Your first day, your first week in an organization is when you’re observing each detail, figuring out where you stand. That’s when your sense of the … - Ben Horowitz

All the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time on what you might do.

Thanks to Ward Cunningham, the computer programmer who designed the first wiki, the metaphor “technical debt” is now a well-understood concept. While you may be able to borrow time by writing quick and dirty code, you will eventually have to pay it back — with interest. Often this trade-off makes sense, but you will run into serious trouble if you fail to keep the trade-off in the front of your mind. There also exists a less understood parallel concept, which I will call management debt. Like technical debt, management debt is incurred when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive, long-term consequence. Like technical debt, the trade-off sometimes makes sense, but often does not. More important, if you incur the management debt without accounting for it, then you will eventually go management bankrupt.

Watered-down feedback can be worse than no feedback at all because it’s deceptive and confusing to the recipient.