Quote
Why We Encrypt
Every time you use encryption, you're protecting someone who needs to use it to stay alive.
This is the clearest statement I’ve seen of the case for ubiquitous, on-by-default encryption.
You do not need permission
You do not need permission to do the right thing. No one can give you permission to do the wrong thing.
One in a million is next Tuesday
Gordon’s response was simply: “In our business, one in a million is next Tuesday”.
I just ran across this great bit of advice I got back in 1995 from Larry Wall, creator of Perl:
Don't get brainwashed by your education into thinking that all the answers have to come from teachers.
Merlin Mann in Back To Work #41:
If you're not asking the right question, then there is no correct answer.
Mart Laar, Prime Minister of Estonia (1992-1994 and 1999-2002):
I was young and crazy… I didn’t know what is possible and what’s not, so I did impossible things.
On Failing Successfully
Inspired by an episode of the Ockham’s Razor podcast:
I want to argue that failure doesn’t get the credit it deserves. If you want to understand success, you must appreciate the ubiquity of failure, and if you’re not regularly failing, you’re not trying hard enough.
William McKnight, Chairman of the Board at 3M Corporation, 1949-1966:
As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way.
Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs.
Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.