Success Quote by Linus Torvalds

There is a kind of anti-prophetic swagger in Torvalds' shrug at "long-range plans": it reads less like a self-help mantra and more like an engineer's allergy to performative certainty. In tech culture, vision is often a status symbol, a way to launder ambition into inevitability. Torvalds punctures that. By framing planning as a liability, he flips the usual hierarchy: adaptability becomes the higher intelligence, and grand narratives start to look like overfitting.

The intent is practical, almost bluntly procedural. Software is a live system, fed by edge cases, user behavior, security holes, and the inconvenient fact that reality keeps shipping updates. Long-range visions can harden into dogma; they create sunk-cost pride, roadmaps that must be defended, and organizations that confuse compliance with progress. His line suggests a different ethic: keep your commitments small enough that new information can actually change your mind.

The subtext is also cultural politics. Torvalds helped birth open-source development, where authority is earned through working code and rapid iteration, not through mission statements. "Anything new that comes up" isn't an annoyance; it's the point. It's the bug report, the unexpected contributor, the hardware shift, the market turn. Avoiding visions isn't a lack of imagination so much as a refusal to let imagination masquerade as control.

Context matters, too: tech's obsession with "the future" often functions as a distraction from accountability in the present. Torvalds' minimalism reads like a quiet rebuke to that theater.