Inspirational quotes

[GrussGott]

When you ask me what I came to do in this life, as an artist I will answer you. I came to live out loud. (Emile Zola)

Ha, I'm currently reading Ladies' Paradise after reading Pot Bouille some time ago ... reading in that order is great because Pot Bouille has the Octave backstory.

I gotta say - and this may sound odd - but if you like business & product management, Ladies' Paradise is a GREAT book to read ... it could just as easily be about Walmart or Amazon, yet it was written 140 years ago! This could go on my list as one of the best business books.

[aungrl]

When you ask me what I came to do in this life, as an artist I will answer you. I came to live out loud. (Emile Zola)

[maverick]

This is a Chinese proverb -

"If you stand straight, do not fear a crooked shadow."

[robburdtt]

A zen quote I needed today:

"Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone." - Alan Watts

[maverick]

A piece from an Apple marketing campaign in the 1990's, by Steve Jobs...

[maverick]

"Two men looked out through prison bars; one saw mud, the other stars."
- Frederick Langbridge

[aedifica]

I remember sharing what I had just done, and then working with the database administrator to recover the database. I had a very understanding people leader. His philosophy (and that of any good leader) was that it's okay to make mistakes -- let's try to not repeat the same mistake; if you never make a mistake, you're probably not doing anything.

Not only was this a great learning experience, but it also created a dialog within the team that it's okay to make mistakes. It also lead to one of our interview questions being -- tell me about a time when you broke something. We all had a good chuckle as we asked this question.

That's a great story, and I like how your leader handled it! I'm reminded of the time when I was new to systems administration and accidentally deleted my boss's account in one of our systems--I thought I was deleting a test account, but the interface didn't behave quite like I thought it would. My boss didn't act upset, just told me to fix it and gave me some hints that helped me to figure out how. In the process I learned a lot more about that system (and got better at SQL, too, since fixing the issue required digging into the SQL database that stored the account information).

Lest I get too far from the topic of the thread, here's an inspirational quote:

"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. Guard your honor, let your reputation fall where it will." -- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign (which is great book, but it has much more effect if you start reading farther back in the series)

[ejvc]

"We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice...We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. -- Ursula K. LeGuin

"I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my nose holes; everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe." -- Audré Lorde.

[maverick]

"The truth has a million faces, but there is only one truth."
- Hermann Hesse

[maverick]

"The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything."
- Theodore Roosevelt

I'd like to share a personal story along this vein. This was about 12 years ago -- I was working in a hands-on engineering role, making a change to a production database that was part of a customer facing solution. The change involved a series of SQL queries, one of which was an update statement. An important aspect of this update was a where clause. Think of it as -- we're going to update this attribute to this new value where this condition is true.

As soon as I ran that update query, I realized that I forgot the where statement. This was an Oracle database, and so long as you don't commit or apply, you have the ability to rollback or not apply what you did. So I thought great, I'll just rollback.

The problem was that I didn't understand how rollbacks and commits work. I thought that unless I explicitly commit that the changes are rolled back. And so I closed my session.

That was a mistake.

When you close the connection, your changes automatically commit. You have to explicitly run rollback in order to roll back to the last commit of the session -- to not apply all of the queries you just ran.

I remember sharing what I had just done, and then working with the database administrator to recover the database. I had a very understanding people leader. His philosophy (and that of any good leader) was that it's okay to make mistakes -- let's try to not repeat the same mistake; if you never make a mistake, you're probably not doing anything.

Not only was this a great learning experience, but it also created a dialog within the team that it's okay to make mistakes. It also lead to one of our interview questions being -- tell me about a time when you broke something. We all had a good chuckle as we asked this question.

[phayes47]

"Women are like teabags; you never know how strong they are until they're put in hot water." - Eleanor Roosevelt

[maverick]

"The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything."
- Theodore Roosevelt

[Kaadk]

Not quotes by famous people but a few, shall we say, philosophies that are potentially quotable:

“There are no accidents in life, merely choice and consequence. We just unfortunately don’t often understand the consequence derived from our choices.”

And along the same lines:

“There is absolutely nothing in life we ‘have’ to do, provided we’re willing to accept the consequence of our failure to do them.”

But the one I really live by, and use as my signature line on a few different forums is:

“There is no use crying over spilt milk, unless it’s on your keyboard.”




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[beachbum]

"Make visible what, without you, might never have been seen."

- Robert Bresson

[maverick]

"Love the whole world as a mother loves her only child."

- Buddha