Yak Shaving
From the tech startup world, here is an example of karma and re-birth in microcosm, well nanocosm:
The biggest thing for me is that I never want to have to solve the same problem twice, ever.... See more
... Defaulting to putting them in public, partly it’s sort of an insurance scheme.
I’ve worked for companies where I did everything in private. And then I le
Karma as ancient progress studies
You should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed say, "Yes, I've stood on so and so's shoulders and I saw further." The essence of science is cumulative. By changing a problem slightly you can often do great work rather than merely good work. Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made th
... See morepaulgraham.com • Richard Hamming: You and Your Research
There are important problems at the center, which tend to be hard, and less important, easier ones at the edges. So as well as the small, daily adjustments involved in working on a specific problem, you'll occasionally have to make big, lifetime-scale adjustments about which type of work to do. And the rule is the same: working hard means aiming to... See more
Paul Graham • How to Work Hard
The thing is, once it's clear what to do, the technical parts may be challenging, but they're pretty much achievable. What's really complicated is everything that happens before that. Before there's a working piece of software, a bunch of people need to communicate through different languages, since there are only humans in between the customer and... See more
Daniel Zacarias • It's Humans all the Way Down | Folding Burritos
In most projects, the first system built is barely usable. It may be too slow, too big, awkward to use, or all three. There is no alternative but to start again, smarting but smarter, and build a redesigned version in which these problems are solved. The discard and redesign may be done in one lump, or it may be done piece-by-piece. But all large-s
... See moreFrederick P. Brooks Jr. • Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary Edition, The: Essays On Software Engineering
Doing great work is a depth-first search whose root node is the desire to. So "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again" isn't quite right. It should be: If at first you don't succeed, either try again, or backtrack and then try again.