Quotes About Improvement

Left untended, knowledge and skill, like all assets, depreciate in value—surprisingly quickly. —DAVID MAISTER, BUSINESS AUTHOR AND CONSULTANT

Concentrate more on your achievements than your failures. Learn to take the failures as opportunities to rectify your errors.

Regardless of how far we have come, we are still looking for answers. While many are being answered, what we really want to know is how we can make our lives better.

If there is something you think you can do well, perfect the action.

The growth and improvement of New York was a wonderful example of the vast and irrevocable benefits reaped by the English empire during the four years when England was at peace and her rivals were at war. Yet in every other English colony, from the Carolinas northward, the immeasurable disasters of the great Algonquin wars set colonial development back by more than thirty years. New York alone was spared. New York alone had Andros.

A guy came to the shop every day. A lot of guys put the foam like stuff that forms to you, kinda like the Indy car guys run. He fitted it up and it felt real good, so we're going to try to run it.

Poor collection of rents may provide you with an opportunity to create value, but remember: the price you pay for the apartment complex should reflect the value of the property as it is currently operating, not what it would be if all of the rents were being collected. The value is created only after you have acquired the property and made the necessary changes to improve collections.

I prefer looking for properties that are more than 90 percent occupied and that just look a little rough from the outside due to poor management and neglect.

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly – until you learn to do it well.

If you do what you've always done, your life will not get better.

The only animals I'm not comfortable with are parrots, but I'm learning as I go. I'm getting better and better at 'em. I really am.

I think we're having fun. I think our customers really like our products. And we're always trying to do better.

As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what's happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don't seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.

Well, it's a start, but basically it stinks!

If you want a great site, you've got to test. After you've worked on a site for even a few weeks, you can't see it freshly anymore. You know too much. The only way to find out if it really works is to test it.

And not just the right thing; it's profoundly the right thing to do, because the one argument for accessibility that doesn't get made nearly often enough is how extraordinarily better it makes some people's lives. How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people's lives just by doing our job a little better?

Look around you. Everything changes. Everything on this earth is in a continuous state of evolving, refining, improving, adapting, enhancing… changing. You were not put on this earth to remain stagnant."

Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, "How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?"

The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.

Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, 'How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?' Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer.

Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software-development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find.

usually more time is spent in making good-looking presentation slides than in improving the quality of the software.

A blanket attempt to avoid mistakes is the biggest mistake of all.