Randy Pausch Quotes

It's always the organizations that are resource constrained that come up with the good ideas to win.

Engineering is the application of scientific principles toward practical ends. If the engineering isn't practical, it's bad engineering.

Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need.

We have to learn how to work within the limits that are possible, not what is desirable.

Low budgets force you to be more creative. Sometimes, with too much money, time and equipment, you can over-think. My way, you can use your gut instinct.

Technology makes things faster and more cost-effective, but it's not perfect. It requires you to be as flexible as you can be.

It's always good to have a limit because it forces you to think about all the ways to get what you want.

If you see something that doesn't make sense, ask. Change it. Think about dollars, think about your soldiers' time, think about efficiency.

I think the whole thing that Jamie [Hyneman] and I have in working together is that we are constantly simplifying each other's designs, and we both appreciate that the quickest and the dirtiest solution is usually the most elegant, the least expensive, and the fastest.

There's no such thing as a perfect play. Sometimes you have to protect the life of the play.

No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people.

The most basic inherent constraint is that neither time nor wisdom are free goods available in unlimited quantity. This means that in social processes, as in economic processes, it is not only impossible to attain perfection but irrational to seek perfection- or even to seek the best possible result in each separate instance.

To be always ready a man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied.

Constraint inspires creativity

Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.

The art model of problem solving is incredibly efficient because ideology has no place there.There's only the thing and what the thing needs to be.

I just know once you're over your emotional outbursts, you'll come up with-' I mean if we even had a wheelbarrow, that would be something,' Westley said.

Ask yourself always: how can this be done better?

No matter how smart you are, you're smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.

I have one very basic rule when it comes to "good ideas". A good idea is not an idea that solves a problem cleanly. A good idea is an idea that solves several things at the same time. The mark of good coding is not that the program does what you want, it's that it also does something that you didn't start out wanting.

It's can you, Steve Wozniak, design the same computer - maybe it's a Varian 620i - can you design it on paper with fewer chips than last month? Can you design it with 79 chips instead of 80 chips? I had played this game so long that I had all these little tricks in my head that I can't even explain... Nothing was wasted; absolutely zero waste. I told this story recently to the Resource Recovery Association, recycling, and they loved to hear I didn't believe in waste.

If he [Thomas Edison] had a needle to find in a haystack, he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. ... [J]ust a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.

Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.

The best substitute for money is ingenuity.

Everything that I make I use.