The future of business?
The manager of the future is going to do actual work. Single skills just won't hack it much longer.
Agreed...makes me nervous, excited, and generally indecisive.
The manager of the future is going to do actual work. Single skills just won't hack it much longer.
Expert performers -- whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming -- are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect.
Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task...Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
I believe you can get good at anything by working at it. But not world-class good. Sometimes you have to just get lucky at the genetic level.
Practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.
Practice doesn't make perfect: Practice makes permanent. You can learn bad habits as well as good ones.
This is not to say that all people have equal potential. Michael Jordan, even if he hadn't spent countless hours in the gym, would still have been a better basketball player than most of us. But without those hours in the gym, he would never have become the player he was.
So as I see it, the less effort it costs you to achieve a particular goal, the more talent you have.
It is surprising how many of our classmates turned their back on the fields they studied at Caltech. Imagine it: you work passionately throughout your teen years, culminating in four years of rigorous study at Caltech. You put in long hours to get a degree from one of the highest ranked science and engineering universities.
Then you turn your back on it, to pursue a life that takes no advantage of those talents.
As far as I can tell, all these people are very happy.
Many of my peers are seeking out jobs where they can be challenged to grow. What they are receiving instead is the challenge of having more to do – a growing workload made up of mundane tasks.
As a CEO, I urge you to understand this: Twentysomethings are not afraid to work...But we are not interested in giving our heart and soul to an organization unless there is something in it for our heart and soul.
Just because startup costs are lower than ever that doesn't mean it's any easier to start "a business". You still have to have a well-timed and well-executed idea - and even then, there's still going to be lots of change, near disasters, near successes, and just a lot of unexpected surprises along the way.
The most important thing when building a web company is users....obsess about making them happy, because the second they're not happy, they're gone. Happy <> giving them everything they want all at once - it means making it clear to them what your doing, and then consistently making progress on that promise. Listen to your users as many ways as possible - thru metrics, usability testing, chat rooms, blogs, etc...
When trying to get users - speed matters: page load times, days between your last blog post, frequency of updates made to your site, handling any errors.
Everything you do in the early days is marketing...features offered (and not offered), how you communicate to users, who you commnunicate to, how you respond to feedback.
Everyone, no matter how interested they are in building a startup, wants to work at Google, end of story. Chris Sacca's talk was one big commercial for Google (unlike all the other presentations) but everyone was drooling to work for GOOG by the end of it...except me :)
The world is indeed flat, but location still matters. Even though outsoucing is playing a bigger role in the smallest of companies, founders hacking in the same room is still something that can't easily be replicated.
The children are our future...unfortunately, 95% of them are male. Lots of < 25 yr olds in the audience, but hardly any women - even though the ratio of male to female speakers was 70/30-ish.
"Commitment is a self fulfilling prophecy...determination, not intelligence is the number one key to success." - Paul Graham
"Enron happened, WorldCom happened, Pets.com happened" - Om Malik
"People will come up with ingenious ways to be annoying" - Josh from Del.icio.us
"You make what you can measure" - Joe Kraus
"Find a parade and get in front on it" - Tim O' Reilly
"In a startup there's always a disaster happening" - Paul Graham
"I view money as an errand to get out of the way quickly" - PG
"Foo up fast" - Caterina Fake
"Don't hamster me" - Caterina Fake
"The UI....eh, it's alright" - Caterina talking about Flickr
"If your product can change a user's behavior you got yourself a winner" - Om Malik
People organize their lives to get their minimum required units of pleasure. While individuals vary in terms of how many units of pleasure they need, everyone is striving to reach their personal minimum.
Do you not like your job? Is it unclear how you provide value? Are you lying to yourself, your customers, your loved ones? Do you have control over your current situation?
They rarely do any "meta-thinking", instead they focus on the base level of how to get things done without stepping out and thinking about the plan or work itself, and it's place in the grander scheme of things.
I find that smart people are always wondering why they're doing what they're doing, and they always have a good grasp on the size, scope, goals, and direction of their efforts.
Unsmart people not only haven't ever thought about these things, they're usually quite surprised, if not openly hostile, about being asked. They evidently think of themselves as cogs in a machine, one that's being piloted by someone else.
Highlights of Steve's talk included his encouragement to establish a one-word New Year's theme rather than more elaborate resolutions (e.g., his last three themes, in chronological order, have been "flexibility", "platform" and "impact").
I really love writing, in a totally uncomplicated way. I'm happy writing anywhere and under any circumstances and in fact I'm now to the point where I'm suspicious of people who don't love what they do in the same way.
it's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection. To me, this is what Peyton Manning's problem is. He has the work habits and dedication and obsessiveness of Jordan and Tiger Woods. But he can't deal with the accompanying preparation anxiety. The Manning face is the look of someone who has just faced up to a sobering fact: I am in complete control of this offense. I prepare for games like no other quarterback in the NFL. I am in the best shape of my life. I have done everything I can to succeed -- and I'm losing.
We live in time. So any definition of success is bound up with time. With other things you can say, “Can I yo-yo? Can I juggle?” Usually you have a pretty small window in which to get your answer....the question is - “Will I enjoy this?” Because by enjoying it enough, now I have a nice big window. You can suspend judgment and make that hole very big. If I make my window ten days for stand-up, the conclusion is that I failed and that I’m not good at stand-up. If I make it ten years—if I just wait—the conclusion might be something totally different.
If character development, and a bit of visual gloss can make repetitive and possibly mundane activities into an addiction, then I have the perfect application for it: the world of productivity porn...
I've never had a problem creating to-do lists...my biggest problem is to stop procrastinating and actually do the to-dos. What I need is an incentive!
So, clearly, what I need is a specialized app, where each task can be assigned a certain number of experience points. Maybe if I, say, replace the furnace air filter, I get a chance at a certain amount of gold or silver. Next, this app checks in with a server and ranks me against other users. What? That guy I work with is level 20 already? I've gotta go mow the lawn, that's worth 500 XP!
Told you it was a great idea. Not only am I getting crap done, but I'm WINNING.
"I've been thinking about the role of art in society...keep coming back to a conversation that says, basically, because art doesn't compute, because it doesn't fit into a progress-oriented, Cartesian mindset, it has value.
That is, one of art's values is to simply be a rare alternative to achievement, forward motion, and strict logic."
Pick a location where you can appreciate the local culture and meet lots of people you trust. They will probably get you your next job.
Sometimes I can't stop making things.*
- circa July '99
"Very sharp for a while until they grow so dull they're painful and it's time to toss them out and get a new one."
1. Every morning, write a list of the
things that need to be done that day.
2. Do them.