There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.

Originality is no excuse for ignorance.

Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.

But I will argue that knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm.

...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.

System debugging has always been a graveyard-shift occupation, like astronomy.

You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you're forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality.