Inspiration

This page includes some of the things I find inspiring – quotes, books, movies.
These items changed my life, my way of thinking or just made me think.
I believe you can learn a lot about people by knowing what inspires them.
The items are divided into different categories.

About life and choosing your path in life

Books

Movies

Quotes

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”
– John Lennon, Beautiful Boy

“There’s no problem, only solutions.”
– John Lennon, Watching the Wheels

“It can only end once. Everything before that is progress.”
– Jacob – from the TV series Lost

“- We’ll never make it.
– Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”
– From the movie Princess Bride

“No. Try not. Do… or do not. There is no try”
– Yoda

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known”
– Carl Sagan

“Every step that you take
Could be your biggest mistake
It could bend or it could break
But that’s the risk that you take”
– Coldplay, What If

“Every event is inevitable – if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t happen.”
– O.W. Grant – from the movie Interstate 60

“All things you can see around you,
You can change them
Rearrange them in your mind
If you’ve heard tales of transformation
Well then one two three
You could be the man who played god.”
– Suzanne Vega, The man who played god

“I skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is.”
– Wayne Gretzky

“When I grow up I want to be a little boy.”
– Joseph Heller

“Live your life each day as you would climb a mountain. An occasional glance toward the summit keeps the goal in mind,
but many beautiful scenes are to be observed from each new vantage point. Climb slowly, steadily,
enjoying each passing moment and the view from the summit will serve as a fitting climax for the journey.”
– Harold V. Melchert or Alfred Mond, 1st Baron Melchett

“People will forget what you said. They will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt

Q: How did God manage to create the world in only six days?
A: He didn’t have any installed base to worry about being backward compatible with.
(He also skimped on documentation)

“That’s because great achievement has no road map; and the X-Ray is pretty good, and so is penicillin,
and neither were discovered with a practical objective in mind;
and when the electron was discovered in 1897, it was useless; and now was have an entire world run by electronics.
Hayden and Mozart never studied the classics. They couldn’t. They invented them.”
– Dr. Dalton Millgate – from the TV Series The West Wing (Dead Irish Writers, 2002)

“I used to think I was indecisive… but now I’m not so sure”

 

“Occam’s Razor. The simplest explanation is almost always somebody screwed up.”
– Dr. House from the TV Series House, M.D.

“Oh yeah, we’re all animals.
Just that, some of us have different priorities.
That’s all.”
– O.W. Grant – from the movie Interstate 60

 

Product Design and customer experience

Books

Audio

Lou Carbone’s talk about engineering customer experience (from 2007, but still great)

 

 

Others

Books