Article; originally an internal Microsoft memo by Bill Gates
- "I assign the Internet the highest level of importance... The Internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981."
- The confidence he projects in his assessment is extraordinary
- Saw the importance of HTML: it's simplicity and ease of use will make it viral
- Saw that mainstream communications technology at the time was old and neglected, monopolized by large telcos; the Internet was at the forefront of a revolution in the technology that would change everything
- Saw the Internet in its network effect: the more users, the more content; the more content, the more users
- Saw an inversion in ease and quality: public networks (e.g. Internet) were easier and higher quality than private networks (e.g. Microsoft's internal)
- Saw the momentum around the Internet, and how it was going to improve as a community, so "all we can do is get involved and take advantage"
- Compared Microsoft's developments with direct competitors and how they (MS) were lacking
- "Once a format gets established it is extremely difficult for another format to come along and even become equally popular" -- switching costs
- "I believe the Internet will become our most important promotional vehicle and paying people to include links to our home pages will be a worthwhile way to spend advertising dollars"
- Determined to demonstrate that a Windows machine on the Internet is worth more than any arbitrary machine
- Puts in writing very strong action points for every group in the company: what they should focus on, where they are lacking, how it all meshes together
- The Internet is a tidal wave. It changes the rules. It is an incredible opportunity as well as incredible challenge...
Article; originally by Vannevar Bush
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"A new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge"
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Previously, science and technology improved material (physical) aspects of life (e.g. food, clothing, etc)
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Identified that the exponential scale of knowledge and information has become cumbersome, even hindering, to progress
- "Truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential"; noise vs signal
- "Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few."
- "We can enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it"
- A prime problem is filtering and selection; have we made advancements (e.g. predicive AIs) that make this mechanically easier?
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Some ideas are meant to be realized at a certain time; some are too ahead of theirs (previously, complexity was synomonous with unreliability; speed with cost; etc)
- "The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it."
- What advancements have led to previous ahead-of-time ideas to be plausible?
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"For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things."
- Mechanical aspects at the time could be obviously improved
- What creative aspects are actually mostly mechanical (and can thus be automated)? Is there a big enough market for them?
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On creativity and releasing humans from the mechanical rigours often required to be creative:
A mathematician is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He is not even a man who can readily perform the transformations of equations by the use of calculus. He is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the manipulative processes he employs.
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Our protocols may be broken; human brains don't function through indexing or categorization, we associate
- In data structures: hash tables vs linked lists
- "The process of tying two items together is the important thing."
- You'd don't have to be the innovator to make innovative products
- Look at what's already working produces the quickest results; "robbing a few gas stations... while planning the perfect crime"
- Don't fall into "not invented here" syndrome; external ideas == others doing the market research for you!
- Look small or far away; those businesses often have a different perspective and have ideas at extremes (for you)
- Strategy:
- Find a promising new idea
- Improve on it (either functionality or cost)
- Out-execute the competition using your strengths
- ???
- Profit
- Think different doesn't necessarily mean YOU thinking differently; it means what you produce
- Main factors in determining if you or someone else will profit from your innovation:
- How hard is it to replicate? Patents, trade secrets, regulation only benefit incumbents, think about network effects, switching costs, etc instead!
- How much does it complement other aspects of your business model? What things do you need to succeed, e.g. distribution, underlying technology, and understanding who benefits more (you or the complementary party, e.g. Airbnb: individual users benefit more from Airbnb than Airbnb from each additional apartment?)
- Most complementary assets will be owned by some large firm; you'll likely have to partner with them (if it's hard to replicate), build the same asset yourself if you can, or give up profits to the asset owner's copy
- Best place to be is to rely on generic complementaries (assets anyone has access to) and have hard to replicate innovation: go for mass growth and then turn revenue on later
- Innovations are easier to replicate, and niches only relying on generic assets (that are becoming older) are filled; leaving start ups to build their own complementary assets
- Don't fall into the trap of trying to build everything yourself! Focus on your core innovation!
- "Look for innovative ideas that take advantage of new technologies"
- "There’s an ingrained mythology around startups that not only celebrates burn-out efforts, but damn well requires it. It’s the logical outcome of trying to compress a lifetime’s worth of work into the abbreviated timeline of a venture fund." -- DHH
- Pressures and stresses trickle and amplify down the management to the employees
- Questions personal sacrifices for the "mission" -- depends on what we consider as the gain; maybe we learned a lot from the experience though
- But yes, the point about stock compensation being shit for employees even in near home runs hits a huge nerve
- Maybe people go along with it because of the psychology of sunk costs?
- Don't build a narrative to justify your personal sacrifices or regrets; avoid that BS
- Motivation comes from accomplishing goals rather than hours worked: find a meaningful daily goal and check it off right
- Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
- Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time?
- Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?
- Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
- Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?
- Don't be the dude who's lost, but pretends he isn't. Take the risk of looking stupid everyday.
- ConvDev: acknowledge that the underlying foundation of getting work done among people is a conversation
- "The clothes you put on every morning express purpose for your day, and that’s what typography does for your content."
- Typography copies the way we've written and the art of calligraphy, and gives us three patterns:
- We are influenced by how content is dressed in typography
- Typography is influenced by how we write by hand
- Fundamental difference between writing is that typography has evenly spaced out characters
- When writing, we can add additional marks to established characters to create new ones; with typography, we get entirely new characters (as glyphs)
- Although typography copied writing, it was fundamentally different (and therefore had to solve the same problems, albeit they were much harder to solve)
- Glyphs make your content shine (used tastefully)
- Suggestions (all CSS properties ->
font-feature-settings: "kern", "liga", "clig", "calt";, but check if your font supports them!):- Kerning: spacing between characters (usually turn to auto; the designer probably thought a lot about this already)
- Ligatures: fix spacing between awkward character combos (e.g. wider together with thinner); useful for things that stand out (e.g. headers, quotes, etc)
- Small caps: make abbreviations great again
- Old style numerals: numbers that go below the baseline; can improve legibility
- Swashes: fancy character versions; great for things that stand out
- "Readable content trumps custom fonts." -- Chris Manning
- Never, ever, use flash-of-invisible-text
- Allow flashes of unstyled text, but try to minimize their effects (use Font Face Observer, or etc to async load and declare fonts as loaded)
- Try to make the unstyled text similar in size (line-height, height of the lower characters, and character width) as the custom font, so there's no jarring layout changes
- You can get even granular font loading by splitting the loading of the bold and italicized versions (fontfaceonload)
- You can get even more granular by just loading "critical" subfonts first (i.e. alphanumeric characters only), and could even augment this by loading it as a data URI
- Store some of these fonts in local storage so they don't have to be loaded for repeat views
- "A set of PSDs can't encapsulate the entire web."
- Consolidation makes good designs; the earlier you can put things into code (and prototypes), the faster you'll be able to consolidate
- Revisit old memories and cast a new, more positive light to conquer them
- "It’s better over time if you can put yourself in a situation where you experience some fear, but you overcome it, and you do it again and again and again"
- Challenge yourself repeatedly, and overcome it
- Your brain will change and respond to your choices; you choose how your brain is wired (to a degree)
- "If you don’t have any fear to begin with, there’s a lot less to control" -- Hannold
- "The essence of demagoguery is recognizing that appealing to people’s emotions is the most rational way to move them. After all, that’s where people make their moral decisions" -- Bart Campolo
- Get the most difficult part of the crowd on your side, either before speaking or during (by eye contact, etc)
- Charisma can come from a great desire to feel validated, a desperate need to be liked
- Humans can visually decide very quickly if they think a person has traits we feel are important (first impressions)
- Charismatic people put us in awe, and we unconsciously hold back our own emotions and rationality for them
- When we hold back from expressing our emotions, those emotions increase their intensity inside of us
- We report to remembering more from a charismatic speaker, but in fact we actually remember less
- We make leaders out of those who we assume are; when we assume someone is charismatic, and that we can trust them, we turn off our analytical minds and give in to the speaker
- Leaders in crisis have a "marriage between what is going on between them internally and whatever is going on externally"
- When individuals feel vulnerable, they're more likely to be affected by charisma and attachment to "saviours"
- "Charisma is like fire. You can use it to heat your house or you can use it to burn your house down."
- Connect through a verbal message: paint a picture using metaphors or stories, express collective sentiments, and deliver in an animated and passionate way
- Charisma is rooted in:
- Logos: powerful and reasoned rhetoric
- Ethos: establishing personal and moral credibility
- Pathos: rouse emotions and passions
- Nonverbal tactics: animated voice, facial expressions, gestures
- Verbal tactics: metaphor and comparison, story, rhetorical question, contrasts, lists and repetitions, moral convictions, expression collective sentiments, setting high and ambitious goals, and creating confidence of achieving goals
- Metaphor and comparisons: easy to understand, digest, remember; help connect with speaker
- Contrasts: combine reason and passion; clarify your position
- Rhetorical questions: encourage engagement
- Lists: distil message into takeaways; three is good for memory, proving pattern, and imitating completeness
- Moral convictions, collective sentiments: establish credibility, allow audience to identify with you
- Setting high goals: demostrate passion, invite energy
- Convey confidence: demonstrate it yourself, act upon it
- Nonverbal tactics: easier for audience to process than verbal tactics
- Other tactics include: creating a sense of urgency, invoking history, talking about sacrifice, humor
- Tactics are more important than traditional presentation skills, especially in everyday life
- Use a balanced, thought-out combination of tactics
- There's a link between time perception and motion; the bigger the movement, the longer it seems to last
- Strongest emotional distortions: anger > fear > happiness > sadness > neutral
- We internally enact what we see: we prime our bodies to reflect our visual sense (e.g. someone picking up a ball, feeling angry, etc)
- "The effectiveness of social interaction is determined by our capacity to synchronize our activity with that of the individual with whom we are dealing", and this is in part based on emphathy
- Reward uncertainty makes the task more addictive; dramatically increases their interest in getting a reward
- No uncertainty means that the other party knows their reward will be waiting when they want it
- Texting conditions us to respond immediately (rather than a phone call or mail); that's the reward
- "When you’re texting with someone you’re attracted to, someone you don’t really know yet, it’s like playing a slot machine: There’s a lot of uncertainty, anticipation, and anxiety. Your whole system is primed to receive a message back. You want it—you need it—right away"
- Creating uncertainly is a factor to strong romantic attraction
- People like: uncertainty > attracted > unattracted reciprocated in others
- Surprise enhances our learning
- Reciprocation
- If you're nice, they'll be nice
- Go first and set the stage
- We give in to socially approved norms to avoid confrontation
- Resist by refusing the initial offering
- Consistency
- We try to behave consistently with our past commitments (especially in the other's presence)
- Social proof
- Amplified in situations of uncertainty; we want to do what others do
- Others are probably looking for the same thing; lead them
- Liking
- People comply more with people they like
- Tell people you like them; people like people that like them
- Authority
- We're more likely to be persuaded by someone knowledgable or experienced
- Build rapport by establishing credentials, and beware when someone else does it in a BS manner
- Scarcity
- We never want to miss out
- Establishing artificial time constraints
- Most people assess new situations for threat before anything else; make sure to lower the perceived risk for them
- Let the other person know how much of their time you'll take, and that an end is really close
- Accomodating nonverbals
- Smile, slight head tilt, slightly lower chin angle, slight body angle
- Slower rate of speech
- Slow == credibility
- Let others absorb your content
- Sympathy or assistance theme
- Ego suspension
- Put other's needs, wants, and perceptions of reality above your own
- Make them feel like they're the most interesting; get them to keep expanding on their story
- Validate others
- Hear others; don't put your own idea or story in; you have no story to offer, listen to theirs!
- Thoughtfulness (what does this even mean here?)
- Validate the thoughts and opinions of others (even if they're not what you agree on?)
- Ask how, when, why?
- Ask open-ended questions about their content
- Connect with quid pro quo
- Give a little bit of information about yourself when someone feels awkward (either introverted or has spoken too much)
- Gift giving
- Give compliments, material gifts, advice, etc.
- Do it sincerely, and without an agenda you're pushing
- Manage expectations
- Lower expectations, shift the agenda to something selfless
- Recognize when you're in similar situations, although it could be "mutally assured pain" rather than destruction
- MAD can promote beneficial behaviours between parties, i.e. trust to do their part
- Two types of conditions for sucess:
- Necessary: must be present, but not enough for success
- Sufficient: traits that, together with present necessary conditions, enable success
- Trust is a necessary condition for leadership, but it doesn't come from titles; legitimacy is a suffficent condition
- "Consider your perspective in relation to results; are you really achieving what you think you are?"
- Shows us the limits of our perception; we don't percieve changes and have the full picture when we're at moving at the same speed (i.e. enacting the change)
- No perspective is right or wrong when observing galilean relativity; but some may have a more complete picture
- You might not notice it yourself, but consider it so you can appreciate others' perspectives
- Don't be complacent; stay on Day 1
- Co-evolve with your environment
- Invest your energy and time smartly
- Recognize how the world works, not how you want it to work; adapt to reality when it differs from your thought
- Notice when you're forced to keep running only to keep on pace with the competition; maybe there's an opportunity to shift your thinking?
- Reverse-thinking: examine things through the lens of those who got it wrong
- Large groups of people can fall under fallacies that plague single humans too
- Bias from incentives
- "Money, the root of stupidity"
- Avoid incentives that can never be realized; e.g. costlier to collect something than what they're actually worth
- Britain focused on money, cost more to collect taxes than the taxes were worth
- Tendency to distort due to liking/disliking
- We often conclude that others are the problem (when we or the evironment is actually the problem), through rationalization and self-justifying behaviour
- Have a desire to understand others and their perceptions
- Britain completely ignored what the Americans wanted, and put themselves in the high ground of judgement
- Denial tendency
- Don't stubbornly repeat the same failing action
- Britain kept taxing and retaxing the Americans, despite every attempt failing and inciting disapproval
- Social proof
- Fear the majority and those who listen to the majority (especially if they're disinterested)
- Britian's House of Commons had dissenters and alternative voices, but most just looked to what the majority decided
- First conclusion bias
- Look for alternatives before deciding
- Later on, other problems might layer onto your first conclusion; never forget the foundation argument and re-evaluate it later (first principles)
- Britian never re-examined their first conclusion that they had a right to tax the Americans
- Commitment and consistency bias
- Don't be afraid to admit your mistake and change plans
- Tendency to want to do something
- Busyness signals productivity, but is actually the silent killer of it
- British and Americans never paused to regroup and reconsider their positions
- Integrity: "Fail with honor than win by cheating"
- "There's a thin line between visionaries and fools"
- Hold yourself to incredible standards, and others will follow
- Master the power of gestures
- Actions are easier to hear than words
- Based on Cato's actions, "just a second’s glance at him told an onlooker everything he needed to know about Cato"
- Don't compromise–ever
- Stoicism: no moral shades of gray
- Cohering to standards builds authority, charisma
- Fear nothing
- "Fear can only enter the mind with our consent"
- Fear is insignificant aside for our own belief in it
- Use pain as a teacher
- Build endurance and discipline using pain and hardship
- Only your will determines your attitude; ignore external factors like shame, embarrasment, etc
- Don't expect to control your legacy
- Everything we are normally lead to value, e.g. wealth, health, success, reputations, is beyond our control
- The only reward for virtue is virtue
- Rather than just asking if we should work hard or work smart, we should examine exactly how our efforts (either hard work or smart work) actually contribute to the bottom line
- Are we in a system of diminishing (logx) or increasing (x^x) returns (curve of efficiency)?
- Some systems are fundamentally one or the other, but some may change depending on environmental circumstances (e.g. timeframe, competition, etc)
- Human activies can be characterized by both diminishing and increasing return curves; we are both biological and symbolic
- E.g. A day has diminishing returns; we lose efficiency and at some point we need to take a break to recover ==> Learn when to hit the breaks
- E.g. A career has increasing returns; we need to dedicate ourselves to intense practice to obtain mastery ==> Learn when to hit the gas
- Some times, we may reach an inflection point, where it doesn't make sense to give up time for more effort (efficiency loss) or where we should deliberately practice to obtain as much mastery as we can
- We're most productive when we alternate between intense focus and breaks
- Where do other activities outside of rest and work go?
- Think about boundaries instead of balance: separate our time and space, but most importantly, our attention
- At various stages in our life, the impedus will change from stress to rest, and then again to stress; know when you should be changing your focus and make sure to alternate
- When building teams, focus on getting both accountability and empathy high
- Avoiding stupid: "one easy way to guarantee failure, and that's making the assumption that either we can hold people accountable or we can empathize with them"
- Empathy =/= endorsement; we can empathize while still disagreeing, but make it genuine!
- "[Great creatives] organize their lives around their work, but not their days"
- Rest and creativity lie hand in hand
- Blend work and rest together
- "A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life." -- Darwin
- Deliberate practice: "engaging with full concentration in a special activity to improve one’s performance"
- Focused and structured with clear goals and feedback
- Spending hours perfecting details that only a few other people will ever notice
- Reason for practice: craft your professional and personal identity; reinforce your sense of who you are and who you will become
- Limit practice to allow for full recovery; avoid exhaustion; use available mental and physical resources, rather than time as the judge
- "Deliberate rest"
- Assess what you did with your time, accurately and honestly; devote thought and energy to organize time
- "We’ve come to believe that world-class performance comes after 10,000 hours of practice. But that’s wrong. It comes after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, 12,500 hours of deliberate rest, and 30,000 hours of sleep."
- "Greatness is inherently asymmetric"
- Asymmetric threats require asymmetric countermeasures, but also asymmetric people
- Accept unnevenness and consciously nurture extremes and outliers
- Short term: linear development leads to linear results; long term: decline (from drag and growing comfort)
- Intelligence compounds, but so does complacency and missed opportunity!
- Don't be stupid: don't fall prey to corporate ladders; heirarchy is a terrible proxy for impact and makes you comfortable and conforming
- There will be failures; would you rather have a safety net (in the ladder) or reach your potential?
- Find mentors who embody the extremes, and get autonomy to do your own thing (never accept handholding)
- Find the greatest challenges you can, in meaning and difficulty
- Keep your edge; work on new problems and compound your intelligence
- Don't let someone else won your most precious possession: your future
- Don't kid yourself into thinking your can own your future and be comfortable all the time
- Grit is the biggest determinant of your success, along with purpose
- Make the most of your youth, when you're at your fastest and strongest (and haven't degraded too much)
- "Most often the wisdom of experience is largely the result of earlier realizations having the time to compound into something richer"
- "The place of maximal learning is often at the point of significant pain"
- Have a purpose that makes the sacrifice bearable
- Early on, we learn much more by doing than reflecting
- You won't be able to appreciate chances to rest, if you haven't been sprinting
- "Sacrificing your potential to comfort isn’t a hedge against an early death – it IS an early death"
- Interesting psychology of workplace: if you choose a job for work-life balance, most likely, so did everyone before you (decide if that's what you want)
- Understand the problem
- Do you really, truly, understand what you're trying to solve?
- Can you restate the problem?
- What is the unknown? What are the conditions?
- What is the data? Is there enough available?
- Plan
- Pick a strategy, or a shortlist of the likely most effective ones, e.g.:
- Guess and check, elimination, symmetry, considering special cases, deductive reasoning, distilling into an equation, pattern matching, drawing a picture, distill into simpler problems, work backwards, think outside the box
- Find a connection between the data and the unknown
- Is there a similar or simpler problem that has the same unknown or condition?
- Pick a strategy, or a shortlist of the likely most effective ones, e.g.:
- Carry out the plan
- Care and patience, with the necessary skills
- Persist, and if it doesn't seem to work after a while, try another
- Before you switch, make sure you carried out each part of your plan correctly (and can you prove that it was?)
- Look back
- What did you do? What was effective or ineffective? Why?
- Is there a different way to get to the solution?
- Is there another use for the result or the method you used?
- Blockchain might create the most repressive survelliance-and-controlling system yet (despite its origins for crypto-anarchy); have we outsmarted outselves?
- Surely there will be moral codes to follow in most places with (what I think are) reasonable bills of rights that stop this from happening?
- Privately, there will always be the 1% that don't follow the rules because they don't have to (from money, fame, etc); those same people today can do the same as what the author envisions for authoritarianism
- On Google, Facebook, etc silos and impacts they've had on culture and etc: "Nobody chose this life, exactly. People adopted technology in sufficient numbers to allow industry, and the culture that follows it, to conclude that the market had decided what was best."
- Was it really? Are we really happy with it?
- How will this be changed in the future as the pains grow, ala industrial revolution?
- "Individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset"
- A "pure" growth mindset doesn't exist; some parts of you will be of a fixed mindset!
- Reward learning and progress, emphasize processes that result in those
- Make these processes real! Put things into motion, not just words and talk
- Avoid falling into insecurities or defensiveness
- "Start conditions matter. Choose wisely and mix and blend to suit your taste."
- If you set people up for a factory (with slightly subtle clues), they'll act like it: productive but bland; if you start a studio, you get: creativity, happiness, but likely little real progress
- Factory: specific jobs, separate workspaces, clear heirarchy
- Studio: kindergarten conditions
- Family: "a lifetime relationship with a sense of belonging"
- You're never going to fire your daughter
- Professional teams have a specific mission and people come together to accomplish this; families look for warmth and inclusion instead
- Employment relationships are temporary; professional goals are long-term
- You can try to bridge the two with a focus on shared goals and establishing long-term personal relationships, but never confuse the two
- Winning as a team can often be the best way for individuals to achieve success; they demonstrate they can help more than just themselves
- Great list of cognitive biases!
- Cognitive biases try to save our brains time or energy:
- Information overload
- We recognize what we already know or believe, is repeated often, or recently noted rather than contradictory details
- Extremes (unusual, weird, striking) stick better than the average
- Changes stick better than constants; evaluate direction of change (historical) rather than absolute values
- Flaws in others stick out more than flaws in us (we're our own blindspot)
- Lack of meaning
- We pattern match on what we're given (usually it's really sparse rather than full!)
- Fill in unknowns by widespread understandings (e.g. stereotypes, generalities); we also forget which parts we filled in with guesses
- Our subconscious math usually sucks; don't trust it
- We think we can read minds and they can read ours
- We project our current mindset into the past and present; our internal measures of time are also crap
- The need to act fast
- We usually want to be confident (and of important consequence) before we do anything
- Focus often requires us to favour immediate (and reliable) goals vs delayed (and distant) goals; we discount delayed rewards
- Sunk cost: we're more motivated to complete what we've already begun
- We usually rely on actions considered less risky and preserving status quos (favour reversible decisions)
- We prefer simple over complex (and ambiguous)
- How to know what needs to be remembered for later
- We alter memories to our liking over time
- Memories are different based on how they were originally experienced
- We reduce everything to just their key parts (specifics to generalities, lists to key items)
- Information overload
- General bias framework: noise -> signal -> story -> decisions -> create and influence mental models
- Make sure your prospect is the one in the spotlight; talk TO them, not AT them
- Gather information (ASK) and LISTEN so you know how to sell to them
- Ask open-ended questions and have a conversation
- Stop to make sure your prospect can soak in what you've conveyed and ask to make sure they have
- Make sure the information you are conveying is personal; you should be problem solving specfiically for them
- Make your emails valuable, so that they can reciprocate by giving you information (you want)
- “Give away so much value that you think you've given too much – and then give more”
- Be authentic, and persistent (not rushed and pushy)
- During objections:
- Wait and look them in the eye for three seconds; they'll answer their own objections or give you more info
- Don't be afraid of silence!
- Most people are afraid of silence; use it to your advantage!
- Echo: use the last word (or most important word) of their objection and raise it as a question
- Use bullshit scripts to "build value" around how you "chose" the best company and did your own research; it probably works really well!
- Put your customer's needs first!
- Negotiating mistakes:
- Treating negotiation as a zero-sum game
- Not knowing why the prospect would buy
- Not knowing why the prospect wouldn’t buy
- Negotiating too early
- Negotiating with the wrong person
- Treating all objections the same
- Thinking price as the only lever you can pull
- Giving something away without getting something in return
- Not knowing when to walk away
- You don’t understand the prospect’s decision criteria
- You take things personally
- No way to really practice being a manager
- People are complex
- Outcomes often unpredictable
- "Observation is no substitute for doing."
- Don't over-involve yourself; don't get in the way of real work getting done
- Don't assume others know what you might think is obvious, or will react to the same news the same way as you do
- With more experience, your gauge of how people will react will get better
- "It’s unfortunate that management is the primary way to progress in one’s career. It’s often a regression."
- Incredible analysis of cities based on universal scaling laws across comparables (amazing nobody has used this method until them)
- "He who does not increase his knowledge decreases it"
- "If you love science, you had better question it, and question it well, so it can live up to its potential"
- Bullshit: seemingly goodie two shoes arguments, data, publications, etc, but which are actually lying when you scrutinize them
- "Bullshit has the veneer of truth-like plausibility. It looks good. It sounds right. But when you get right down to it, it stinks."
- Be careful how much you depend on systemic reviews; they may be biasing their citations on their own polarized critiques in others' works
- "The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."
- Lol @ MBA
- A bit cynical, but close approximation of what I got out of my BBA experience