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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.