Persistence beats timing. Execution beats luck. Not immediately, but eventually.

Timing beats speed...precision beats power.

Speed and efficiency do not always increase the quality of life.

First, when we are busy, we naturally believe that we are achieving. But busyness does not equal productivity. Activity is not necessarily accomplishment. Second, prioritizing requires leaders to continually think ahead, to know what's important, to know what's next, to see how everything relates to the overall vision. That's hard work. Third, prioritizing causes us to do things that are at the least uncomfortable and sometimes downright painful.

I had prioritized one thing at the expense of everything.

The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.

Most organizations I've worked with have too many top priorities to achieve the level of focus they need to succeed.

You had to make your choice between survival and efficiency, though in the long run survival was optimum efficiency, no matter how much time and effort it took.

I believe one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right than to be effective

It is more trouble to make a maxim than to do right.

Schedules prioritize coordination over creativity.

It’s a classic case of misplaced accounting priorities, valuing depreciable capital assets a thousand times more highly than the fruits of actual labor—but that’s the nature of the government organization.

In an ExO world, purpose trumps strategy and execution overrides planning.

It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.