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.
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.
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.