April 2013
4 posts
You Should Get Married As Early as Possible, But... →
The older you get, the more your dating pool shrinks. You also run into the Problem of Grandma’s Lamp: the more settled you get, the harder it is to adjust to a potentially excellent mate who doesn’t quite fit into the life you’ve made. Obviously, these barriers are not insurmountable, since lots of people get married in their late thirties. But it’s easier if you’ve...
Quora: What does a great product manager at a tech...
Read Quote of Dan Schmidt’s answer to Product Management: What does a great product manager at a tech startup do day-to-day? (e.g. wireframe, feature flow, etc.) on Quora
March 2013
1 post
The Myth of Focus | Mindvalley Insights for Online... →
Note Law #3 – “Multiple Projects Lead to Multiple Successes”
Peter is a prolific “Unfocuser”.
He runs Singularity University, The X Prize foundation and Planetary Resources. Multiple companies started in the span of a few years.
In short, almost every great entrepreneur I’ve studied – chose NOT to focus.
Focus is myth. It’s bull. And if you’re working under me, especially on my marketing team,...
February 2013
8 posts
C. Everett Koop, Ex-Surgeon General, Dies at 96 -... →
He also maneuvered around uncooperative Reagan administration officials in 1988 to send an educational AIDS pamphlet to more than 100 million U.S. households, the largest public health mailing ever done.
Modern Love - Dealing With Asperger’s Syndrome,... →
Acquiring empathy seemed a taller order, given that my Aspergerish point of reference is myself in every circumstance. (Someone just slipped and killed himself in the men’s room? I see. How long until they get him out of there so I can go?) But I’ve learned that people can develop empathy, even if by rote. With diligent practice, it can evolve from a contrived acknowledgment of other people’s...
Alex Payne — Alone Together, Again →
Nobody’s life ever really falls apart, exactly. Lives unravel, thread by thread. First, I came to realize that the job wasn’t the right job. Then the city wasn’t the right city. Two threads loose, easily stitched back in; there are other jobs, other cities. Our house went on the market. I resigned.
Then, a month ago, the person I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with came home...
5 tags
Is There an Ideal Running Form? - NYTimes.com →
But the most provocative and wide-ranging implication of the new Kenyan study is that we don’t know what is natural for human runners. If, said Kevin G. Hatala, a graduate student in evolutionary anthropology at George Washington University who led the new study, ancient humans “regularly ran fast for sustained periods of time,” like Kalenjin runners do today, then they were likely forefoot or...
“If I had followed the program director’s advice and pumped experts for feedback,...”
– Study Hacks » Blog Archive » You Need to Master the Rules Before You Can Reinvent Them
6 Quick Hacks On Becoming A More Likeable Person →
4) “You know I completely trust you”
First of all, the “You know I …” part can be used at the start of pretty much any sentence. It makes it so much more powerful by emphasizing that the person you’re talking to already knows the information that’s about to follow but you’re going to say it anyway. This implicitly acknowledges the importance of the information – if it’s worth repeating, it must...
A Short Rant About Working Remotely | Hacker News →
“It doesn’t take much distance before a team feels the negative effects of distribution - the effectiveness of collaboration degrades rapidly with physical distance. People located closer in a building are more likely to collaborate (Kraut, Egido & Galegher 1990). Even at short distances, 3 feet vs. 20 feet, there is an effect (Sensenig & Reed 1972). A distance of 100 feet may...
January 2013
19 posts
To Hell with Good Intentions by Ivan Illich →
There exists the argument that some returned volunteers have gained insight into the damage they have done to others - and thus become more mature people. Yet it is less frequently stated that most of them are ridiculously proud of their “summer sacrifices.” Perhaps there is also something to the argument that young men should be promiscuous for awhile in order to find out that sexual...
It Takes Planning, Caution to Avoid Being 'It' -... →
The game they play is fundamentally the same as the schoolyard version: One player is “It” until he tags someone else. But men in their 40s can’t easily chase each other around the playground, at least not without making people nervous, so this tag has a twist. There are no geographic restrictions and the game is live for the entire month of February. The last guy tagged stays...
Do I Love My Wife? Are You Really in Love Test -... →
The Sex Drive. One of the main lust factories in the brain is a peach-pit-sized lump called the hypothalamus (deep in your skull, sitting just above the brain stem). This controls hunger and thirst. It also has receptor sites for testosterone, which fuels the sex drive in both men and women. So when you’re feeling horny, the hypothalamus is working overtime. You don’t have to be...
Summer Reading… and Programming →
Nothing is stranger than sitting in dirty sweatpants and picking up the ringing phone to say “Ellen Ullman speaking” in a mature, efficient voice. It is as if I have projected myself into another universe, where I am dressed in a blazer and slacks and my hair is washed, some place completely discontinuous with the universe I inhabit in sweats. While I speak on the phone — to a client, a CEO...
The Race Grows Sweeter Near Its Final Lap — Modern... →
OLD LOVE is different. In our 70s and 80s, we had been through enough of life’s ups and downs to know who we were, and we had learned to compromise. We knew something about death because we had seen loved ones die. The finish line was drawing closer. Why not have one last blossoming of the heart?
I was no longer so pretty, but I was not so neurotic either. I had survived loss and mistakes and...
Inventor Labs Blog - "What it's Really Like... →
Not only did he know and love product engineering, it’s all he really wanted to do. He told me once that part of the reason he wanted to be CEO was so that nobody could tell him that he wasn’t allowed to participate in the nitty-gritty of product design. He was right there in the middle of it. All of it. As a team member, not as CEO. He quietly left his CEO hat by the door, and...
Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30? -... →
In studies of peer groups, Laura L. Carstensen, a psychology professor who is the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity in California, observed that people tended to interact with fewer people as they moved toward midlife, but that they grew closer to the friends they already had. Basically, she suggests, this is because people have an internal alarm clock that goes off at big life events,...
How to Write an Opening Sentence →
Bottom line: When you’re stumped as to how to begin a piece of writing, consider doing one of the following: Simply tell the reader what the subject is. Make a blunt statement. Cite a statistic. Tell a first-person anecdote that’s relevant to the subject. Tell a third-person anecdote. Put up a straw man, then knock it down. Summarize a current state of affairs (or the conventional...
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Watch(via Watch this lens battle! Canon Cinema Primes vs. Canon L Series by Jon Yi | planet5D - the best DSLR video community on the planet!)
Hey Extraverts: Enough is Enough | The American... →
Spelling bees are, of course, organized by extraverts — indeed, pretty much everything that is organized is organized by extraverts, which in turn is their justification for their ruling of the world. “See? If we didn’t organize things they wouldn’t get organized at all!” Precisely, mutters the introvert, under his breath, to avoid confrontation.
littlerunnerd:
Why do runners get so excited when they get a new PR? Because it’s their own. No one can take it away from them. Nobody else ran the race for them. They earned it all by themselves and they pushed their body to limits they had only dreamed of before. PRs represent what you’re capable of and exactly how much you’ve trained and worked. That’s why PRs are so exciting.
Well put.
‘Be Wrong as Fast as You Can’ - NYTimes.com →
I recently saw a Charlie Rose interview with John Lasseter, a founder of Pixar, about the creative process behind his movies. Pixar’s in-house theory is: Be wrong as fast as you can. Mistakes are an inevitable part of the creative process, so get right down to it and start making them. Even great ideas are wrecked on the road to fruition and then have to be painstakingly reconstructed. “Every...
December 2012
19 posts
Half the Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong -... →
More daringly, Arbesman suggests, “Stop memorizing things and just give up. Our individual memories can be outsourced to the cloud.” Through the Internet, we can “search for any fact we need any time.” Really? The Web is great for finding an up-to-date list of the 10 biggest cities in the United States, but if the scientific literature is littered with wrong facts, then cyberspace is an enticing...
(I am working the register over Christmas.)
Me: “Find everything today?”
Customer: “Yup.”
(Note: she is silent through the transaction, which includes a gift card.)
Me: “How much would you like on this?”
Customer: “Oh, sorry. Can I have $150?”
Me: “No problem.”
Customer: *after paying* “Can you do me a favor?” *she hands me the gift card* “The next customer you see that you think could use this, could you give it to them?”
Me: *stunned* “…Of course!”
(After a minute another customer comes up, a visibly upset young woman.)
Me: “Hi! How are you?”
Customer #2: “I’m okay, thanks.”
(Clearly she is not ok, but she is trying very hard to be pleasant. She is getting very basic items: milk, bread, eggs, etc. Nothing very festive.)
Me: “So your total comes out to $0.00.”
Customer: “What?”
Me: “The person before you gave me a $150 gift card to use for the next person I thought could use it. You look like you’re having a rough day, so here are your groceries, and there’s about $130 left on this card.”
(The customer just started crying. Once she could, she thanked me about 100 times. Made my whole Christmas season.)
All the worlds a game - and business is its player →
Comments on this article are amazing.
Jesse Schell, a game designer and assistant professor of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University, said game ideas were creeping into “every nook and cranny of everything” because reward systems are satisfying. “Our affluence has allowed us to move to a place where we tend to make things pleasurable, as opposed to efficient,” he said.
The secret lives of stories: rewriting our... →
Be mindful, in other words, of the stories you believe, the stories you love, and the stories you choose to tell. Because in the end they may become your own.
“Wouldn’t it be better to fully live an experience, than risk missing it while...”
– 1 Second Everyday App by Cesar Kuriyama — Kickstarter (via deplorableword)
Soooo awesome! I love life capture tools and this seems like an elegant and simple way to do that. He’s right - there’s nothing like video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFGAQrEUaeU&feature=player_embedded
Great Casual Pickup Line for Someone You've Seen...
If you haven’t already, next time you see her stop her or walk with her or sit down next to her or catch up to her as you’re walking out of class and just call it like it is. You say: hey She’ll say: hi You say: I’m _____. I keep seeing you around, but don’t know your name. She’ll say: Oh, it’s ______ You say: (With a little confidence and a smile) You...
Saving the Endangered Dinner Party - NYTimes.com →
New York, after all, has always been oversupplied with those who pride themselves on their tables, competing to populate them with lively strivers who do their social networking not on tiny, glowing screens but cheek by jowl.
Increasingly, such gatherings seem outmoded, squeezed out by overcrowded schedules, the phony urgency of affinity sites, restaurants cultism and overall tectonic shifts in...
