“Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.”
— Doris Lessing

“All progress depends on the unreasonable man. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.”
— George Bernard Shaw

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”
— Jack Kerouac

(Stolen from Rachel, who apparently stole it from Google?)

“I’d rather be a failure at something I love than a success at something I hate.”
— George Burns

“Change. We don’t like it, we fear it, but we can’t stop it from coming. We either adapt to change or we get left behind. And it hurts to grow; anybody who tells you it doesn’t is lying. But heres the truth: The more things change, the more they stay the same. And sometimes, oh, sometimes, change is good. Sometimes, change is everything.”
— from Meredith Grey on Grey’s Anatomy

(Yes, I did just quote a TV character. But come on, it’s a great show, and this is sound advice. Besides, I’ve quoted a muppet before.)

“Journalism can never be silent: That is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air.”
— Henry Anatole Grunwald

I hadn’t heard about this before, but stumbled on it recently and spent an hour listening to Randy Pausch’s last lecture.

Pausch is a highly respected scholar in computer engineering/virtual reality, but he has terminal cancer and was given a few months to live. Seriously, his lecture about achieving your childhood dreams and basically how to live your life is worth listening to for anyone.

Here’s a story about the lecture from earlier this fall in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Here’s a short Wall Street Journal video story to give you a quick snynopsis of the lecture and its point:

The full video, I caught in 10-minute snippets on YouTube, but you can read the transcript, learn more about him or watch it in entirety at the Carnegie Mellon site.

There were a few lessons in particular that struck me from his lecture, but this one was my favorite:

“Brick walls aren’t there to keep us out. Brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop people who don’t want it bad enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”

Ponder that the next time you come upon something that seems impossible or really, really to the point of “is it even worth the effort?” hard. The next time you have an assignment or story you just can’t nail down, plug on and press harder. Prove every person who ever said you can’t, or doubted you would, do something wrong.

“Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you’re at it.”
— Horace Greeley

“Journalism is literature in a hurry.”
— Matthew Arnold

“Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin