better or dead!

"Any time you encounter a small annoyance in your daily computer life, think about how you could write a program to help solve that problem. Any time you find something interesting that you want to experiment with, do it. Play with new concepts and tools and languages, as much as possible. Get into the mentality that a day/week/month in which you have not learned something interesting is a failure. But most of all: write code. Every day, even if it's just a regular expression to search through your email history or something. Do something programming-ish as often as you can."

Hippocrates (c. 400BC):
"Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile"
"Life is short, [the] craft long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult."