'Tis the Season

As we reach the end of the year, many of us will reflect on the past 12 months and contemplate good times and bad. Although our industry has been fickle, remember: Opportunity is all around us — we just have to look for it.

I remain optimistic not only for our particular sliver of the world, but for the world as a whole. There is much good to be found, as is evil. It’s what you do with the information that makes all the difference.

As my gift, I want to share some quotations and snippets I collected throughout the year. I use these thoughts and concepts to help direct my life. I’m hopeful they can do the same for you.

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”
–Gertrude Stein

“The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.”
–William Gibson

“Learning is not compulsory… neither is survival.”
–W. Edwards Deming

“When you are asked if you can do a job, tell ’em, ‘Certainly I can!’ Then, get busy and find out how to do it.”
–Theodore Roosevelt

“There is only one success — to be able to spend your life in your own way.”
–Christopher Morley

“You moon the wrong person at an office party and suddenly you’re not ‘professional’ any more.”
–Jeff Foxworthy

“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
–Joseph Chilton Pearce

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.”
–Henry David Thoreau

“If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles to the gallon, and explode once a year, killing everybody inside.”
–Robert X. Cringely

“Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.”
–B.F. Skinner

“Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.”
–Yogi Berra

“Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.”
–Samuel Johnson

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
–Ellen Parr

“Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”
–Malcolm Forbes

“That’s what’s cool about working with computers. They don’t argue, they remember everything and they don’t drink all your beer.”
–Paul Leary

“If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.”
–Anatole France

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
–Benjamin Franklin

Season’s best to all of you!