If you set a goal of being better than you were yesterday, you have the chance to succeed every day. If you set the goal of being the best in the world, you have the chance to feel so overwhelmed you’ll jump in front of the nearest ice cream truck.

– Naomi Dunford @ IttyBiz

If reading an inspiring quote about DIY creativity makes you wish someone would print it on a t-shirt, you maybe ought to go read it again.

–Merlin Mann aka hotdogsladies @ Twitter

The inspiring quote in question: “Get Excited and Make Things,” as seen in this design by Matt Jones. It’s a great spin on the Brits’ WWII slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

Sadly, I would like that design on a poster.

You need to create a tortoise enclosure so that your little tortoise mind, a little nervous creature, can look around and think “Yes, it’s safe to come out.” And to do this you need to create a kind of oasis in your life in the middle of the stress. [...] There’s two things you have to do: you have to create boundaries of space and you have to create boundaries of time. It’s as simple as that.

– John Cleese, from a talk in Belgium. This bit comes at about 6:45 minutes into the video. A lovely talk.

(via Mark Forster @ Twitter)

When I lived in the back of my Chevy van, I had to dig my typewriter out from beneath layers of tire tools, dirty laundry, and moldering paperbacks. My truck was a nest, a hive, a hellhole on wheels whose sleeping surface I had to clear each night just to carve out a foxhole to snooze in.

The professional cannot live like that. He is on a mission. He will not tolerate disorder. He eliminates chaos from his world in order to banish it from his mind. He wants the carpet vacuumed and the threshold swept, so the Muse may enter and not soil her gown.

– Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

Great book. I wrote a full write-up on it here at the main site.

When I was an Israeli paratrooper a general stopped by to give us a little speech about strategy. In infantry battles, he told us, there is only one strategy: Fire and Motion. You move towards the enemy while firing your weapon. The firing forces him to keep his head down so he can’t fire at you. (That’s what the soldiers mean when they shout "cover me." It means, "fire at our enemy so he has to duck and can’t fire at me while I run across this street, here." It works.)  The motion allows you to conquer territory and get closer to your enemy, where your shots are much more likely to hit their target. If you’re not moving, the enemy gets to decide what happens, which is not a good thing. If you’re not firing, the enemy will fire at you, pinning you down.

I remembered this for a long time. I noticed how almost every kind of military strategy, from air force dogfights to large scale naval maneuvers, is based on the idea of Fire and Motion. It took me another fifteen years to realize that the principle of Fire and Motion is how you get things done in life. You have to move forward a little bit, every day.

– Joel Spolsky @ Joel on Software

If your life were magically transferred to a battlefield what would it look like? Can you see yourself wandering around with an upside down map oblivious to the tank bearing down on you? Are you sitting in The Thinker’s pose amid the hail of bullets?

Reconnaissance and planning both have their place, in war and in life, but are you moving and firing when you need to? Or are you letting others dictate your movements?

Because if you don’t “move like you got a purpose” (as the movie sergeants like to say) and lay down some cover fire, someone else will happily take advantage of your indecision and direct your life for you. And they won’t present it as a choice.