Everything I share — writing, short curated lists, and links. You can also find me on Threads.
We think of certain kinds of challenges as *really hard* when they are, in fact, *completely impossible*. And then we drive ourselves crazy trying to deal with them – thereby distracting and disempowering ourselves from tackling the *real* really hard things that make life worth living.
The Musk School is as much about cultivating the individual executive’s brand as it is about running an actual company. Its practitioners see themselves as visionaries, and they can often point to the early success of their companies as evidence. But they also believe that the skills they perceive as having in one area are applicable elsewhere—in particular, the messy art of managing people.
There’s something magical about being big enough to have “big city” amenities (bike shares, public transport, bars, food music, etc..) while being small enough that there are not too many options for people to choose between.
any new technology is probably disruptive to *someone,* at some part of the value chain. The iPhone disrupted the handset business, but has not disrupted the cellular network operators at all, though many people were convinced that it would. (For all that’s changed, the same companies still have the same business model and the same customers that they did in 2006.) Online flight booking didn’t disrupt airlines much, but it was hugely disruptive to travel agents. Online booking (for the sake of argument) was sustaining innovation for airlines and disruptive innovation for travel agents.
The least successful people I know run in conflicting directions, are drawn to distractions, say yes to almost everything, and are chained to emotional obstacles.
Moving to Austin is the geographical equivalent of saying: “I don’t read the news anymore.” The people moving here are tired of others telling them what to think, which is why the people here are so much less likely to police your speech.
A truth that applies to almost every field is that it’s possible to try too hard, and when doing so you can get worse results than those who knew less, cared less, and put in less effort than you did.
Things you use for a significant fraction of your life (bed: 1/3rd, office-chair: 1/4th) are worth investing in.
Rushing through tasks and chores like we need to get to the next thing only creates an experience of life that blends together in a dull soup. But what if we could elevate the moments of our lives to something special, sacred, alive? What if cooking soup for dinner became a transcendent experience? A moment of transcendence is something each of us has experienced: when we feel incredibly connected to the world around us, when we lose our sense of separate self and feel a part of something bigger. It’s that moment when you’re at the top of a mountain looking with awe on everything around you, or looking up at the stars, or floating in the ocean, or having your breath taken away by a sunset or field of flowers. We can intentionally create these moments, with practice, in our everyday lives. As you’re doing everything on your list, as you’re washing the dishes or having a conversation, driving home or eating kale and beans … you can elevate that moment into one of transcendence.
This crash - to whatever extent it continues - may end up damaging many millions more lives than the ones in 2017/2018 simply because more people have been exposed to crypto through hucksters and celebrities telling them this was the future. And just like the rest of the startup world, the crypto industry massively overhired to deal with the rush of new money and excitement in the industry, with clearly no strategy to prepare for the thing that crypto is best known for - crashing.
When the company is the first to give a number, you always get the job, and you have a 50% chance of getting a high salary.
People are saying that value investing is dead. That Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are dead. They are not dead, and these ideas are not dead. They are timeless ideas. They are ideas that say that a business today is the present value of its future cash flows; that a business has a competitive advantage when there's something structural in its supply, or its brand, or its pricing power, or its ability to have a monopoly on intellectual property or government licensing. There's real things that make real businesses. And __the value that you provide to the customer is then in the pricing power that you have and in the margins that you make. And contrary to the scarcity of the word today, *profits* are a great measure of the value that you provide to people.__
In school, everything is planned for kids with strict rules. They’re constantly being evaluated and directed. They’re told what to do, what to think, and even what to wear! One survey found that the average kid has to follow twice as many restrictions as an active-duty Marine and an incarcerated felon.
Humans naturally copy the energy of the people they’re around. As a result, you can shape the conversation by *how* you say what you say.
Video games are essentially simulations. They give kids a chance to practice solving complex problems that mirror real life. The thinking skills they need to win games set them up for success as adults.
Research shows that kids who play games to escape real life (that is, to block unpleasant emotions or avoid confronting real-life stress) have a very difficult time translating their game skills to real life. This approach tends to increase depression, worsen social isolation, and in cases lead to addiction.
All too often, a metaphorical pillory is erected upon the Twitter platform, to unrelentingly bludgeon the Outrage Target of the Day™ with rotting projectiles, no clear purpose or goal in sight. Why ask for an apology if you won’t accept it when it is given? What correction can be made for a bad tweet besides removing the tweet? Is the goal to actually, truly address the specific offensive tweet and generally discourage online sexism and misogyny — or simply to stoke the fires by which the online rage mob can light their torches?
We each have a noise in our heads, an agenda and something urgent that’s grabbing our attention. And so, the amount of interest you receive (or don’t receive) has little to do with how interesting you are and a lot to do with how the people you seek to serve have organized their priorities long before you got there.
Productivity is a measure of the value of what we ship in the time we’ve got to invest. It’s not measured in drama.
Most of us are able to respond to a feedback loop in the short run. The real opportunity and challenge is to get much better at recognizing the long loops.
You don't want to be in a career where people who have been doing it for two years can be as effective as people who have been doing it for twenty—your rate of learning should always be high. As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results.
the most common conflict failure mode at a startup is when the leadership disagrees on what should happen, but no one speaks up because it’s uncomfortable to do so.
Watching these shows, there’s a sense of someone whispering look what you made me do. They can’t decide whether their heroes are deluded assholes or low-key aspirational #goals. In some narratives, that sort of ambivalence is compelling; in these shows, it mostly feels hazy, like the ethical compass of the show itself is spinning wildly, demagnetized in some way by the haze of the narrative norms of the biopic. I mean, these shows are fine. But apart from The Dropout’s precise evocation of mid-2000s fashion, they’re also unmemorable.
Easy startups are easy to start but hard to make successful. The most precious commodity in the startup ecosystem right now is talented people, and for the most part talented people want to work on something they find meaningful.
The most impressive people I know care a lot about what people think, even people whose opinions they really shouldn’t value (a surprising numbers of them do something like keeping a folder of screenshots of tweets from haters). But what makes them unusual is that they generally care about other people’s opinions on a very long time horizon—as long as the history books get it right, they take some pride in letting the newspapers get it wrong.
A small productivity gain, compounded over 50 years, is worth a lot. So it’s worth figuring out how to optimize productivity. If you get 10% more done and 1% better every day compared to someone else, the compounded difference is massive.
At home, work is especially leaky: Leisure bleeds into labor (reading TMZ during a Zoom meeting) and work seeps into leisure (answering emails at the dinner table).
Drawn to the laid-back lifestyle and lower cost of living — relatively speaking — nearly 185 people are moving to Austin on a daily basis. Many of those people work in the tech industry, and many are moving from California.
Hundreds of point solutions across dozens of Gartner quadrants solve subsets of these problems, but these narrowly-focused products cannot solve administrative challenges across systems. It’s not surprising that total factor productivity has stagnated, despite an explosion of productivity software tools promising the opposite. Not only do point solutions fail to accelerate productivity, their sprawl is actually slowing things down:
She likes Slack, but she sees how it can get to be too much. “Sometimes I felt that I needed to mute every single channel in order to get stuff done.
My Friday ritual is to do a cool down to prep for the week before the Daniel Craig Weekend meme hits. I'll change the scenery to focus on, such as a walk, moving to another room in the house, or going to a cafe outdoors. The purpose is to put all the weekly reflections and subsequent week planning down on paper. This might be a checklist of what you need to do or start planning the week out. We should be entering the weekend like Roman Soldiers marching back through the Arch of Triumph; cleansing ourselves before re-entering the haven that is the weekend—leaving the baggage on the battlefield of the workweek.
Most business models require companies to sell more products consistently. At best, this forces businesses to constantly develop and market new products to new customers — rather than making the experience for existing customers the best it can be. Pharmaceutical companies are great examples of this: They need to keep selling more stuff to stay above water, so they have no incentive to focus on long-term value for those who have already made a purchase.
Good ideas are easy to write, bad ideas are hard. Difficulty is a quality signal, and writer’s block usually indicates more about your ideas than your writing.
According to Brook’s law, the number of communication paths grows at a faster rate than the number of people you add to the group. As a result, what worked for a small team of 10 won’t work for a team of 40. Actively designing and tending to the tools & process is essential.
Sherlock Holmes, in BBC’s rendition, builds a fabled mind palace, an imaginary castle in which to stash his clues and concepts for later recall. Mere mortals with our average powers of recollection turn instead to notes and bookmarking apps, with their promises to be our “second brain” and help us “remember everything.”
While many politicians earnestly believed their Covid policies necessary and good, it is impossible not to notice these policies also afforded our political leaders sweeping new power over the lives of ostensibly free people. Beyond the world of elected power, on questions related to the nature of the pandemic from which these new political powers draw legitimacy, media companies policed our information landscape for dissent, and social media companies erased that dissent from the internet. All of this was managed unofficially in tandem, and with ruthless efficiency. Tensions flared. Flaring tensions were further repressed. Backlash was inevitable, and in Ontario that backlash manifested on the road.
Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought.
This metagame ends up giving players the habit of looking at every situation by asking: what's the best way to automate this, and what dependencies of other automations are threatened if I do? This is, for developers and for the many, many people whose jobs will involve more software development over time, a very good habit indeed. I tried to crank through some emails right after playing Factorio one time, and realized—I urgently need to write some email snippets. This just can't be allowed to exist in an un-automated state! But if I'm going to use a lot of email snippets, I need a consistent way to manage them lest I end up with five different iterations on "Yes, let's talk about that; here's my Calendly."
If those dreams become realized, you’ll probably end up buying crap and yelling at people through a head-mounted display, instead of through your smartphone. Sure, calling that a metaverse probably sounds better. Just like “the cloud” sounds better than, you know, a server farm where people and companies rent disk space.
High school taught me big words. College rewarded me for using big words. Then I graduated and realized that intelligent readers outside the classroom don’t want big words. They want complex ideas made simple.
Facebook Marketplace is the world’s second-largest marketplace, in terms of monthly active users, behind only Amazon.
Delicious represents choices that have been made. Delicious is a learning machine, and it has done learnt a shitload about what is not shit on the internet.
But the point of these phrases is to fill space. No matter where I’ve worked, it has always been obvious that if everyone agreed to use language in the way that it is normally used, which is to communicate, the workday would be two hours shorter.
adults talk way too much — like 80 percent too much. What happens is that they end up babbling and a 5-year-old says something like, “I hate you,” sidetracking the conversation and getting out of any responsibility. Using fewer words helps that.
Well, our kids live in a world of immediate gratification. The internet, the iPads, the ease of everything. Because there are so many ways right now to get around frustration, you have to be mindful to raise kids who learn how to tolerate it. But what would cultivate happiness? The work, the intention, the frustration, the failure. That used to be the pathway to happiness. Maybe we’re spending more time with our kids, but the ease of things makes it harder to build pathways that lead to longer-term happiness.
So herein lies the Great Tension:
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the health-care sector has lost nearly half a million workers since February 2020. Morning Consult, a survey research company, says that 18 percent of health-care workers have quit since the pandemic began, while 12 percent have been laid off.
Here’s the thing—even before the pandemic (this was a real time, there are pictures and everything) different people had different capacities for doing things. But even people with the exact same capacity for a thing don’t have to do those things at the same rate, or at all.
The interest from investors, which also include TCG, Tiger Global Management, Canaan, Initialized Capital and Seven Seven Six, speaks to the growing recognition that a person’s “health” isn’t limited to the doctor’s office — a combination of socioeconomic factors from access to transportation to distance to a grocery store play a role in long-term healthcare costs.
Marketing and sales shouldn’t stop once someone becomes a customer. Customers need to know about new features (and feel excited about them), learn best practices, and understand how the product can be used and what makes it worth spending money on so they can defend the spend to their leadership team.