Rushing

Great craftsmanship - worth the effort and the wait.

Quoting Peter Norvig’s Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years:

As Auguste Gusteau (the fictional chef in Ratatouille) puts it, “anyone can cook, but only the fearless can be great.” I think of it more as willingness to devote a large portion of one’s life to deliberative practice. But maybe fearless is a way to summarize that. Or, as Gusteau’s critic, Anton Ego, says: “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.”

So go ahead and buy that Java/Ruby/Javascript/PHP book; you’ll probably get some use out of it. But you won’t change your life, or your real overall expertise as a programmer in 24 hours or 21 days. How about working hard to continually improve over 24 months? Well, now you’re starting to get somewhere…

I’m not all that confident the Ratatouille quote does a great job of conveying the idea that there are some things that simply can’t be rushed, yet are well worth waiting (and working) for… but who can object to a well-intentioned reference to an adorable cartoon rat with a great story?

Image from SlashFilm’s review.