Think pieces

a 73-year-old typically feels about 60. But the study also finds that this gap closes with age, as your body insists, ever-more loudly, on the harsh truth. I should imagine there is a lot of variation here. On announcing his retirement from Berkshire Hathaway, at the age of 94, Warren Buffett told an interviewer he had never felt old until he passed 90. Then, all of a sudden, he did.

In your twenties, you say “about three years ago” of memories you can only hazily locate on the timeline. Then at some point you suddenly hear yourself say “ about twenty years ago”. And you hear yourself saying it again and again. About things that feel like three years ago.

The physicist Michael Nielsen tells us that the Polish-American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam perceived his life as sharply divided into two halves: “In the first half, he was always the youngest person in the group. In the second half, he was always the oldest. There was no transitional period.” There was no transitional period.

The American poet George Oppen said my favourite thing about growing old: “What a strange thing to happen to a little boy.”

Let’s be honest: after a certain point - 35? 40? - growing older is psychologically punishing. How could it not be? It involves getting a little bit weaker, stupider and uglier every year.

“To get born, your body makes a pact with death, and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat.” Louise Glück. I am not certain what she meant but this reads optimistically to me. All our biological processes - healing wounds, fighting infection, repairing cellular damage, maintaining homeostasis - are essentially the body attempting to beat the system. I sometimes hear people criticise fitness fanatics by saying they’re trying to deny mortality. Well, no shit - that’s the whole game. We’re cheating entropy from the moment we’re born. Every organism, including the one which is you, is a revolt - an organised rebellion - against the universe’s fundamental drive towards disorder. When you’re up against an enemy this implacable, I say it’s OK to cheat. In fact it’s heroic. The universe wants us to be dust and will eventually get the job done. Staying vital for as long as we can is a magnificently perverse act of resistance.

Age is time divided by achievement.

Like root canal treatment and democracy, ageing is the least bad option.

Agencies serve an extremely important purpose. They bring fresh, bright talent with an outside perspective and have the capacity to explore and innovate in ways that in-house teams do not. As AI forces us to separate creativity (humans) and execution (machines), new innovative workflows will naturally emerge. Human-AI co-worker teams will attend to these workflows and all of this will require leadership to evolve.

The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.

Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command.

How do we manage to advise so many startups on the maker's schedule? By using the classic device for simulating the manager's schedule within the maker's: office hours.

When you're operating on the manager's schedule you can do something you'd never want to do on the maker's: you can have speculative meetings.

ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me.

Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes”  can occasionally generate. His actual definition is:  “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”