The four XP values

Quite by chance I've notice several recent blog entry quotes mention the four XP values:
  • Communication: Community has to do with communication.
  • Simplicity: The art of maximizing the amount of work not done.
  • Feedback: Practicing without feedback is like bowling through a curtain that hangs down to knee level.
  • Courage: One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how relatively few people understand what courage is. The absence of fear is not courage; the absence of fear is some kind of brain damage. Courage is the capacity to go ahead in spite of fear.


The Way of Zen

is an excellent book by Alan Watts. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
For things made are separate parts put together, like machines, or things fashioned from without inwards, like sculptures. Whereas things grown divide themselves into parts, from within outwards.
...as soon as a boundary is defined it has two sides.
Man is involved in karma when he interferes with the world in such a way that he is compelled to go on interfering, when the solution of a problem creates still more problems to be solved.
Form is precisely emptiness; emptiness is precisely form.
When reading a difficult book it is of no help to think, 'I should concentrate,' for one thinks about concentration instead of what the book has to say.
Hurry, and all that it involves, is fatal.
A good haiku is a pebble thrown into the pool of the listener's mind.
If Christianity is wine and Islam coffee, Buddhism is most certainly tea.