A startup sent me a revenue graph that grew steeply, then flattened. I asked why. Because they decided to focus on profitability, and had just achiev… - Paul Graham

There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating grad student.

This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what's the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.

One thing I didn't get about technical fields as a kid is that rigor is the standard ideas have to meet, not the source of them. The source is often the cheesiest sort of guessing.