When you go into the wilderness, the only thing you can count on is what you take with you.
Halfhearted or insincere apologies are often worse than not apologizing at all because recipients find them insulting.
This student’s eyes widened. “I admit it,” I told him. “I’m a recovering jerk. And that gives me the moral authority to tell you that you can be a recovering jerk, too.” For.
No Job Is Beneath You.
But being considered the best speaker in a computer science department is like being known as the tallest of the Seven Dwarfs.
Two decades later, when I got my PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon, I thought that made me infinitely qualified to do anything, so I dashed off my letters of application to Walt Disney Imagineering. And they sent me the nicest go-to-hell letter I’d ever received.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
We don’t want to create things that people will want to destroy.
When I was interviewing people to work for me, and I came upon a candidate who had been an Eagle Scout, I’d almost always try to hire him. I.
It doesn’t matter how well you polish the underside of the banister.” You.
The second kind of head fake is the really important one – the one that teaches people things they don’t realize they’re learning until well into the process.
Another way to be prepared is to think negatively.
Fear turned to awe when I met my coach, Jim Graham, a hulking, six-foot-four wall-of-a-guy. He had been a line-backer at Penn State, and was seriously old-school. I mean, really old-school; like he thought the forward pass was a trick play. On.
Lucky” is a strange word to use to describe my situation, but a part of me does feel fortunate that I didn’t get hit by the proverbial bus. Cancer has given me the time to have these vital conversations with Jai that wouldn’t be possible if my fate were a heart attack or a car accident.
When we send our kids to play organized sports – football, soccer, swimming, whatever – for most of us, it’s not because we’re desperate for them to learn the intricacies of the sport. What we really want them to learn is far more important: teamwork, perseverance, sportsmanship, the value of hard work, an ability to deal with adversity. This kind of indirect learning is what some of us like to call a “head fake.” There.
Tenacity got me over the brick wall.
There are a few key moments in anyone’s life. A person is fortunate if he can tell in hindsight when they happened.
A professor’s job is to teach students how to see their minds growing in the same way they can see their muscles grow when they look in a mirror.
We now live in an age when parents praise every child as a genius. And here’s my mother, figuring “alert” ought to suffice as a compliment.
Andy, I just gave my students a two-week assignment and they came back and did stuff that, had I given them an entire semester to complete it, I would have given them all A’s. What do I do?” Andy thought for a minute and said: “OK. Here’s what you do. Go back into class tomorrow, look them in the eyes and say, ‘Guys, that was pretty good, but I know you can do better.