Marita’s Blog

If you don’t have an answer that inspires you, fills you with passion, makes you proud or livens you up, then think of one.

Otherwise, why are you doing what you are doing?

JPL, NASA and Boeing do not hire R&D problem solvers who have not played with their hands before, not even people from MIT or Caltech.
Fewer than one of three executives who reach upper- echelon positions hold an MBA. Business Week
Ross Perot, former presidential candidate and billionaire, never attended college.
Joan Withers, CEO of Fairfax Media New Zealand, didn’t finish high school.
Going to uni to get a computer science degree doesn’t make you a great programmer.

The best way to learn is through practise. To learn how to program, program; to learn maths, do maths; to learn a language, practise the language; to learn how to start-up a company, start up a company; to learn how to be a salesperson, sell stuff to people. You probably won’t get it right the first time, and you probably won’t get it right the second time. But the more times you do it, the more likely you’ll eventually get it right.

JPL, NASA and Boeing believe that if you haven’t played around with a car’s internals, or fiddled around with electronics, then you can’t problem solve. What matters is what you can do, not what a piece of paper says you can do.

I admire Seth Godin and his marketing insights, so my website looks kind of like his.

I admire Richard Branson and his go-getter attitude, so I wrote him a letter and handed it in to his office personally.

I admire Steve Jobs and his attention to aesthetics, so I always keep the simplicity and beauty of Apple products in mind whenever I design anything, and I always think of his zen presentations when I’m preparing my own.

I admire my mum and all the effort she put in to bringing my brother and I up, so I put effort into the things I do.

When we admire someone or something, we aspire to be like them or have something like it; and so it shapes the course of action we decide to take. Who are your role models? Why do you want to be like them?

Are you acknowledging your team for all the hard work they’ve put in?
For all their efforts?
For all their long hours?
For what they’ve produced?

I want to acknowledge you for the respect you’ve created for yourself in your team, and the freedom and space you’ve given everyone to be empowered to do a good job and create a great project.

Team leaders, everything that happens in your team occurs in the space you’ve created for them. If you’re a stand for the project, they will be. If you’re passionate, they will be. If you appreciate their efforts, they will appreciate yours.

- The red pill or the blue pill?
- What should we call our team?
- What should I wear today?
- What should we call our robot?
- How many pizzas should we order?
- What type of game should we design?
- Is he Mr. Perfect? Is there someone better out there?
- Should I study what I’m studying?

Often, we think that the more options and more flexibility we have, the better. And so we spend a lot of our time diverging from our course in order to ensure none of our options diminish completely.

We spend so much time running to keep all these doors open that we don’t actually get the chance to take the hinges off a door and toss that door aside. Rather than run around confused outside; choose a door, unscrew the hinges, and step inside.

Before Steve Jobs took the helm at Apple again in 1997, Apple was selling over 300 products, each only slightly different to the next. Steve came in and said something to the degree of, if I get confused by why version 5.017B is better for me than version 5.017A, then what hope does the average consumer have? He then listened to Apple employees explain each product and their benefits, and then scrapped 300 to 4. Now look at Apple.

Researchers have found that people who stop at market stalls with only a few varieties of a product spend less time, and are more likely to make a purchase than at stalls which have over 20 varieties of the same product.

Sony doesn’t need to release 7 versions each time it releases a product, and the simple layout of Facebook means a newcomers’ profile looks just as clean and professional as a veteran’s.

KISS. Keep it simple. There is enough clutter in the world.

To someone who cannot see, the sky isn’t blue. To someone who hasn’t opened the box, Schrödinger’s cat is still alive (maybe). To the men who called Galileo a fool, the earth was the centre of the universe, and the Sun revolved around the Earth.

Too often, we pigeon hole our thoughts by subjecting objects and people to ‘is’ sentences.

About mathematics:
Person #1: Mathematics is hard.
Person #2: Mathematics is easy.

According to wikipedia,

Mathematics is the study of quantity, structure, space, change, and related topics of pattern and form. Mathematicians seek out patterns whether found in numbers, space, natural science, computers, imaginary abstractions, or elsewhere.

Mathematics is not hard, and it is not easy. But saying it is, makes it so for you.

So essentially, you can create how anything in the world occurs for you. You can create whether it is a lovely day. Or not. Whether a person is smart. Or not. Whether that person is making me angry. Or not.

What you say to yourself creates your world.

… if you want it badly enough.

If you want to be a professor at a university, then you’ll do research there for 10 years until you get your professorship. If you want to buy a new computer with all the latest features, you’ll earn your own money, forgo nights out to save every penny, and get your computer. If you want to build a company, you’ll set up a company. If you fail, you’ll set up another one.

When you choose what you want, and you want it so badly, all of your actions become consistent with what you’re out to achieve.

However, you can’t change the past, you can’t change the minds of Google’s recruitment team and you can’t make a bus coming towards you stop just by wanting it to stop.

Unless you can time-travel, you can’t change the past. So what happened, happened. Get over it and move on. With recruitment, make yourself and your application so compelling that you give yourself the best chance for the job. Want to be a software engineer at Google? Code like crazy! Learn the tricks and immerse yourself in what you’re interested in, contribute to open source projects, do stuff for recognition, don’t do stuff for recognition, do stuff. Learn! Work on yourself to have what they want so they want to have you. Want to make a bus stop? Stick our your arm.

If you want something badly enough, you’ll get into action. Just don’t forget to have fun along the way!

If a tooth has a cavity, putting plastic on top of the cavity won’t fix the problem. The tooth will continue to ache and rot, and eventually the tooth will die.

To fix a cavity, you have to drill the hole until you’ve broken through all the decay, clean the hole thoroughly and only then fill it with plastic.

If you’re avoiding someone, or making someone wrong, consider that’s a cavity. To repair the relationship, don’t just plaster something nice on top of what’s already there. Get through all the decay and sort through all the guck- how you’ve been being a jerk, how you’ve been making them wrong, the stupid reason you’ve been harbouring about why you did what you did, etc. Be really straight with them, and create the space for a new friendship or the next stage in a friendship, with solid foundations.

is unique.
has contributed to the world in some way.
is perfect.
has changed someone else’s life.
is complete.
has made a difference, just by being there.
has loved.
has laughed.
has been wrong.
has been right.

We are all human.