"You must remember that anyone under 30 — especially a ballplayer — is an adolescent,” he once told me. “I never got close to being an adult until I was 32. Even though I was married and had a son at 20, I was a kid at 32, living at home with my parents. Sure, I was a manager then. That doesn’t mean you’re grown up.
“Until you’re the person that other people fall back on, until you’re the one that’s leaned on, not the person doing the leaning, you’re not an adult. You reach an age when suddenly you realize you have to be that person. Divorce did it to me. It could be elderly parents, children . . . anything. But one day you realize, ‘It’s me. I’ve got to be the rock.’ "
How long you spent on it.
How hard it was to implement.
How clean your architecture is.
How extensible it is.
How well it runs on your machine.
How great it will be once all their friends are on it.
How amazing the next version will be.
Whose fault the problems are.
What you think they should be interested in.
What you expected.
What you were promised.
How important this is to you.
I have to keep relearning these lessons. Finding an experience that people love is far more precious and rare than most of us realize.
Eggs were often beaten in copper bowls. Why copper bowls? Chefs might have been able to give you some kind of reason, but it would have sounded silly to scientific ears. But the modernists discovered that the ions in the copper ended up forming complex bonds with the conalbumin in the eggs.
- Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit
The reason why copper bonding with conalbumin is desirable is that the conalbumin-copper complex is more stable than the conalbumin alone, so egg whites whipped in a copper bowl are less likely to denature (unfold).
