Anna Anks > Anna's Quotes

“You get anxious about confronting somebody in your life. That anxiety cripples you and you start wondering why you’re so anxious. Now you’re becoming anxious about being anxious. Oh no! Doubly anxious! Now you’re anxious about your anxiety, which is causing more anxiety. Quick, where’s the whiskey?”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“My recommendation: don’t be special; don’t be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or dismal failure. Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator. The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible. This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that you’re uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented, or intimidatingly attractive, or especially victimized in ways other people could never imagine. This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you’re somehow owed something by this world. This means giving up the supply of emotional highs that you’ve been sustaining yourself on for years. Like a junkie giving up the needle, you’re going to go through withdrawal when you start giving these things up. But you’ll come out the other side so much better.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“When people are trapped in this downward spiral for years, especially those who are downstream of Development, they often feel stuck in a system that pre-ordains failure and leaves them powerless to change the outcomes. This powerlessness is often followed by burnout, with the associated feelings of fatigue, cynicism, and even hopelessness and despair. Many psychologists assert that creating systems that cause feelings of powerlessness is one of the most damaging things we can do to fellow human beings—we deprive other people of their ability to control their own outcomes and even create a culture where people are afraid to do the right thing because of fear of punishment, failure, or jeopardizing their livelihood. This can create the conditions of learned helplessness, where people become unwilling or unable to act in a way that avoids the same problem in the future.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“when projects are late, adding more developers not only decreases individual developer productivity but also decreases overall productivity.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“He concluded that the Lean community missed the most important practice of all, which he called the improvement kata. He explains that every organization has work routines, and the improvement kata requires creating structure for the daily, habitual practice of improvement work, because daily practice is what improves outcomes. The constant cycle of establishing desired future states, setting weekly target outcomes, and the continual improvement of daily work is what guided improvement at Toyota.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Lean defines two types of customers that we must design for: the external customer (who most likely pays for the service we are delivering) and the internal customer (who receives and processes the work immediately after us). According to Lean, our most important customer is our next step downstream. Optimizing our work for them requires that we have empathy for their problems in order to better identify the design problems that prevent fast and smooth flow.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Mike Rother observed in Toyota Kata that in the absence of improvements, processes don’t stay the same—due to chaos and entropy, processes actually degrade over time.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public’s mind while others are neglected. People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“When the question is difficult and a skilled solution is not available, intuition still has a shot: an answer may come to mind quickly—but it is not an answer to the original question. The question that the executive faced (should I invest in Ford stock?) was difficult, but the answer to an easier and related question (do I like Ford cars?) came readily to his mind and determined his choice. This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Practice does not make perfect. It is practice, followed by a night of sleep, that leads to perfection.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams