.” – Steve Jobs
  • “My biggest professional development was getting comfortable admitting what I don’t know.” – Jessica Rose
  • “If you want them to RTFM, make a better FM.” – Kathy Sierra
  • “The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.” – Occam’s razor
  • Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY)
  • “Legacy code is code you wrote more than 10 minutes ago.” – Justin Beal
  • “I’m human, forgetting comes naturally.” – George Mutale
  • “So obsessed with originality, and maybe even creativity. Can you copy?” – George Mutale
  • “It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best. ” – W. Edwards Deming
  • Do we need to agree on “Done” to then say we know what we are doing? But it’s never done. The work, it’s never done. There’s no Done, right? – George Mutale
  • “We don’t know what we are doing.”, could this be the only truth to come out of Computer Programming? – George Mutale
  • “As a user, I care about the internal structure of an organisation….Not!” – George Mutale
  • “(Writing) software can’t be the point.” – George Mutale
  • “If we teach as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow.” – John Dewey
  • “Look outside the window with me.” – George Mutale, Zambia 2020
  • “Lead time to ‘Thank you’ is the only useful software metric.” – Dan North
  • “The goal of software development is ‘to sustainably minimise lead time to business impact.'” – Dan North
  • “Things that are easy to do are just as easy not to do.” – Jeff Olson
  • “Clarity comes from engagement, not thought.” – Marie Forleo
  • “Legacy code is code that doesn’t fit in my head.” – George Mutale
  • “Trust, but verify.” – Russian proverb
  • “If you ever have to ssh into a machine, your monitoring has failed you.” – Randy Shoup
  • “You Build It, You Run It” – Werner Vogels
  • “Being educated must mean that you can solve your own problems.” – George Mutale
  • “Being at and having been at school, college and university must mean that you can solve your own problems.” – George Mutale
  • “We would know what they thought when they did it.” – Richard Hamming.
  • “Talk is cheap. Show me the code.” – Linus Torvalds
  • “Code wins arguments.” – Mark Zuckerberg
  • “Memory and imagination are but two words for the same thing.” – Thomas Hobbes
  • “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” – Ian Maclaren
  • “Being ignored is not such a bad thing, you can continue to make progress in peace.” – George Mutale
  • “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” – Steve Jobs
  • “If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.” – Chinua Achebe
  • “We thought humans were rational, so we created relational databases (only), irrationality is now widely accepted, we now use NoSQL databases.” – George Mutale
  • “I used to think it was advice for children, but I keep coming across adults that need it more. So now I think it’s just advice.” – George Mutale
  • “In software is eating the world, there are no exemptions, Programmers, Developers, and DevOps just happen to be in the front row seats.” – George Mutale
  • “If I fail more than you do, I win.” – Seth Godin
  • “Could it be that the experts are wrong? This is a valid question. I don’t know how often you should use it, but know that’s it’s a valid question.” – George Mutale
  • “Sometimes the only thing that makes something possible is trying again.” – George Mutale
  • “If removing duplicate code is like normalising a database, do you really think you must remove all duplication?” – George Mutale
  • “If you hear a voice within you say, ‘You cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” — Vincent Van Gogh
  • “God has already blessed me, I struggle with showing enough appreciation.” – George Mutale
  • “Is there a profession with more false prophets than computing? Email is dead, spreadsheets are dead, Windows is dead, … *sigh*” – George Mutale
  • “You are wrong.” is perhaps not the best way to start a conversation. – George Mutale
  • “In God we trust; all others must bring data.” – W. Edwards Deming
  • “Envy is ignorance, Imitation is Suicide.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “Development is a puzzle whose pieces lie within the people you are trying to help.” – George Mutale
  • “I don’t have much to offer, but to the right person, what I have to offer is the difference between night and day.” – George Mutale
  • “I know for sure: Your journey begins with a choice to get up, step out, and live fully.” – Oprah
  • To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” – E. E. Cummings
  • “If someone can write a step-by-step guide of what you do, it’s nearly too late.” – George Mutale
  • “Achieving 60% of the impossible is better than 100% of the ordinary.” – Don Dodge
  • “Time is always too short for those who need it. But for those who love, it lasts forever.” –
  • “Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.” – Henry Van Dyke
  • “The more efficiently a system is automated, the more important humanity is in its success.” – The Paradox of Automation
  • “Who we think we are is why we do what we do. We live in our stories, and we live according to them.” – Thomas Asacker
  • “A load of books does not equal one good teacher.” – Chinese Proverb
  • “It’s not enough to reach the treasure, one must bring it back.” – Andre Gide
  • “You can learn from successes, and you can learn from failures. You only stop learning when you give up.” – Neil Patel
  • “Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.” – Chuck Swindoll
  • “We teach best what we most need to learn.” – Richard Bach
  • “Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.” – Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
  • “Don’t try to win over the haters. You’re not the jackass whisperer.” – Scott Stratten
  • “I religiously followed “Don’t copy” while at school, that now I can’t remix without wanting to first invent what to remix.” – George Mutale
  • “Language is a user interface for ideas.” – Nate Abele
  • “Caring is sometimes difficult.” – George Mutale
  • “Accepting that some people want to keep their problems, that’s difficult.” – George Mutale
  • “Data dominates. If you’ve chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.” – Rob Pike
  • “Doing is the best kind of thinking.” – Tom Chi
  • “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” – Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles
  • “It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” – Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
  • “Your vocation is where your greatest passion meets the world’s greatest need.” – Theologian Frederick Buechner
  • “Where your talents and the needs of the world cross; there lies your vocation.” – Aristotle
  • “Sometimes, the only thing standing between impossible and possible is deciding.” – George Mutale
  • “Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment.” – Kent Beck.
  • “Human beings have an extinction button, someone pushed it and hid it, and now we can’t find it.” – George Mutale
  • “There’s a part of me that doesn’t believe me unless I show it.” – George Mutale
  • “A journey of a thousand miles begins with deciding.” – George Mutale
  • “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Lao-tzu
  • “When we can all read and write, what’s left is to read and write.” – George Mutale
  • “To be able to process the signals in spite of the noise, that’s the point.” – George Mutale
  • “It feels like plastic.” – George Mutale
  • “All children are artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he has grown up.” – Picasso
  • “Growth demands a temporary loss of security.” – Gail Sheehy
  • “Start by doing what is necessary, then what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” – Francis of Assisi
  • “Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.” – Jawaharlal Nehru
  • “Mindfulness for me, would be not to buy another book on Computer Programming.” – George Mutale
  • “If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.” – Mother Teresa
  • “I would advise anyone, including myself, that any moment you understand your life is good, then everything that led up to it was worthwhile.” – Norman Lear
  • “If someone, or even a friend told me the things I tell myself, I would have taken out a restraining order.” – George Mutale
  • You can perhaps hope to work and live a little bit longer, but not forever. #TheRiseOfTheMachines – George Mutale
  • “To assume that everything has been thought about any idea, is a dangerous idea.” – George Mutale
  • Education is for life.
  • “To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.” – A.C. Grayling
  • “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” – William Arthur Ward
  • “Complaining Is Stupid. Either Act or Forget.” – Stefan Sagmeister
  • “If I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.” – Mahatma Gandhi
  • “The future depends on what we do in the present.” – Mahatma Gandhi
  • “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair
  • “If the government can’t keep drugs out of prisons, what chance do they have of keeping drugs out of the country? Ouch! #DangerousIdeas” – George Mutale
  • “The crumbs are so big now, that they make up a complete meal.” – George Mutale
  • “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein
  • “We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.” – Clay Shirky
  • “The best way to complain is to make things.” – James Murphy
  • “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi
  • “…don’t confuse your to do list or your outputs without taking into account what the outcomes of that to do list are there to achieve.” – Wil Reynolds
  • “Ahhh! I get it now. I don’t know.” – George Mutale
  • “We must ask not just ‘Is it profitable?’ but ‘Is it right?'” – Barack Obama
  • “Learning never exhausts the mind.” – Leonardo da Vinci
  • “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein
  • “Change is the point.” – Seth Godin
  • “Disconnect yourself from the outcome.” – Julianne Harvey
  • “Do you know what happens when you are all looking for the right answer? Nothing. Nothing happens for very long periods of time.” – George Mutale
  • “Done is better than perfect” – ?
  • “Good is better than perfect” – ?
  • “Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.” – Kenneth E. Boulding
  • “No one will truly invest in you, but you.” – Tasha Eurich
  • “100 billion neurons and you have nothing to say?” – George Mutale
  • “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” – Epictetus
  • “I would rather be first than perfect.” – Howard Schultz
  • “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” – W. Edwards Deming
  • “Your most valuable customers aren’t those who buy the most. Your most valuable customers are those who sell the most.” – Dharmesh Shah
  • “Computers are going to win the war. Do you know why? They know how to reply to a ping.” – George Mutale
  • “Behaviour-driven development is about implementing an application by describing its behaviour from the perspective of its stakeholders.” – Dan North
  • “The faintest ink is more powerful than the strongest memory.” – Chinese proverb
  • “I’m not here to argue. I’m here to tell you what the situation is. You will have more than enough time to argue with yourself later.” – George Mutale
  • “When everything is connected to everything else, for better or for worse, everything matters.” – Bruce Mau
  • “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead
  • “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” – Peter Drucker
  • “The last thing a fish would notice would be the water.” – Ralph Linton
  • “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” – Albert Einstein
  • “If the news is that important, it will find me.” – via Jane Buckingham
  • “Knowing “why”, is the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.” – George Mutale
  • “The reason why you and I can’t think, is because we spend too much energy on trying to remember. So here is to writing everything down.” – George Mutale
  • “Once you have made your priorities, you have to be OK with them. Otherwise they won’t hold.” – George Mutale #GettingThingsDoneInspiration.
  • “I have written software for personal use, it’s still hard.” – George Mutale
  • “Pearls don’t lie on the seashore. If you want one, you must dive for it.” – Chinese proverb
  • “Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.” – George Addair
  • “When the end comes for you, let it find you conquering a new mountain. Not sliding down an old one.” – Jim Rohn
  • “Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.” – John D. Rockefeller
  • “A number of us complain about the 1% only to realise we are in the 10%” – George Mutale
  • “Believing in God works for me.”- George Mutale
  • “Don’t judge me, I know you eat sugar.” – George Mutale
  • “Sometimes life feels as if you didn’t get the memo.” – George Mutale
  • “It is easier to act yourself into a better way of feeling than to feel yourself into a better way of action.” – O.H. Mowrer
  • “If someone can write down what you do for a living, they can find someone to do it cheaper.” – Seth Godin
  • “Just because you can’t see it, it doesn’t mean it’s not there, ask grep.” – George Mutale
  • “If you know the why, you can live any how.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
  • “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” – Mark Twain
  • “As farmers or owners, the poor peasants possess a piece of land. The excellent means of transport enables them often to sell their goods. At the very worst they can mostly provide their own food.” – Herman Gorter
  • “Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.” – Benjamin Franklin
  • “The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.” – Chuck Close
  • “My important work is my marshmallow, I’ll wait.” – George Mutale
  • “Do everything, but limit your work in progress.” – George Mutale
  • “Clarity is thinking about everything, and then thinking about nothing.” – George Mutale
  • “My most important work does not come in Tweets, or Facebook posts, talk to me.” – George Mutale
  • “I can’t touch-type, but that’s OK, I use the time between typing to think about what I’m doing.” – George Mutale
  • “If you’re making mistakes it means you’re out there doing something.” – Neil Gaiman
  • “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” – Thomas Edison
  • “You can’t judge Microsoft today based on Windows 3.1” – George Mutale
  • “The awesomeness of your software application is hidden in the lack of appropriate documentation.” – George Mutale
  • “Computer programming is like everything.” – George Mutale
  • “Programming is like everything.” – George Mutale
  • Input -> [Do something here] -> Output. Agreeability level is high on input and output, but it’s always very low on [Do something here].
  • Good code does not remain good, even when left unchanged.” – George Mutale
  • “Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.” – C.S. Lewis
  • “What you think of me is none of my business.” – Wayne Dyer
  • “Knowing what you have is a competitive advantage.” – George Mutale
  • “The money is in the cup of coffee, not in the coffee beans.” – George Mutale
  • “Whenever you see the word ‘clever’ replace it with ‘self-indulgent’.” – Don Norman
  • “If it involves a set of steps, someone somewhere out there is turning that into a single step.” – George Mutale
  • “The ability to repeat using a computer is your compound interest.” – George Mutale
  • “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” – Marie Curie
  • “The root of all suffering is attachment.” – Buddha
  • “The best people are like water, which benefits all things and does not compete with them. It stays in lowly places that others reject. This is why it is so similar to the Way (Dao).” – Lao Tzu
  • “Nature does not worry, but everything is accomplished.” – Lao Tzu
  • “To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.” – Lao Tzu
  • “Even if something in theory has been done before, it hasn’t been done by you in the way you can do it. It’s time to step forward.” – Dorie Clark
  • “Today we call it learning, tomorrow we’ll call it breathing.” – George Mutale
  • “Listening to smart people can have its drawbacks, you might go away thinking your Hello World! application has a scaling problem.” – George Mutale
  • Seek clarity.
  • “A good architecture allows major decisions to be deferred!” – Robert Cecil Martin
  • “You can break anything once.” – Songkick Maxim
  • “Nothing is as permanent as a temporary fix” – Michael T. Nygard
  • “Hope is not a design method.” – Michael T. Nygard
  • “if you fail to design for production your life will be filled with “excitement”.” – Michael T. Nygard
  • “Count your pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.” – ?
  • “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” – Donald Rumsfeld
  • “Write it down, and I will trust you more.” – George Mutale
  • “I trust you, I just don’t trust you to remember.” – George Mutale
  • “I don’t have an ‘I don’t have an idea problem.’, I have a ‘I am not doing anything about it problem.'” – George Mutale
  • “HTML is OK, but XML is Evil.” – George Mutale
  • “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.” – Shunryu Suzuki
  • “A prototype is worth a thousand meetings.” – Mike Davidson
  • Greed has no upper limit.
  • “There is a you-shaped hole in the universe.” – Rod Stryker
  • “My life is my message.” – Mahatma Gandhi
  • “The secret to building large apps is never build large apps. Break your applications into small pieces. Then, assemble those testable, bite-sized pieces into your big application.” –
    Justin Meyer
  • “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” – David Allen
  • “Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart give yourself to it.” – Anonymous
  • “Flexibility trumps perfection.” – David Allen
  • “Your Economic Security is based on your Skills and Reputation.” – Netflix
  • “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
  • “There’s room and a place for you, if you will only be yourself.” – George Mutale
  • “You had me at continuous improvement.” – George Mutale
  • “If you look hard enough, you can find two experts that will tell you the exact opposite.” – George Mutale
  • “Feelings suspend reason.” – George Mutale
  • “Architecture is the decisions that you wish you could get right early in a project, but that you are not necessarily more likely to get them right than any other.” – Ralph Johnston
  • “If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.” – Alan Perlis
  • “It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.” – Niels Bohr
  • “Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.” – Edward V. Berard
  • “Patience obtaineth all things.” –
  • “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, the second best time is now.” – Anonymous
  • “Always do what you are afraid to do.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “The world is an open book exam, teach me something worth knowing.” – George Mutale
  • “I think doing this is stupid, but that’s what they are buying.” – George Mutale
  • “Doing it the hard way will always have customers, because there are more than enough people looking for shortcuts.” – George Mutale
  • “Imagine your software applications are like plants, you will then begin to understand why your garden is in such a mess.” – George Mutale
  • “Given enough time, we will all come to the same conclusion.” – George Mutale
  • “There are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.” – Nigel Marsh
  • “The rich are always sitting on the shoulders and survive on the shoulders of the poor.” – Indian mythology
  • “We all become the stories we tell ourselves.” – Tom Asacker
  • “When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.” – Mark Twain
  • “The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.” – Mahatma Gandhi
  • “Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.” – Bertrand Russell
  • “A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.” – J.R.R. Tolkien
  • “What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.” – Robert McKee
  • “‘Should’ is one of the most evil word in the English language.” – George Mutale
  • “Reverse innovation is not optional. It is oxygen.” – Vijay Govindarajan
  • “Keep as close as possible to reality. If teaching someone about apples, give them apples.” – George Mutale
  • “No” is a complete sentence. – Anne Lamott
  • “Those who have just discovered how to light a fire using a matchstick will tell you it’s the only way to lighting a fire.” – George Mutale
  • “Curiosity is evolution.” – Dan
  • “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” – Lucius Annaeus Seneca
  • “Agile development uses feedback to make constant adjustments in a highly collaborative environment.”
  • “If you are not in the process of becoming the person you want to be, you are automatically engaged in becoming the person you don’t want to be.” – Dale Carnegie
  • “If you risk nothing, then you risk everything.” – Geena Davis
  • “If you do tomorrow what you did today, you will get tomorrow what you got today.” – Benjamin Franklin
  • “It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work.” – Jeff Bezos
  • “Once you realise that human beings are irrational, it all makes sense.” – George Mutale
  • “Measure twice, cut once.”
  • “I don’t think there’s a whole lot in life that I can’t do — just things I haven’t done yet.” – Richard Parker
  • “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” – Peter Drucker
  • “Every minute you spend in your life is either spent bringing you closer to your goals or moving you away from your goals.” – Bo Bennett
  • “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” – Pablo Picasso
  • “We fear our highest possibilities. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments, under conditions of great courage.” – Abraham Maslow
  • “A smartphone anywhere in the world today, means endless opportunities.” – George Mutale
  • “There’s nothing else that communicates more clearly that you are here to play, than trying to take someone’s job or business.” – George Mutale
  • “Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.” – Mark Cook
  • “Don’t worry if it doesn’t work right. If everything did, you’d be out of a job.”
    – Mosher’s Law of Software Engineering
  • “Becoming is better than being.” – Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
  • “A successful product solves a painful problem for a specific customer in a sizeable reachable market.” – @neoinnovate
  • “Value trumps cool. Period.” – @neoinnovate
  • “the reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.” – John Irving
  • “… if you know it will work, it isn’t creative.” – Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Seven Rules for Managing Creative-But-Difficult People
  • “I will not profess to know what I’m doing; but I know my heart is in the right place.” – George Mutale
  • “Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.” – Epictetus
  • “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” – Abraham Maslow, Maslow’s hammer
  • “Do you know how I know I’m not doing too many projects? I still watch TV.” – George Mutale
  • “When it comes to solving my own problems, I’m an inside trader.” – George Mutale
  • “Amateurs who aren’t afraid of trying will inherit the earth.” – George Mutale
  • “There’s no strong correlation between being able to create wealth, and knowing what to do with it.” – George Mutale
  • “The customer is the most important part of the production line.” – W. Edwards Deming
  • “In the past the man was first. In the future the system will be first.” – Fredrick Winslow Taylor
  • “Good Software Takes 10 Years. Get Used To It.” – Joel Spolsky
  • “I get paid for code that works, not for tests, so my philosophy is to test as little as possible to reach a given level of confidence.” – Kent Beck
  • “Just because something is easy to measure doesn’t mean it’s important.” – Seth Godin
  • “As hard as it may be to believe this, there’s only ever one best thing to do next.” – George Mutale
  • “Magic is turning one dollar into two dollars.” – George Mutale
  • “Those who think they have come down from the mountain, usually bring their own set of commandments.” – George Mutale
  • “Mindless consumption always turns into excessive consumption.” – Joshua Becker
  • “Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for massive inspection by building quality into the product in the first place.” – W. Edwards Deming
  • “Simplicity is your best design strategy.” – Michael Garvey
  • “Who goeth a borrowing, goeth a sorrowing…A fool and his money are soon parted.” – Thomas Tusser
  • “You wasted $150,000 on an education you could have got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.” – Matt Damon as Will Hunting, Good Will Hunting
  • “In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.” – Bertrand Russell
  • Here’s the conclusion of the whole matter; there’s only one thing that matters:
    Doing the right thing, right now, as fast as you can.
  • “A goal without a date is just a dream.” – Milton H. Erickson
  • “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  • My thoughts maybe all over the place, but the general direction continues to be the same. And this is fine.” – George Mutale
  • “Do. Or do not. There is no try. – Yoda”
  • The Enterprise IT Adoption Cycle – http://enterpriseitadoption.com/ – Simon Wardley
  • “I will tell you all I know, so that we can focus on what you are going to do.” – George Mutale
  • “There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.” – Hermann Hesse
  • “The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.” – Samuel Johnson
  • “You are your process.” – Jim Benson
  • “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” – Henry David Thoreau
  • “If I have a scaling problem, I should also have an “I’m making too much money” problem.” – George Mutale
  • “It’s a good day if I’m not putting out fires or going around in circles.” – George Mutale
  • The commander’s ethos: ‘Viel leisten, wenig hervortreten, mehr sein als scheinen’. (‘Work hard, avoid the limelight, be more than you seem’) – via Stephen Bungay
  • “People copy the most visible, obvious, and frequently least important practices.” – Jeffrey Pfeffer & Robert Sutton
  • “The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept.” – Lieutenant General David Lindsay Morrison AO
  • “Who has searched for the meaning of life and has found any happiness at the end of it all?” – George Mutale
  • “Something is breaking somewhere. That’s the song in my head when there’s no configuration management.” – George Mutale
  • “If you can’t reduce your sadness, increase your happiness.” – George Mutale
  • “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” – Leo Tolstoy
  • “The trouble is, you think you have time.” – Gautama Buddha?
  • “The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it is selling him.” – Peter Drucker
  • ‘They don’t want quarter-inch bits. They want quarter-inch holes.’ – Leo McGinneva
  • “People don’t buy a quarter-inch drill bit, they buy a quarter-inch hole. You’ve got to study the hole, not the drill. The drill is just the solution for it.” Theodore Levitt.
  • “Want to increase innovation? Lower the cost of failure.” – Joi Ito
  • “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” – Voltaire
  • “A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.” – Alan Kay
  • “Point of View is worth 80 IQ points.” – Alan Kay
  • “I am I and my circumstance.” – José Ortega y Gasset
  • “Getting confused is walking in and out of other people’s ideas.” – George Mutale
  • “We struggle to understand not because there’s a lot of information or data, we struggle because we lack context.” – George Mutale
  • “The future depends on what you do today.” – Mahatma Gandhi
  • “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Leonardo da Vinci
  • “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
    – Douglas Hofstadter”
  • “Sometimes, asking someone to focus is as bad as asking them to stand in front of a train; ideas don’t exactly give way.” – George Mutale
  • “Problems begin when people act like computers or computers act like people. Silicon is not carbon.” – George Mutale
  • “You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem.” – Edwards’s Law?
  • “If you are not working on your best idea right now, you are wasting your time.” – ?
  • Permission slip. Sonia says, APPROVED. – http://www.copyblogger.com/permission-slip/
  • “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” – Alvin Toffler
  • “Hope is not a plan.” – Anderson Cooper
  • “Life is like a long regular expression. Do you know what happens when you try to build it all at once?” – George Mutale
  • “90% percent of everything is crap.” – Sturgeon’s revelation
  • “Why not try?” – ?
  • “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” – Theodore Roosevelt
  • “Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation…. Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself–it’s worldview; its basic values: its social and political structures; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived… We are currently living through just such a transformation.” – Peter Drucker
  • “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” – Abraham Lincoln
  • “A aircraft is complicated while a mayonnaise is complex.” – Paul Cilliers
  • “Complexity is looking at interacting elements and asking how they form patterns and how the patterns unfold.” – William Brian Arthur
  • “Carbon is not the same as silicon.” – David Snowden
  • “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” – Richard P. Feynman
  • “Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.” – H. James Harrington
  • “Today is cruel. Tomorrow is crueler. And the day after tomorrow is beautiful.” – Jack Ma
  • “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”- T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph
  • “The bottleneck is never code or creativity; its lack of clarity.” – Scott Berkun
  • “Don’t spend time regretting mistakes made in the past, today is a new day. Spend as little time as possible crafting that apology and just do it.” – George Mutale
  • “If ethics depends on human rationality, we are so screwed.” – George Mutale
  • “Computing is the branch of mathematics with all the problems.” – George Mutale
  • “Organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations – M. Conway”
  • “It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.” – Margaret Mead
  • “Success is hacking your mind and finally figuring out what works for you.” – George Mutale
  • “Explanations do not explain. Orders do! Nothing else does! Don’t forget that!” – Napoleon Hill
  • “The future demands dreamers with courage.” – Napoleon Hill
  • “The worst thing you can do when writing software, is accepting expert advice from your client – you are contracted to provide expert advice.” – George Mutale
  • “The next wave before climate change that is going to hit Zambia, and most parts of Africa, is Open-source software and free online and offline courses.” – George Mutale
  • “The next wave set to change everything in Zambia and most parts of Africa, Open-source software and free online and offline courses.” – George Mutale
  • “Before you ask for more, plug your leaks.” – George Mutale
  • “Even for expert users things should be simple.” – Jason Fried
  • “Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!” – Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
  • “‘Other people’ or ‘someone else’ are not constants.” – George Mutale
  • “If it’s finite, it’s possible.” – George Mutale
  • “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke
  • “The hardest thing about learning is the discomfort that comes from not understanding.” – George Mutale
  • “It’s just zeros and ones, how hard can it be?” – James Kinley
  • “The problem with inequality, is that the ones that need convincing, benefit from the problem and don’t think inequality is a problem.” – George Mutale
  • “It seem one has to increasingly convince people that a computer can’t do ones job. Hmmmmm, to look forward to, or to dread the future.” – George Mutale
  • “It’s not a lot if you don’t have to remember it.” – George Mutale
  • “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.” – Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut
  • “Schools are the modern day day care centres where children go to hibernate their minds.” – George Mutale
  • “Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” ― Viktor E. Frankl
  • “Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth… That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” – Viktor E. Frankl
  • There’s is something missing once you have understood something, the misunderstanding; and possibly, how you got rid of it. – George Mutale
  • “Arguments over style are pointless. There should be a style guide, and you should follow it.” – Rebecca Murphey
  • When you have been burnt that many times, even ice seems hot. – George Mutale
  • Do something everyday that’s going to change your life forever. – George Mutale
  • If you are having trouble understanding a subject area, write a book to help you understand. – George Mutale
  • “I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” – Mark Twain?
  • “A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.” – Mark Twain
  • “I’m all for going to Mars, but only if we do not take Human Beings there.” – George Mutale
  • “The truth of a function, does not lie in the comments; but in what goes in and what comes out.” – George Mutale
  • “There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” – Phil Karlton
  • “We need creative there is no box kind of thinking if we are to solve our challenges. I propose we introduce Lego in parliament so that we can see just how creative our politicians are.” – George Mutale
  • “It’s a good thing I am now addicted to good books. I would hate for it to be something else.” – George Mutale
  • “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” – Albert Camus
  • “No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.” – Baruch Spinoza
  • “Making hard things easy, is hard; writing software is making hard things easy.” – George Mutale
  • “Work is the most fair way of distributing income.” – George Mutale (read some form of this somewhere)
  • “Computer Programming is hard because life is full of exceptions.” – George Mutale
  • “As soon as we associate reading with a test, we’ve missed the point.” – Seth Godin
  • “Privacy is the new Green.” – George Mutale
  • “It’s not wise to overthink things.” – George Mutale
  • “You Promised Me Mars Colonies, Instead, I Got Facebook.” – Buzz Aldrin
  • “When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.” – Native American proverb
  • “Modern development framework take away 80% of the job. Then they make the remaining work ten times as hard.” – Johannes Brodwall
  • “There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” – Nelson Mandela
  • “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” – Thomas Jefferson
  • “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.” -Ronald Coase
  • “Easy is Hard” – Peter Lewis
  • “Don’t be too quick to optimize code for computers, human beings experience pain, computers don’t.” – George Mutale
  • “History is written by the victors.” – Winston Churchill
  • “It’s more important to document than to remember.” – George Mutale
  • “You go to the West to make a bit of money, but you go back to Africa to become wealthy.” – George Mutale
  • “Buy land and wait, don’t wait to buy land.” – Kenyan proverb
  • “One good test is worth a thousand expert opinions.” – Wernher Von Braun
  • “No matter how good the team or how efficient the methodology, if we’re not solving the right problem, the project fails.” – Woody Williams
  • “…kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.” – Rita Pierson
  • I tried thinking, for a while, that things were not possible. Oh my goodness, what a nightmare. – George Mutale
  • “True wisdom lies in gathering the precious things out of each day as it goes by.” – E.S. Bouton
  • “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” – Pablo Picasso
  • “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” – Pablo Picasso
  • “If you are doing the wrong thing you can’t learn, you will only be trying to do the wrong thing righter.” – John Seddon
  • “A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.” – J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Teaching is more powerful than learning. Have students teach, learning comes for free. – George Mutale
  • Teaching is more powerful than learning. – George Mutale
  • “an ounce of hope is worth a ton of despair.” – George Monbiot
  • “An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “I don’t like things that limit or diminish my choices.” – George Mutale
  • Teacher, Keep Calm and Relax you don’t know everything. Get the kid a smartphone. – George Mutale
  • As long as you are going to be thinking anyway, think big.” – Donald Trump
  • “Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King
  • “Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time’ is to say ‘I don’t want to.'” – Lao Tzu
  • “To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.” – Leonard Bernstein
  • I would rather not know how your black box works. – George Mutale
  • Memorisation was invented before computers. – George Mutale
  • “We have met the enemy and he is us.” – Pogo
  • “Your talent is in your choice.” -Stella Adler
  • “Collaborate or perish.” – George Mutale
  • “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” – Mark Twain
  • “Genius is eternal patience.” – Michelangelo
  • “The mind is the worst place to store things.” – George Mutale
  • “The future is very hard to predict, even for Economists.” – George Mutale
  • Educate the masses, and let them decide. – George Mutale
  • “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” – Derek Bok
  • “The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do.” – Ralph W. Emerson
  • You don’t have to do a lot; you just have to do your part. – George Mutale
  • Sometimes it seems like to “practice” well on the internet, one needs to suspend belief. – George Mutale
  • All it takes for evil to succeed is for a few good men to do nothing…”
    ― Edmund Burke
  • “Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.” ― Edmund Burke
  • If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.” ― Edmund Burke
  • It is a general popular error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.” ― Edmund Burke
  • “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.” ― Edmund Burke
  • “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” ― Edmund Burke
  • Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.” ― Edmund Burke
  • The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” ― Edmund Burke
  • “Kids in school should be nudged, not pushed.” – George Mutale
  • “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” –
    William Gibson
  • “Code is coming to take over a job near you, hopefully it’s not your job.” – George Mutale
  • “How to fail properly should be a unit taught at all levels of Education.” – George Mutale
  • “There will always be work to do for other people: but this is also true for your own work that you do not do.” – George Mutale
  • “You need to find your frequency. Life is so much better then.” – George Mutale
  • “Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.” – Chinese proverb
  • “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” – Socrates
  • “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” – Donald Knuth
  • “If this side is the same as the other side; whatever you do to this side, you must also do to the other side.” – George Mutale
  • “Always be in a position to undo.” – George Mutale
  • “Computers, and people must not be left unattended.” – George Mutale
  • “A function is always too long.” – George Mutale
  • “A method is always too long.” – George Mutale
  • “A class is always too long.” – George Mutale
  • “The truth is that you can be dangerous with just HTML.” – George Mutale
  • “A business is a repeatable process that makes money. Everything else is a hobby.” – Paul Freet
  • “There is no way to doing more; doing more is the way.” – George Mutale
  • “Ifintu kwesha besha” – Bemba Proverb
  • “A good teacher is good fortune.” – ?
  • “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.” – John Maynard Keynes
  • “As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.” – Maurice Vincent Wilkes
  • “Haste is killing me.” – George Mutale
  • “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Peter Drucker
  • “Excellence is the best deterrent to racism or sexism.” – Oprah Winfrey
  • “A change in strategy is never a bad thing, as long as you have learned from your actions not your theories.” – Daniel Ngari
  • “When you do things, don’t wait for the right time. This is the right time.” – Dennis Langat
  • “There’s no silver bullet. You cannot helicopter people out of poverty.” – Esther Duflo
  • Money for overheads should be spent on overheads. – George Mutale
  • “If you say that money is the most important thing, you’ll spend your life completely wasting your time: You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is, in order to go on doing things you don’t like doing — which is stupid!” – Alan Watts
  • “Deeds not words” – ?
  • “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “Make easy things easy and hard things possible.” – Larry Wall
  • “A leader is a dealer in hope.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
  • “Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill
  • Whatever you do, don’t delegate thinking for yourself to someone else. – George Mutale
  • There’s no glory in administration, automate everything! – George Mutale
  • I do not envy anyone who has to explain his or her vision. – George Mutale
  • If you can’t win, start another sport. – George Mutale
  • “College is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the student’s lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.” – Mark Twain
  • “The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.” – Plutarc
  • “Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary.” – Thomas L. Friedman
  • You come to the Western world to make a bit of money; and you go back to Africa to become wealthy. Si ndio? – George Mutale
  • If you want to fast track fixing your problems, spend some time fixing other people’s problems. – George Mutale
  • Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.” – Napoleon Hill.
  • I am coming to the conclusion that it’s more important to inspire and guide than it is to teach or lecture. – George Mutale
  • There is no such thing as useless information. – George Mutale
  • “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Some, though few have arrived in the promised land. As for the others, well, we are waiting for them to complete their (40 year) stay in the wilderness. – George Mutale
  • The current way of doing things doesn’t work (anymore) so why do we continue to tell people to read the textbook? – George Mutale
  • A honest employee is like a Swiss Army knife, there is very little that one such employee can not do.” – George Mutale
  • Why are you quitting as if you have something better todo? – George Mutale
  • Don’t confuse what I can do with what you think I can do. – George Mutale
  • “You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.”- Galileo Galilei
  • “It’s easy to sound like a racist when you are failing to reconcile the differences between cultures.” – George Mutale
  • “The world asks everyday “Pay now or pay later?”. Choose wisely.” – George Mutale
  • “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed on an equal or greater benefit.” – Napoleon Hill
  • “No job is so important, and no service is so urgent, that we cannot take time to perform our work safely.” – Bell System
  • “A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.” – Mark Twain
  • “Tasks are to be executed like good speeches; tell them what you are going to do, do it and then tell them what you’ve just done.” – George Mutale
  • “…do more and better work than you are paid for.” – Napoleon Hill
  • “If you can’t solve a problem, make it bigger.” – Donald Rumsfeld
  • “How you have convinced yourself that you can’t do it is the ninth wonder of the world.” – George Mutale
  • “The ability to make an informed decision is the eighth wonder of the world.” – George Mutale
  • “And so the conclusion of the matter is this; the only thing that matters is what you do with what you know.” – George Mutale
  • “The value in everyone rushing to be the same is realising that there is more value in diversity, in being different.” – George Mutale
  • “Why be a shovel when you can be an earth mover?” – George Mutale
  • “The fact is that we can’t borrow ourselves out of all our problems.” – George Mutale
  • “Ubuchushi bupela amano.” – Bemba Proverb
  • “If you want innovation, listen to your employees.”
  • “If you want innovation, listen to your customers.”
  • “Would Zambia make more money if it had iMines instead of Mines? What’s an iMine? I don’t know. But it seems things that start with ‘i’ make more money. Like iPad, iPhone, iPod,….” – George Mutale
  • “If you don’t want me to implement your idea, don’t share it.” – George Mutale
  • “If I were to share my ideas with you, you would think I’m borderline mad, so I will show you instead.” – George Mutale
  • “The burden of having the vision is that everyone else can’t see what you are on about.” – George Mutale
  • “The only thing I know is that I can’t do this alone.” – George Mutale
  • Reality distortion field (RDF) is a term coined by Bud Tribble at Apple Computer in 1981, to describe company co-founder Steve Jobs’ charisma and its effects on the developers working on the Macintosh project.[1] Tribble claimed that the term came from Star Trek. – Wikipedia
  • “Don’t be deceived. There’s only one sustainable way of living on this planet. And this is how. Be good, be kind and know that you are important.” – George Mutale
  • “As individualistic as we want to be, complexity requires group success. We all need to be pit crews now.” – Atul Gawande
  • “Have you ever had an overwhelming feeling that you are exactly where you are supposed to be?” – George Mutale
  • “I’m the smartest person I know when it comes to solving my own problems.” – George Mutale
  • “I’m the smartest person I know when it comes to issues that affect me.” – George Mutale
  • “I’m yet to meet someone who has nothing to offer.” – George Mutale
  • “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” – Brooks’s law
  • “It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.” -Bill Vaughan
  • “Many of Africa’s best and brightest become bureaucrats or NGO workers when they should be scientists or entrepreneurs.” – Jennifer Brea
  • “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” – Regina Dugan
  • “If you want to make more money, help more people.” –
  • “Familiarity destroys and trumps fear. Try it.” – Sheikha Al Mayassa
  • Continuous delivery.
  • You have to invest into solving your own problems.
  • “Endless growth is impossible in a finite world.” David Suzuki
  • “The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he…” – Proverbs 23:7
  • There can be no failure for the man who still fights on. – Napoleon Hil
  • There is more to life than increasing its speed. – Mahatma Gandhi
  • First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. – Mahatma Gandhi
  • Most of the things that you worry about will never happen and most of the things that you think (have a hunch) about will. But take note to differentiate the two.
  • “The path of least resistance is what makes rivers run crooked.” – Elbert Hubbard
  • “I don’t know who discovered water, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.” – Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
  • “I want to be able to see all of it, some of it and none of it.” – George Mutale
  • “Information Technology has an uncanny way of creating jobs.” – George Mutale
  • “If I knew where the start line was, I would have be on my way to the finish line.” – George Mutale
  • “Those who wish to make life difficult do not provide online forms, forms that can be downloaded or forms that can be printed on A4 paper.” – George Mutale
  • “If you are going to play, learn the rules.”
  • “Your inner peace is in inversely proportional to the difference between what you say and what you do.” – George Mutale
  • “Persist, sometimes people just want to see if you are as convinced about your ideas before they adopt them.” – George Mutale
  • “How did we get so addicted to ‘expert advice’? Even when we know better will still seek expert advice.” – George Mutale
  • “Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.” – Wolfgang Mozart
  • “I gave up on trying to be a genius or a geek, now I just work really hard.” – George Mutale
  • “I’m African, the rest are details.” – George Mutale
  • “I’m an African, the rest are details.” – George Mutale
  • “Simplifying breads complexity.” – George Mutale
  • “The exciting thing about sleeping is that the next day comes around much quicker.” – George Mutale
  • “Genius is the art of taking infinite pains.” – Elbert Hubbard
  • “The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.” – Theodore Roosevelt
  • “Do not tell the world what you can do, show it!” – Napoleon Hill
  • “Asking the right question to the wrong person is time consuming and very costly.” – George Mutale
  • “The greatest thing in life is freedom. There can be no real freedom without a reasonable degree of financial independence.” – Napoleon Hill
  • “Where thought prevails power may be found.” – Napoleon Hill
  • “The easiest thing to find on God’s green earth is someone to tell you all the things you cannot do.” – Richard M. DeVos
  • “Africa, our mother Africa, must be free, and it has fallen to our lot to free this part. Be of good cheer, we are just beginning.” – Dr. Kenneth D. Kaunda, First President of Zambia
  • “I wanted to feel ok about spending money on my ideas, so I now call my work research.” -George Mutale
  • Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not. The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” — Calvin Coolidge
  • “Take control of your career development, and see your employer as only one resource” – Rex Black
  • “People aren’t comfortable until they label you.” – George Mutale
  • “True education means mind development; not merely the gathering and classifying of knowledge.” – Napoleon Hill
  • “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.” – A. J. Muste
  • It’s just another way of doing the same thing.
  • Just how many of us think, it’s not me, it’s the government?
  • “This too shall pass.” – ?
  • “Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.” – Henry Ford
  • Be thankful for your mistakes, for they show you were improvements can be made.
  • “One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.” — Socrates
  • “When you get an idea, assume you are the last person to get the idea. This should hopefully be an incentive for you to start implementing the idea as soon as possible.” – George Mutale
  • “I have not experienced if I have not shared.” – George Mutale
  • “The self-reliant and the self-helpful are the minority; the majority are forever looking toward and relying upon some government or some institution to do for them what they should only do for themselves.” – Observation: every man his own university, Russell H. Conwell
  • “The best compensation for doing things is the ability to do more.” – Napoleon Hill
  • There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance — that principle is contempt prior to investigation – William Paley
  • “While there is life, there is hope” – Cicero, Ad Atticum
  • “Nothing can work me damage except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault.” St. Bernard
  • “The devil destroys those that he first annoys.” – Napoleon Hill
  • “Laugh at life because non of us are getting out of it alive” – Og Mandino
  • “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used
    when we created them” – Einstein
  • Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he. Proverbs 29:18
  • “No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich.” – Chinese Proverb
  • I am a self-confessed TED (http://www.ted.com) evangelist 🙂
  • “Don’t blame God for your shortcomings” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLRPGj5JPgw
  • “In Zambia we have got too many bureaucracies, people who transform theory into theory, what we need are technocrats, people who transform theory into practice, into finished products” – Dr Richard Mbewe
  • It seems as though people who do not know how to write computer programs are more likely to concentrate on content for their website than those who do
  • “You have to keep experimenting, and sometimes ideology has to be trumped by practicality.” – Esther Duflo
  • “Success is all about great execution” Getting Real – The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application
  • “The fact is, foreigners do not go to Africa to advance the interests of Africans. Americans go to Africa to pursue their (American) interests — just as the British, the French and the Russians do. Certainly, the Chinese don’t go to Africa because they love black people so much. It is the height of insanity to expect foreigners to come and solve Africa’s problems. Even if they do, they will do so to their (foreign) advantage.” George B.N. Ayittey, http://www.freeafrica.org/president.htm
  • Our elders have been in power for such a long time, that I feel the young people feel it’s not their turn yet.
  • “You can’t run a society by the lowest common denominator” – Philip K Howard
  • “People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.” – Zig Ziglar
  • For some, everything is to be criticised
  • sometimes, if you only ever learn one thing, learn how to be grateful.
  • Everyone needs the internet (and Google)
  • “…nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent…” (Calvin Coolidge)
  • “He who seeks to learn how to fly does not master the techniques of staying down.” – Mwata
  • People don’t change because they get married, they change because they want to change.
  • Success is realising your purpose in life and living each day fulfilling it. – George Mutale
  • A country only needs one president. We do not need everyone to come along, just enough and the rest will follow.
  • No one can be as enthusiastic as yourself when it comes to accomplishing your desires/goals.
  • Sometimes it is a good idea to stick to what works
  • “Talk doesn’t cook rice.” – Chinese Proverb
  • I have more chances of finding gold if I start digging on the mine I am sitting on rather than find another gold mine.
  • Usually when a major problem occurs, it is not due to a single reason, but a number of problems (failures).
  • People are quick to forget
  • People do weird and wonderful things
  • We like to reinvent the wheel because it is fun, and or we want to do it ourselves.
  • It is hard to innovate on an empty stomach.
  • Poverty is complex.
  • May be we need less trust and more checks and balances. – George Mutale
  • “You don’t know what you don’t know”
  • After a while people stop marveling at your brilliance and come to expect it. – George Mutale
  • The quickest way of getting a pay rise is by reducing your expenses. – George Mutale
  • “You can choose to look the other way, but you can never again say you did not know” – William Wilberforce
  • Expenditures rise to meet income – Parkinson’s Second Law
  • Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion – Parkinson’s Law
  • Look for a win win situation, most people are out there to benefit themselves.
  • Most people want to benefit or know how they can benefit. Thats why it is hard to get people involved in your project, especially if their is no perceived benefit on their part. This is the reason why you get more people attending your meetings if you provide food. So find ways for all parties to benefit and you will get more response, feedback or help. It does not have to be actual benefit, perceived benefit will do.
  • Asking all of the Zambian diaspora to return to Zambia is unrealistic. In the interest of reducing the brain drain, there needs to be more innovative ways in which the Zambian disapora can contribute to Zambia without necessarily having them return to Zambia.
  • “To kick start the economic reformation process, Zambia needs to imagine a Zambia without copper” – World Bank Vice President (Africa), Mrs Obaiageli Kathryn Ezekweili (Zambia National Indaba)
  • A talented Zambian writer should write the biography of Mr Dennis Liwewe
  • Zambians never used to say much, or their voices were never heard, but now, I can hear more Zambians voicing out their concerns. And the next stage will hopefully be more Zambians talking less and doing more. “All hard work brings profit; but mere talk leads only to poverty” – Warren Buffet (http://marcovilla.instablogs.com/entry/warren-buffet-the-man-to-see/). “ Zambia needs to avoid being a member of NATO (No Action Talk Only)” – Mr Jegathesan Jegasothydato aka J.J , Experience from Malaysia representative (Zambia National Indaba)
  • Your perception is your reality.