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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.

Primary care is unique in health care. It cannot be managed the same way as other parts of health care where the emphasis has rightly been on streamlining and cutting waste from a bloated system. At the heart of primary care’s success remains a unique relationship between physicians and patients built on trust.

Babies commonly have a growth spurt between 2 to 3 weeks, 4 to 6 weeks, and again at about 3 months. It is important to let your baby feed more often during these spurts. Generally, you should not need to supplement with formula during these times. In a few days, your baby will go back to a more normal pattern.

We predicted that engaging in a visuospatial task during memory reconsolidation would compete for working memory resources with visual imagery and interfere with the reconsolidation of intrusive memories. There are dual-task experiments indicating that when similar cognitive tasks compete for shared resources, they interfere with each other and thereby impede memory processing; for example, a visuospatial pattern-tapping task interfered with holding a visual mental image in mind (rendering it less vivid and emotional),

Best practices from smart people are great and all, but remember—not everything you read about will work within your specific business, market and team. You may be too early-stage for a highly opinionated way of building. Your company may already work in a way that makes it impossible to work differently. You may not have a team that wants to change.

The peculiar stew of old school "keep Austin weird" iconoclasm, paired with one of the highest concentrations of info marketers and New Age lifestyle coaches in the country, Burners, anti-vaxx UFC podcaster bros, God, Guns and Guts Evangelicals, a slug of crytpo currency Silicon Valley libertarians and Don't Mess with Texas homesteading tax resisters...

To find the one program that might be a real game-changer, you probably have to sift through 10 other ideas. Maybe some of the marketing strategies sounded brilliant on paper, but when you get into the execution, you realize that many assumptions were incorrect. You need to focus your team’s energy on nurturing the seeds that have the most promise — and divest from the ones that don’t

Statistics–seeing the world around us clearly and understanding nuance, analog results and taxometrics (learning how to sort like with like). Realizing that everyone and everything doesn’t fit into a simple box. Learning to see the danger of false labels and propaganda, and the power of seeing how things are actually distributed.

The civilians aboard United Airlines Flight 93, whose resistance forced the plane to crash into a Pennsylvania field rather than the U.S. Capitol, were later lionized as emblems of swashbuckling Americana. But one offhand detail in the 9/11 Commission report underscores just how American their defiance was. The passengers had made phone calls when the hijacking began and had learned the fate of other aircraft that day. “According to one call, they voted on whether to rush the terrorists in an attempt to retake the plane,” the commission report states. “They decided, and acted.”

After the invention of photography, artists and collectors had to come to terms with the fact that an artist can produce an unlimited number of identical prints of any photograph. The art world’s practical answer to the question of authenticity, and thus collectibility, in the era of mechanical reproduction was signed editions.

Imagine your child actually gets COVID-19. What should you expect? 

First, the broad technological future is pretty clear: there will be ever faster cellular networks, far more numerous Wi-Fi “hotspots” and many more gadgets to connect to these networks. Second, the social changes are already visible: parents on beaches waving at their children while typing furtively on their BlackBerrys; entrepreneurs discovering they don't need offices after all (if you need to recharge something, you just go to Starbucks); teenagers text-dumping their boyfriends. Everybody is doing more on the move.

We’ve intentionally avoided any public counts. We don’t want Glass ever to become a popularity contest. We’re not home for influencers. We are a home for photographers.

“Over time, this general sense may grow of ‘Why are we who are vaccinated enduring this in order to coddle this liberty fantasy of the unvaccinated?’ And I think that is going to get stronger as the inconvenience grows, and as the wind goes out of the getting-back-to-normal sails, which is clearly happening. Everybody I know is pissed off.”

regardless of whether you’re focused on fundraising, selling, or product, as a CEO you’re responsible for the output of the entire organization. In my current role at the company, I think of myself as an information router, so my primary job is to unblock everyone else on the team to operate at peak efficiency.

At the end of that five minute sequence, I ended up with no valuable additional information. In this instance, Twitter played the role of an ephemeral anxiety delivery device. Is that really how I want to spend my time online? Given how much I use social feeds to consume news, I don’t even know if that’s a rhetorical question. For the last two years I’ve thought a lot about whether I am lightly addicted to information that gives me a low grade level of worry.

And as these loyalists harm themselves and expose all of us to unnecessary and preventable risk, publications—including this one—have run articles sympathetically explaining the recalcitrance of the unvaccinated. These tales are 2021’s version of the Trump safaris of 2017, when journalists traveled through the Midwest to seek enlightenment in diners and gas stations.

We will also work fully remotely two days a week, 3 weeks a year, and for the month of July, to keep our remote muscle working.

I propose using a simple taxonomy of related activities that put it in context.

I told her I felt like all I did every day was try to act normal while watching the world end, watching the lake recede from the shore, and the river film over, under the sun, an enormous and steady weight. There’s only one thing I have to say about climate change, I said, and that’s that I want it to rain, a lot, but it’s not going to rain a lot, and since that’s the only thing I have to say and it’s not going to happen, I don’t have anything to say. I said I had one more thing to say, which was that I didn’t even want to talk to my friends about it because of course none of them were doing well either and I just didn’t want to talk about how afraid and how sad I was because if I told them then I would just make them feel worse so that basically meant that I was never actually telling anyone what I was thinking so I just felt full of feelings that would be better not expressed and at this point I felt that my relationships were becoming yet another casualty of (points at relentlessly blue sky) “this.”