My collected quotes from February.
As usual, anything written without the proper grammar or capitalization comes directly from me.
Thanks for reading.
Tim
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This is pretty obvious. I’m sure you already do it. But I’d study what the best people are doing, figure out how to standardize it, and then bring it to everyone to execute.
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Customization should be five per cent, not ninety-five per cent, of what we do.
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The best way to make good decisions is to use a system that allows you to know when you have an edge.
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UPS trucks almost never take left-hand turns.
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The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.
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Unshod (or minimally-shod) populations experience almost none of the common foot problems that shoe-wearing populations do.
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Take the modified pigeon stretch.
“Most people stand with their hips shifted to the right, which causes their left hip to tighten up,” Kechijian says. This pose helps redistribute that weight.
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Many dogs lose their eyesight and/or hearing as they age, so it makes sense to train them early on for such times. Add body contact to your play and teaching routines. For example, tap their butt twice to ask them to sit down. If you communicate with a mix of verbal commands, hand signs and body contact, you’ll be able to use one of those even if they become deaf, blind, or senile.
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In December 2015, Chan was appointed as the manager of Eastern Sports Club in the Hong Kong Premier League, replacing Yeung Ching Kwong. She was the first female manager in the league.
Chan became interested in association football through her admiration as a teenager for David Beckham.
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It’s not only football, for me there’s a few strange decisions in 2016/17: Brexit, Trump, Ranieri.
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Even the worst teachers are great. They educate us not to be like them. If you think this way, you can learn from anyone.
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I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions.
As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?
What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's an expert.
Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.
The most intriguing thing about this theory, if it's right, is that it explains not merely which kinds of discussions to avoid, but how to have better ideas. If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
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What made, for instance, James Baldwin and Margaret Mead’s superb 1970 dialogue about race and identity so powerful and so enduringly insightful is precisely the fact that it was a dialogue — not the ping-pong of opinions and co-reactivity that passes for dialogue today, but a commitment to mutual contemplation of viewpoints and considered response.
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"As a Christian, my whole philosophy in life is pull up the unfortunate," Bohon said, a comment that drew verbal affirmation from others in the room. "The individual mandate: that's what it does. The healthy people pull up the sick."
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This passage has 3,316 underliners:
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within 30 seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.So it’s like watching Meet the Press, basically.
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“Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not… No more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”
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The phrase was extensively described as Orwellian; by Thursday 26 January 2017, sales of the book Nineteen Eighty-Four had increased by 9,500 percent, becoming the number one best seller on Amazon.com.
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the thing about 1984- the government was very well-run
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What Orwell failed to predict is that one day we’d carry those around in our pockets and fill them with compromising personal information willingly. Is there an Arcade Fire song on this topic? You bet.
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It's not a good look to repeatedly and self-righteously defend your own self-interests.
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That note got MBTA Fiscal and Management Control Board member Brian Lang to mention a conversation he had recently with college students who told him they have found that UberPool costs about the same as the T and provides a better service.
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Uber was on track to lose $3 billion or so globally last year based on its performance from the first three quarters.
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In the startup world, most good ideas seem bad initially. If they were obviously good, someone would already be doing them.
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Meanwhile, Uber's biggest competitor, Lyft, took a decidedly different stance. The company emailed customers Sunday morning, condemning Trump's order. Lyft called the executive order "antithetical to both Lyft's and our nation's core values." Lyft also said it was donating $1 million to the ACLU over the next four years.
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In 2016, Lyft generated about $700 million in sales, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the financials are private.
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As one of my medical school mentors would say, true – true and unrelated, or two problems can co-exist and our tendency is to try to get them into the same basket for a neat and tidy explanation.
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First, the goal of your resume is to get you an interview for the job. You may believe your resume has other purposes:
-To showcase your every achievement
-To mention when you received promotions, awards, or recognition
-To describe the size of your organization, team or budget
Trust me, none of those are the goals of your resume.
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A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.
That sounds right, but is it simply a description of how to be successful in general? I don't think so. This isn't the recipe for success in writing or painting, for example. In that kind of work the recipe is more to be actively curious. Resourceful implies the obstacles are external, which they generally are in startups. But in writing and painting they're mostly internal; the obstacle is your own obtuseness.
Being relentlessly resourceful is definitely not the recipe for success in big companies, or in most schools. I don't even want to think what the recipe is in big companies, but it is certainly longer and messier, involving some combination of resourcefulness, obedience, and building alliances.
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But though I can't predict specific winners, I can offer a recipe for recognizing them. When you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that's merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you're probably looking at a loser.
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Before Google, companies in Silicon Valley already knew it was important to have the best hackers. So they claimed, at least. But Google pushed this idea further than anyone had before. Their hypothesis seems to have been that, in the initial stages at least, all you need is good hackers: if you hire all the smartest people and put them to work on a problem where their success can be measured, you win. All the other stuff—which includes all the stuff that business schools think business consists of—you can figure out along the way. The results won't be perfect, but they'll be optimal. If this was their hypothesis, it's now been verified experimentally.
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What super-angels really are is a new form of fast-moving, lightweight VC fund. And those of us in the technology world know what usually happens when something comes along that can be described in terms like that. Usually it's the replacement.
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The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If Yahoo merely extracted the actual value, they'd have made less.
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Good programmers want to work with other good programmers.
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Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results.
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What people wished they'd paid more attention to when choosing cofounders was character and commitment, not ability. This was particularly true with startups that failed.
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This is the city of Houten, just South of Utrecht and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. You can’t get around the city by car, because the roads don’t connect in the middle. A car would have to drive out to the ring road, and then back in the other side. As a result, 66% of in-town trips are by bike or on foot. Also, a central train station whisks you to other cities if desired. One of my life goals is that we – quite literally you and me – build a city like this here in the USA.
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Every time you drive within a town, you destroy a bit of the feeling of community. Every single time you walk, you build the community, and advertise the idea of walking to every person who sees you.
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It’s a real puzzle to me why most Americans won’t consider a scooter as an alternative to a second car. It seems to be some sort of cultural prejudice. In most third world countries the scooter is the most popular form of urban transportation – the streets are filled with them. I think scooters hit the sweet spot between driving a car and biking in urban areas.
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The average American gets the most expensive car he can afford, and drives it as much as he can – for virtually 100% of trips out of the house. And yet he has a net worth of nearly zero, and subpar physical health, for most of his life.
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The Environmental Protection Agency tests and rates each new car model to figure out its fuel consumption in typical use. The funny part about their rating system is that they have to keep changing it because the average US person drives so inefficiently that they end up using even more fuel than the EPA estimates.
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I think that as long as we keep the government out of businesses that the private sector could provide more efficiently (designing products, for example), but use them in places where the private sector has been proven to suck (preserving groundwater quality, or providing national health insurance, for example), we will come out ahead.
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The authors noted, however, that previous guidelines going back more than a decade had recommended such remedies, and doctors were still not providing them to more than two-thirds of patients. One study examined how long it took several major discoveries, such as the finding that the use of beta-blockers after a heart attack improves survival, to reach even half of Americans. The answer was, on average, more than fifteen years.
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To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men.
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I think most peoples’ financial goals are far too feeble, stuff like “Pay off my $20,000 student loan over the next ten years”.
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A few days ago I realized something surprising: the situation with time is much the same as with money. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work
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I believe that life has much more to offer us than doing the same thing every day for the majority of our waking hours. But I’ve read that our brains change if we keep ourselves locked into routines as we age. Over time, people become addicted to the routine of work, and eventually that’s all they know – it becomes impossible to let go or really experience anything else.
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If you’re writing something other than a nice exciting novel, you should really be able to make your point in 200 pages or less, don’t you think?
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Now, when coding, I try to think "How can I write this such that if people saw my code, they'd be amazed at how little there is and how little it does?"
Over-engineering is poison. It's not like doing extra work for extra credit. It's more like telling a lie that you then have to remember so you don't contradict it.
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Because the list of n things is the easiest essay form, it should be a good one for beginning writers. And in fact it is what most beginning writers are taught. The classic 5 paragraph essay is really a list of n things for n = 3. But the students writing them don't realize they're using the same structure as the articles they read in Cosmopolitan.
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The greatest weakness of the list of n things is that there's so little room for new thought. The main point of essay writing, when done right, is the new ideas you have while doing it.
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Most "word problems" in school math textbooks are similarly misleading. They look superficially like the application of math to real problems, but they're not. So if anything they reinforce the impression that math is merely a complicated but pointless collection of stuff to be memorized.
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Two famous authors, Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller are talking at a party hosted by a billionaire hedge fund manager. Kurt says to Joseph, “You know, this billionaire makes more money in one day than you made in your whole lifetime from your novel Catch-22“. Joe responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have… enough.”
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When we were kids I used to annoy my sister by ordering her to do things I knew she was about to do anyway.
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The core of the philosophy seems to be this: To have a good and meaningful life, you need to overcome your insatiability.
