Today is going to be a little different than usual. Today I’m going to pass on to you two quotes that I personally find very powerful, in business, in software development, in real estate, and in life in general.

Without further ado, the first quote:

“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.”

– George Bernard Shaw

This is the most powerful quote for me. The reality is that life doesn’t always deal you a great hand. It’s not the hand your dealt that’s as important as how you play it. It’s much like the other famous quote “It took me 10 years to become an overnight success”. People forget that a lot those who made it didn’t have an easy path. They chose to take the hard path, they made the sacrifices, they took the chances (financially, emotionally, etc.), they put themselves out there. Just think of Rollerblades. I’ve heard I don’t know how many people say they thought of the idea before they came out, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But you know what, however true that is, unless you made the jump and did the 99% perspiration to get the idea going, an idea remains just that, an idea. You need to create your luck, you need to create your own circumstances that will let you get ahead!

Darren Rowse of Problogger.net recently wrote a very good article entitled “How to be lucky“. He virtually comes to the same conclusion, luck only comes to those looking for it.

The second quote is from the Navy Seals mantra when training for close quarters combat (an unexpected source), somewhat different than the first.

“Fast is slow. Slow is fast.” Watch your fields of fire, pick your targets, aim center mass, squeeze the trigger. The faster you go, the more mistakes you make. The more mistakes you make, the deeper in the shit you will be. Go slow. Try not to make mistakes. Be one with the battle yet transcend it. Float above the action, survey the scene, target immediate threats, and dispatch them with ruthless efficiency.

Basically it says that if things are going very fast, slow it down. Concentrate on the immediate issues and deal with them with ruthless efficiency in a calm and precise nature. Don’t try to do everything at once, you’ll can’t, you will fail.

I can tell you that with my company LandlordMax we have more work than we have resources. There will always be more work than can be accomplished, that’s the nature of the business. Now, we could take the path of trying to do everything fast, but we’d make a lot of mistakes and everything would be probably be done poorly. We simply would not succeed as a business if we did this. Yes, we might get lucky and get a good start, but it would eventually catch up with us. We would make mistakes with time that would bring down our business.

What we do as a business is follow the philosophy of the quote above. We focus on making sure that every feature and benefit we built is done right, we don’t try to add every featuer possible. For example, in version 2.12 we wanted to add many more features, but each new feature that we could have rushed in for the release probably would’ve caused more errors and bugs. Nobody likes to see buggy error prone software, it’s bad for business. We focused on making sure that every feature we added worked, and that it worked well, period. We focused on the most common and important requests, and we’ll continue to do.

As you can see, both of these two quotes are very powerful. Yes it’s debatable whether or not they should be core life and business philosophies, but there’s no debate as to whether or not they can help you succeed.

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