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You and Your Research, a talk by Richard Hamming
You and Your Research, a talk by Richard Hamming
I will talk mainly about science because that is what I have studied. But so far as I know, and I've been told by others, much of what I say applies to many fields. Outstanding work is characterized very much the same way in most fields, but I will confine myself to science.
I spoke earlier about planting acorns so that oaks will grow. You can't always know exactly where to be, but you can keep active in places where something might happen. And even if you believe that great science is a matter of luck, you can stand on a mountain top where lightning strikes; you don't have to hide in the valley where you're safe.
Most great scientists know many important problems. They have something between 10 and 20 important problems for which they are looking for an attack. And when they see a new idea come up, one hears them say ``Well that bears on this problem.'' They drop all the other things and get after it.
The great scientists, when an opportunity opens up, get after it and they pursue it. They drop all other things. They get rid of other things and they get after an idea because they had already thought the thing through. Their minds are prepared; they see the opportunity and they go after it. Now of course lots of times it doesn't work out, but you don't have to hit many of them to do some great science. It's kind of easy. One of the chief tricks is to live a long time!
He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder.
You should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed say, ``Yes, I've stood on so and so's shoulders and I saw further.'' The essence of science is cumulative. By changing a problem slightly you can often do great work rather than merely good work. Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class.
by altering the problem, by looking at the thing differently, you can make a great deal of difference in your final productivity because you can either do it in such a fashion that people can indeed build on what you've done, or you can do it in such a fashion that the next person has to essentially duplicate again what you've done. It isn't just a matter of the job, it's the way you write the report, the way you write the paper, the whole attitude. It's just as easy to do a broad, general job as one very special case. And it's much more satisfying and rewarding!
it is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it. `Selling' to a scientist is an awkward thing to do. It's very ugly; you shouldn't have to do it. The world is supposed to be waiting, and when you do something great, they should rush out and welcome it. But the fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well that they will set aside what they are doing, look at what you've done, read it, and come back and say, ``Yes, that was good.'' I suggest that when you open a journal, as you turn the pages, you ask why you read some articles and not others. You had better write your report so when it is published in the Physical Review, or wherever else you want it, as the readers are turning the pages they won't just turn your pages but they will stop and read yours. If they don't stop and read it, you won't get credit.
I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.
He had his personality defect of wanting total control and was not willing to recognize that you need the support of the system. You find this happening again and again; good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system and take advantage of all the system has to offer. It has a lot, if you learn how to use it. It takes patience, but you can learn how to use the system pretty well, and you can learn how to get around it. After all, if you want a decision `No', you just go to your boss and get a `No' easy. If you want to do something, don't ask, do it. Present him with an accomplished fact. Don't give him a chance to tell you `No'. But if you want a `No', it's easy to get a `No'.
Amusement, yes, anger, no. Anger is misdirected. You should follow and cooperate rather than struggle against the system all the time.
I found out many times, like a cornered rat in a real trap, I was surprisingly capable. I have found that it paid to say, ``Oh yes, I'll get the answer for you Tuesday,'' not having any idea how to do it. By Sunday night I was really hard thinking on how I was going to deliver by Tuesday. I often put my pride on the line and sometimes I failed, but as I said, like a cornered rat I'm surprised how often I did a good job. I think you need to learn to use yourself. I think you need to know how to convert a situation from one view to another which would increase the chance of success.
I do go in to strictly talk to somebody and say, ``Look, I think there has to be something here. Here's what I think I see ...'' and then begin talking back and forth. But you want to pick capable people. To use another analogy, you know the idea called the `critical mass.' If you have enough stuff you have critical mass. There is also the idea I used to call `sound absorbers'. When you get too many sound absorbers, you give out an idea and they merely say, ``Yes, yes, yes.'' What you want to do is get that critical mass in action; ``Yes, that reminds me of so and so,'' or, ``Have you thought about that or this?'' When you talk to other people, you want to get rid of those sound absorbers who are nice people but merely say, ``Oh yes,'' and to find those who will stimulate you right back.
On surrounding yourself with people who provoke meaningful progress
I believed, in my early days, that you should spend at least as much time in the polish and presentation as you did in the original research. Now at least 50% of the time must go for the presentation. It's a big, big number.
Luck favors a prepared mind; luck favors a prepared person. It is not guaranteed; I don't guarantee success as being absolutely certain. I'd say luck changes the odds, but there is some definite control on the part of the individual.
If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one. So yes, you need to keep up. You need to keep up more to find out what the problems are than to read to find the solutions. The reading is necessary to know what is going on and what is possible. But reading to get the solutions does not seem to be the way to do great research. So I'll give you two answers. You read; but it is not the amount, it is the way you read that counts.
Avoiding excessive reading before thinking
your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there's the answer.
#dreams , subconscious processing
#advice#career#philosophy#writing#research#work/productivity#stem#science#talks#transcript#academic
·blog.samaltman.com·
You and Your Research, a talk by Richard Hamming
The Top Idea in Your Mind
The Top Idea in Your Mind
You can't directly control where your thoughts drift. If you're controlling them, they're not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want to think about.
barring emergencies you have a good deal of indirect control over what becomes the top idea in your mind.
Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't deserve space in my head.
just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it's not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.
#philosophy#advice#writing#ideas#work/productivity
·paulgraham.com·
The Top Idea in Your Mind
The art of the pivot, part 2: How, why and when to pivot
The art of the pivot, part 2: How, why and when to pivot
people mix up two very different types of pivots and that it’s important to differentiate which path you’re on: Ideation pivots: This is when an early-stage startup changes its idea before having a fully formed product or meaningful traction. These pivots are easy to make, normally happen quickly after launch, and the new idea is often completely unrelated to the previous one. For example, Brex went from VR headsets to business banking, Retool went from Venmo for the U.K. to a no-code internal tools app, and Okta went from reliability monitoring to identity management all in under three months. YouTube changed direction from a dating site to a video streaming platform in less than a week. Hard pivots: This is when a company with a live product and real users/customers changes direction. In these cases, you are truly “pivoting”—keeping one element of the previous idea and doubling down on it. For example, Instagram stripped down its check-in app and went all in on its photo-sharing feature, Slack on its internal chat tool, and Loom on its screen recording feature. Occasionally a pivot is a mix of the two (i.e. you’re pivoting multiple times over 1+ years), but generally, when you’re following the advice below, make sure you’re clear on which category you’re in.
When looking at the data, a few interesting trends emerged: Ideation pivots generally happen within three months of launching your original idea. Note, a launch at this stage is typically just telling a bunch of your friends and colleagues about it. Hard pivots generally happen within two years after launch, and most around the one-year mark. I suspect the small number of companies that took longer regret not changing course earlier.
ou should have a hard conversation with your co-founder around the three-month mark, and depending on how it’s going (see below), either re-commit or change the idea. Then schedule a yearly check-in. If things are clicking, full speed ahead. If things feel meh, at least spend a few days talking about other potential directions.
Brex: “We applied to YC with this VR idea, which, looking back, it was pretty bad, but at the time we thought it was great. And within YC, we were like, ‘Yeah, we don’t even know where to start to build this.’” —Henrique Dubugras, co-founder and CEO
#business#business/strategy#startups#advice#work/productivity#examples#profiles#case-study
·lennysnewsletter.com·
The art of the pivot, part 2: How, why and when to pivot
What are conference talks about? - the stream
What are conference talks about? - the stream
It's crazy how so much industry conf content is an ad these days. Ads obfuscate and conflate truth and opinion.
This is why events like Handmade Seattle or Strange Loop get so much love. They are about technology and people and values, not tools and companies.
When I write a talk, I almost always just want you to walk away thinking about the technology you create as an instrument for advancing your values, and a lens through which to view the world with those values.
if I do my job right, you won't go back and use the library I talked about, or whatever. You'll think about the values you're advancing when you build your technology, and think about the perspective it reveals to its users and audiences.
#blog#ideals#talks#themes#advice#philosophy
·stream.thesephist.com·
What are conference talks about? - the stream
When To Do What You Love
When To Do What You Love
People pay you for doing what they want, not what you want. But there's an obvious exception: when you both want the same thing. For example, if you love football, and you're good enough at it, you can get paid a lot to play it.
it's clear that Bill Gates truly loved running a software company. He didn't just love programming, which a lot of people do. He loved writing software for customers. That is a very strange taste indeed, but if you have it, you can make a lot by indulging it.
If you want to make a really huge amount of money — hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars — it turns out to be very useful to work on what interests you the most. The reason is not the extra motivation you get from doing this, but that the way to make a really large amount of money is to start a startup, and working on what interests you is an excellent way to discover startup ideas.
Many if not most of the biggest startups began as projects the founders were doing for fun. Apple, Google, and Facebook all began that way. Why is this pattern so common? Because the best ideas tend to be such outliers that you'd overlook them if you were consciously looking for ways to make money.
there's something like a midwit peak for making money. If you don't need to make much, you can work on whatever you're most interested in; if you want to become moderately rich, you can't usually afford to; but if you want to become super rich, and you're young and good at technology, working on what you're most interested in becomes a good idea again.
When you have trouble choosing between following your interests and making money, it's never because you have complete knowledge of yourself and of the types of work you're choosing between, and the options are perfectly balanced. When you can't decide which path to take, it's almost always due to ignorance. In fact you're usually suffering from three kinds of ignorance simultaneously: you don't know what makes you happy, what the various kinds of work are really like, or how well you could do them
Don't wait till the end of college to figure out what to work on. Don't even wait for internships during college. You don't necessarily need a job doing x in order to work on x; often you can just start doing it in some form yourself. And since figuring out what to work on is a problem that could take years to solve, the sooner you start, the better.
You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people?
If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you'll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you're genuinely interested in, you'll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring
The less sure you are about what to do, the more important it is to choose options that give you more options in the future. I call this "staying upwind." If you're unsure whether to major in math or economics, for example, choose math; math is upwind of economics in the sense that it will be easier to switch later from math to economics than from economics to math
The root of great work is a sort of ambitious curiosity, and you can't manufacture that.
#career#advice#work/productivity#lifestyle#philosophy
·paulgraham.com·
When To Do What You Love
You Should Seriously Read ‘Stoner’ Right Now (Published 2014)
You Should Seriously Read ‘Stoner’ Right Now (Published 2014)
I find it tremendously hopeful that “Stoner” is thriving in a world in which capitalist energies are so hellbent on distracting us from the necessary anguish of our inner lives. “Stoner” argues that we are measured ultimately by our capacity to face the truth of who we are in private moments, not by the burnishing of our public selves.
The story of his life is not a neat crescendo of industry and triumph, but something more akin to our own lives: a muddle of desires and inhibitions and compromises.
The deepest lesson of “Stoner” is this: What makes a life heroic is the quality of attention paid to it.
Americans worship athletes and moguls and movie stars, those who possess the glittering gifts we equate with worth and happiness. The stories that flash across our screens tend to be paeans to reckless ambition.
It’s the staggering acceleration of our intellectual and emotional metabolisms: our hunger for sensation and narcissistic reward, our readiness to privilege action over contemplation. And, most of all, our desperate compulsion to be known by the world rather than seeking to know ourselves.
The emergence of a robust advertising culture reinforced the notion that Americans were more or less always on stage and thus in constant need of suitable costumes and props.
Consider our nightly parade of prime-time talent shows and ginned-up documentaries in which chefs and pawn brokers and bored housewives reinvent their private lives as theater.
If you want to be among those who count, and you don’t happen to be endowed with divine talents or a royal lineage, well then, make some noise. Put your wit — or your craft projects or your rants or your pranks — on public display.
Our most profound acts of virtue and vice, of heroism and villainy, will be known by only those closest to us and forgotten soon enough. Even our deepest feelings will, for the most part, lay concealed within the vault of our hearts. Much of the reason we construct garish fantasies of fame is to distract ourselves from these painful truths. We confess so much to so many, as if by these disclosures we might escape the terror of confronting our hidden selves.
revelation is triggered by literature. The novel is notable as art because it places such profound faith in art.
#writing#books#advice#entertainment#culture#profiles#reviews#themes#academic#liberal arts#americanism#social media#public-life
·nytimes.com·
You Should Seriously Read ‘Stoner’ Right Now (Published 2014)
Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People
Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People

AI Summary: > This article challenges the common advice to "surround yourself with smarter people," arguing that it's logically flawed and potentially harmful. Instead, the author proposes seeking out "differently free" individuals who can provide non-sequiturs and unexpected perspectives, keeping one engaged in an "infinite game" of continuous learning and growth.

We can finally define what it means for someone to be differently free from you. They are people who are playing just a slightly different game than you are. That difference makes them a reliable sources of non sequiturs in your life. Waiting for nature to present you with a parrot or a piece of corn to awaken you out of a finite game is a tricky, chancy business.
Differently free people change the equation in an interesting way. When you include a person in your life, it is because they have a definite worth (possibly negative) in whatever finite game you’re asleep in at the time. This means there is at least some overlap between their game and yours; some similarity between how you keep score and how they do. Some meaningful relationship (possibly adversarial)  between how you define winning and how they do.
This means you have a model of the person in your head. One that predicts how they will value things.
it is the parts that don’t overlap that matter. There are things that have a defined worth in their lives that are non sequiturs in yours, and vice versa. When you see through the eyes of a differently free person, you expect to see a landscape of presumptively valued things. A landscape based on your predictions of how they value things. When the other person appears to value something that doesn’t even register with you, for a moment, that thing turns into a non sequitur, a candidate parrot. It lingers just a little bit longer in your own mind than it would if you yourself saw it. Long enough that you do a double take and notice it consciously.
My alternative to the heuristic, which many of you have heard in off-blog conversations, is that I am only interested in people as long as they are unpredictable to me. If I can predict what you’ll do or say, I’ll lose interest in you rapidly. If you can keep regularly surprising me in some way, forcing me to actually think in unscripted ways in order to respond, I’ll stay interested. It’s reciprocal. I suspect the people with whom I develop long-term relationships are the ones I surprise regularly. The ones who find me predictable don’t stick around. We’re not talking any old kind of surprise, but non sequiturs. Surprises that you can’t really relate to anything else, and don’t know what to do with. Mind-expanding surprises rather than gap-closing surprises.
#advice#lifestyle#culture#relationships#philosophy
·archive.is·
Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People
Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
The useful thing about defining good design as a form-context fit is that it tells you where you will find the form. The form is in the context. To find a good relationship, you do not start by saying, “I want a relationship that looks like this”—that would be starting in the wrong end, by defining form. Instead you say, “I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive”—you start from the context.
The context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.
If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is.
The opposite of an unfolding is a vision. A vision springs, not from a careful understanding of a context, but from a fantasy
Anything that increases the rate and resolution of information you get from the context will help. And anything that makes it easier for you to act on the context.
A common reason we filter information and become blind to the context is that we bundle things when we think. Thinking about our career, we might think in abstractions like “a job.” But really a career is made up of a bunch of different things like a salary, an identity, relationships, status, a sense of meaning, and so on. It is often easier to find a fit if you unbundle these things, and think about the parts that matter to you individually. Do you actually need more status? Or can you find a better fit if you go low status?
Another common reason the feedback loop of unfolding often works poorly is that people have decided on a solution already. They have turned on their confirmation bias. They have decided that a certain solution is off-limits. Let’s say you are 34 and haven’t found a partner but want kids. If we unbundle this, it is clear that the problem of having a kid and the problem of love are not the same thing, so you could solve your problem by having a kid with your best friend instead. But this feels weird. It is not the vision you have for your life. And it seems dysfunctional. Observe that feeling—it is, perhaps, a part of the context. There is some information there. But to unfold, do not write off any solutions. Leave them all on the table; let them combine and recombine. Many good ideas look bad at first. To increase the rate at which you understand the context, you want to develop a certain detachment. When the context thrashes one of your ideas, you want to say, “Oh, that’s interesting.” It takes practice. But it is worth getting better at. Reality is shy—it only reveals itself to those who, like honest scientists, do not wish it to be something else.
The faster you can collide your ideas against reality, the faster you get feedback.
The school system is centered around visions, not unfolding. You are asked to make decisions about realities that are five, ten years down the line, and you get no feedback on your decisions.
you’re less torn by anxious attachments when you recognize how something must naturally and necessarily unfold.
Knowledge is freedom from getting mad at facts.
Detachment does not mean you don’t care what happens. It just means you don’t care whether a specific thing happens or not. You want to know the outcome of the coin-toss (you care), but you don’t care whether it is heads or tails even if you’ve bet on heads (you’re not attached to a specific outcome). The important thing is that something happens, which means you’ve successfully kept play going, but without keeping score.
Emotional Self-Management: I like to think of this as accepting the emotions you have instead of having emotions about having emotions in an endless stack.
Fear. Not fear, plus anxiety about fear, plus guilt about anxiety about fear, plus shame about displaying guilt about experiencing anxiety about having fear. This is emotional focus. Instead of retreating from an emotion through layers of additional emotions until you find one you can deal with, you experience the actual emotion for what it is.
#lifestyle#philosophy#design#self improvement#career#advice#relationships#design/processes
·archive.is·
Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
Why You Shouldn't Listen to Your Body
Why You Shouldn't Listen to Your Body
There’s a beautiful simplicity in devising a plan and then sticking to it without deviation. I didn’t have to make decisions every step of the way. I didn’t have to agonize over whether I should eat X or if I shouldn’t eat Y; I just had to color within the lines
There’s a beautiful simplicity in devising a plan and then sticking to it without deviation. I didn’t have to make decisions every step of the way. I didn’t have to agonize over whether I should eat X or if I shouldn’t eat Y; I just had to color within the lines.
your body doesn’t lie to you per se; it’s just that you’re ill-equipped to properly interpret your body’s signals.
Tom said it like this: “When you think you’re done, totally done — you have at least five more reps.”
…a certain level of discomfort is unavoidable when losing body fat. You will experience hunger, fatigue, and mood disturbance when using body fat to meet your body's caloric needs for extended periods.
the difference between a beginner lifter and a more advanced one isn’t just about having more strength or better technique; it’s about the ability of the mind to properly interpret the body’s signals.
There comes a point during a hard set of squats, for example, where it gets very uncomfortable. Your muscles are burning, you’re gasping for air. The less experienced lifter receives those signals and thinks “I have to stop now, or I’m going to get seriously injured.” The more experienced lifter gets the same signal, but they know it doesn’t mean they’re about to die; it means they’ve got five more reps
#advice#health#diets
·yungchomsky.substack.com·
Why You Shouldn't Listen to Your Body
thinking - @visakanv's blog
thinking - @visakanv's blog

Summary: > Thinking is a crucial tool for processing information, making sense of reality, and determining how to act on that information. However, there is often a disconnect between abstract thinking and the practical realities of daily life. Finding a balance and building bridges between the two is key. Over the years, the author's own thinking has evolved from being very abstract and focused on big picture questions in his early 20s, to becoming more grounded and focused on navigating the challenges and responsibilities of adult life, while still retaining a sense of curiosity and desire to contribute positively to the world. Ultimately, examining one's life through thinking is valuable, but it's equally important to live life and not get stuck in one's head.

I don’t believe in the separation between thinking and feeling. I think so, I think of thinking as as an instrument. It’s it’s a it’s like, you know, it’s the intellectual psychological equivalent of like weighing scales and barometers and and rulers. It’s it’s a way of processing information. But most information is actually, like, I mean, emotional information, you know.
what makes a pro a pro and what makes a con a con? If you really dig into it all the way down, it boils down to your feelings about those respective things. And, you know, you might say things that, oh, this is objective because I wanna take that job instead of this job because it pays more. But embedded in that is the fact that you feel that that getting more money is a good thing and you’re you’re choosing to weight(?).
there’s this more abstract kind of big picture, philosophical grand thinking, which is interesting and fun, and there is there’s instrumental thinking, which is very, very functional, very, very, it’s about doing something it’s about getting stuff done basically.
the act of confronting a fear is an act. It’s something that you do. It’s something that, you know, you do with your body effectively. Even if it’s, you know, I’m gonna text my boss, right, and ask for a raise. Like, that’s still an act. It’s something you choose to do. It’s something you have an emotional response to. You feel nervous or you feel scared or, you know, you feel angry. Whatever it is, it is about your feelings and and you think to process your feelings but my cat is here. You think to process your feelings but ultimately you act.
there are quotes like the unexamined life is not worth living and then people flip it and say the unlived life is not worth examining. I think both statements are kinda true
I want the world to have more good thinkers and the way to do that is to, you know, like is to be like Richard Feynman, Feynman, I feel, which is to to enjoy thinking, to show the to show, you know, he described it as I think the the pleasure of finding things out. Right? And the pleasure of really understanding how things work. Because when you really understand how things work, you can manipulate it and how things work.
I am trying to demonstrate my own love for thinking and for processing information and for making sense of reality. And while that’s the case, there’s also a subset of people who may be overrepresented on Twitter and YouTube who kind of take that to to, almost dysfunctional degree where, you know, you decide that thinking is a good thing and then you become obsessive about it and you become kind of it it becomes like your drug. Like, and you think too much about everything.
it doesn’t make sense for me to study everything there is about audio before I start making videos. It’s I should just make a video, keep doing it until and when something goes bad, I will learn by trying to fix it. Right? That’s that’s that is a sort of practical approach to thinking. And it means, you know, being okay not knowing some things so that you can focus on knowing the things that are most consequential, most effective, most powerful.
if you spend all your time thinking, you probably should cut that shit out a little bit. You should you can probably afford to think less. You can probably afford to, you know, do like a weekly review or something and and, you know, like, live your life a little bit.
#philosophy#advice#introspection#knowledge-work#existential#lifestyle#self improvement
·visakanv.com·
thinking - @visakanv's blog
Ask HN: How do I balance all my 200 interests in life? | Hacker News
Ask HN: How do I balance all my 200 interests in life? | Hacker News
Horrible advice: find a way to blend your work with your interests so that you no longer understand where your core work hours start and the obsessiveness begins. Do this for > 12 hours a day, every day, holidays included. Tell your loved ones that you're busy with work, and take small satisfaction that what you just said was half true. Develop an unhealthy addiction to liquid stimulants and spring out of bed every morning with a burning curiosity that wont abate until you've tripped over enough hurdles to crush your enthusiasm for a few hours. Rinse and repeat for a decade until you're no longer a jack of all trades, but a master of most. Try to convey your interests to those around you, and failing that, retreat to social media where you will attempt to spin these as career developing STAR moments. Accept the disappointment you will feel in knowing that no one will appreciate the efforts you went to in achieving this level of tedious mastery.
fully regretting that you didn't focus more on that thing, oh and the other thing plus you're certain life would have been better for everyone if you hadn't dont quite so much of...
I started trimming hobbies. To pacify myself, I told myself that I am not stopping FOREVER, but just for now. It worked. Most of them are gone, I continue with a few, and I occasionally dabble with one or two that I put away.
Start with a group of interests that has the most overlaps in terms of skills or resources needed - call these compounded projects. Out of the compounded projects, start with the one that interests you with 2 weeks of effort. If you can’t make a significant progress in that time frame, you either lack the skills, resource, or interests in them. Move onto the next compounded project.
After you finish with the list of compounded projects, review the original list and prioritize the interests based on your experience. Create compounded projects again and go at it. Repeat.
being elastic with your interest and skills while jumping from project to project is the right approach.
(1) Start by being clear with yourself what things you're interested in knowing about vs. what things you're interested in doing.
The more work in progress streams, the more time you waste context switching. Being intentional about the things you choose to do and the order in which you do them allows you to do more things in the same amount of time than if you tried to do all of them simultaneously.
I had a lot of interests: coding, playing musical instruments, cars, woodworking, embedded systems, audio/video engineering, etc, but I had to pare it down to just a few after having had several bouts of burnouts. I'd recommend trying 200 interests at a shallow level, and eventually you'll find some of them are more interesting than others
#see-replies#advice#career#existential#self improvement#careers
·news.ycombinator.com·
Ask HN: How do I balance all my 200 interests in life? | Hacker News
The Rise Of The Generalist (How To Thrive With Multiple Interests) - Dan Koe
The Rise Of The Generalist (How To Thrive With Multiple Interests) - Dan Koe
  1. We are in a second renaissance where the creator economy is growing exponentially and people are turning to creators to learn skills necessary to thrive in a fast-changing digital environment.
  2. Specialists who focus on a single interest or skill are at a disadvantage compared to generalists who are diverse and interesting.
  3. The internet favors generalists because social media exposes creators to diverse audiences who are there to be entertained, not just to learn or buy.
  4. Failure stacking, or pursuing goals and gaining experience even through failures, makes generalists irreplaceable by allowing them to acquire a diverse set of skills.
  5. The most profitable niche for a creator is their unique combination of opinions, beliefs, knowledge, and life experience packaged into impactful content.
  6. To earn a living as a generalist, one must become an entrepreneur and build a general audience around helping them achieve a big goal.
  7. Creators should experiment with writing about all their interests and let the audience decide what resonates, framing everything through the lens of the big goal.
  8. To make interests compelling to others, creators must illustrate the "why" and importance of ideas, as people weren't born with interests but persuaded into them.
  9. Creators should establish authority in topics that resonate by creating digital assets like free products to avoid repeating themselves and give room to experiment with new ideas.
  10. Generalists should build a portfolio of income sources by launching free and paid products around their best ideas every 3-6 months until they have a satisfying brand and business.
#multidisciplinary#gig-economy#creator-economy#social media#ideals#internet#jobs#advice#YouTube#video
·thedankoe.com·
The Rise Of The Generalist (How To Thrive With Multiple Interests) - Dan Koe
How To Be An Adult pt. 3 - Kegan’s Theory of Adult Development
How To Be An Adult pt. 3 - Kegan’s Theory of Adult Development
Robert Kegan's theory of adult development proposes that we can continue developing and reaching higher levels of consciousness well into adulthood, contrary to the previous belief that our development peaks in adolescence. To transition to the fifth and final stage, the Self-Transforming Mind, Kegan suggests cultivating certain conditions that allow for continuous personal growth and transformation, including self-awareness, vulnerability in trusted relationships, engaging in rational discourse, and experiencing self-transcendent states.
we grow by changing both HOW we think about the world and WHAT we think about. It’s not just about becoming smarter (accumulating more knowledge) — it’s about changing our perspective. We do this by continually questioning our hidden assumptions and beliefs.
We grow by moving more and more of what is unseen and unexamined in the way we understand the world (those things that are SUBJECT) to a place where they can be examined, questioned and changed (where they become OBJECT).
In Stage 5 one’s sense of self is not tied to particular identities or roles, but is constantly created through the exploration of one’s identities and roles and further honed through interactions with others.
Stage 5 thinking is important (and something to aspire to) because it helps us engage with people and situations in a more creative and nuanced way. It creates space for more empathy and curiosity in our lives and better equips us to make thoughtful decisions about how we want to show up in the world.
Kegan found that a disproportionate number of Stage 5 adults had dabbled in self-transcendent experiences: often beginning with psychedelics and, after that, making meditation, martial arts, and other state-shifting practices a central part of their lives.
Self-transcendent experiences (STEs) are experiences (also referred to as non-ordinary states of consciousness) where, for a brief moment, people feel lifted above their day-to-day concerns, their sense of self fades away and they feel connected to something bigger.
#drugs/psychedelics#self improvement#mindfulness#coming-of-age#psychology#pseudo#advice
·medium.com·
How To Be An Adult pt. 3 - Kegan’s Theory of Adult Development
Part 1: How To Be An Adult— Kegan’s Theory of Adult Development
Part 1: How To Be An Adult— Kegan’s Theory of Adult Development
Robert Kegan's theory of adult development proposes that adults go through 5 developmental stages. Becoming an 'adult' means transitioning to higher stages of development, which involves developing an independent sense of self, gaining traits associated with wisdom and social maturity, and becoming more self-aware and in control of one's behavior and relationships. However, most adults never progress past Stage 3, lacking a fully independent sense of self. Progressing requires a "subject-object shift" where one's beliefs, emotions, and behaviors become observable and controllable, rather than subjective forces.
When we’re older, religion becomes more objective — i.e. I’m no longer my beliefs. I am now a human WITH beliefs who can step back, reflect on and decide what to believe in.
Stage 1 — Impulsive mind (early childhood)Stage 2 — Imperial mind (adolescence, 6% of adult population)Stage 3 — Socialized mind (58% of the adult population)Stage 4 — Self-Authoring mind (35% of the adult population)Stage 5 — Self-Transforming mind (1% of the adult population)I focus on Stages 2–5, because they’re most applicable to adult development. Most of the time we’re in transition between stages and/or behave at different stages with different people (i.e. Stage 3 with a partner, Stage 4 with a coworker).
#parenting#self improvement#psychology#mental models#advice
·medium.com·
Part 1: How To Be An Adult— Kegan’s Theory of Adult Development
the rogue investor's guide to venture
the rogue investor's guide to venture
Many people try out careers in venture and then wind up leaving after a year when it stops feeling novel and starts feeling like they’re floating in lonely limbo without any markers of success. That’s because the craft of venture is not for people who derive their satisfaction from external indicators of progress — it’s for people who find the development of their relationships and refinement of their internal model of the world to be motivation enough to keep going.
If you derive satisfaction from refining a craft, don’t go into venture yet.
Here are five individual investor archetypes I’ve noticed can produce outsized returns in the early-stage venture game:Philosopher: hangs one’s reputation on their predictions about the futureHustler: simply outwork everyone else and are great at networkingHawk: most competitive, gets a thrill out of the fight to win a deal Friend: confidante and coach to founders, often founders’ first callCelebrity: a person widely respected for their work/knowledge/skill
A good archetype for you is whichever one you can sustain the longest. A great archetype for you is one that no one else is doing and you have some sort of signal works.
Some good advice I got: build your fund’s structure and strategy around allowing yourself to invest in whichever way you most enjoy and are naturally good at (admittedly, it will probably get harder and harder to stick to this as your fund scales).
Examples: if you like being a friend to founders and want your fund to function as Switzerland (i.e. not compete with anyone), write small checks. If you like to fight and are naturally hawkish, it might make sense to set yourself up to try to lead rounds. If complex problems and futuristic theories are what get you excited, investing in series A companies that fit into where you see the world going could be quite gratifying. If for some reason you love living in spreadsheets, consider growth investing (and don’t follow literally any of my advice).
In many ways, the job of the writer and the job of a VC are quite similar, in that they both ask you to produce an original end product (in the writer’s case, articulated ideas and stories; in the investor’s case, a differentiated portfolio with outsized financial returns) without much of a map for how you get there. The reason professional writers complain about writing so much is that it’s really difficult to wrangle your brain into producing uniquely interesting thoughts all the time, and highly frustrating when you consider it your job to do so. Making good investment decisions is similar; just with the added element of also being highly social. Taking the quality of your self talk seriously seems superfluous but is an investment that will result in better decisions.
A lot of the game of investing is won by getting people to think of you — a sign that you’ve built the kind of moat we call a strong brand. Remember: a fund is just a pile of money with a person on top to sell it. As an investor, putting down stakes in the ground about what you invest in saves you a lot of time in the long run because it allows people to self-select for fit
I’ve been surprised by how much it’s benefited my fund to make Moth’s brand (i.e. what I invest in and look for) difficult to summarize in a sentence. For small early-stage generalist funds like my own, quality matters much more than quantity. Quality deals almost always come from trusted sources who resonate with my taste, not from a list of random companies for which I have no context.
A brand is a promise to show up in the same way time and time again. Good brands are built on being decent and principled with all of the people you interact with.
Lastly and of utmost importance: remember that fear of failure fades into the background if you focus on leaving everyone you encounter along the way better than you found them.
#vc#craftsmanship#startups#business#advice#funding#branding#brand strategy#ambition
·mothfund.substack.com·
the rogue investor's guide to venture
the earnest ambitious kid's guide to investors
the earnest ambitious kid's guide to investors
  1. Fundraising is brain damage, so spend as little time doing it as possible
  2. Create an alter ego who you don for fundraising purposes
  3. Don’t spend a lot of time with VCs if you don’t need VC $
  4. Only talk to investors with decision-making power, preferably angels
  5. You know more about your business & domain than 90% of investors
  6. Momentum matters and sequencing is smart
  7. People don’t belong on pedestals
  8. Beware of intellectual dementors and clout demons
  9. People will help you if you ask for what you want clearly and concisely
VCs need to believe that your company could be a billion-dollar business and generally lack imagination — you need to paint a vivid picture of this path for them, starting with the striking protagonist character you play in your company’s story.Your alter ego should never lie, but it should be completely comfortable showing the fullest expression of your ambition to people who probably intimidate you. Fundraising is a snap judgment game — most VCs are trying to pattern-match you to a founder archetype who already won. They index primarily on IQ, self-belief, experience, and personability (in that order). A general rule of thumb is that to be taken seriously in SV, male founders would benefit from acting warmer, while female founders are taken more seriously when they act colder. Both benefit from acting a little entitled.
a VC’s job is to make a diversified portfolio of bets — you are only one. Most founders find being around VCs distracting and draining because they feel pressure to perform the role of ‘impressive person.’ If you can’t immediately capture value from your performance… why waste your energy?
don’t expect the average investor to provide much value beyond money and connections. This makes the 10% of investors who can be legitimately useful to your business worth their weight in gold. Develop litmus tests to identify the valuable ones quickly and avoid wasting your time trying to convince nonbelievers.
our goal here is to spend as little time fundraising as possible — which requires being strategic about the order in which you talk to investors and how you talk about where things stand as you progress through the raise. The combined force of controlling those two variables are what “generates momentum” during your fundraise process.
Make a list of all the investors you know and can get introduced to, ordering them by the ones you most want on board to the ones you couldn’t care less aboutTalk first to a few low-stakes investors at the bottom of your list to practice your pitch and identify common investor questions and critiques you’re going to getIf available to you, next get a few investors who already wanted to give you money on board so you have a dollar amount you can say you’ve raisedWork your way up your investor list, talking to the investors you most-want-on-board-but-still-need-to-convince last (this optimizes your odds they say yes)
This all goes by much faster if you court investors similarly to how hot girls treat their many potential suitors. If your raise is already a little taken and you exude an air that you don’t need them, mimetically-minded investors become much more interested.
If you’re anything like me, you will worry intensely about not making a fool of yourself. It will probably go ok, but not as amazing or illuminating as you’d hoped. You might leave and feel a deep sense of lostness set in. This is all very normal. In time you will see them in increasing clarity, often noticing the differences between your and their values and why you would not enjoy living their life at all.
the people on pedestals probably hate being there. It’s lonely, hard to trust that the intentions of the new people around you are pure, and you often feel like you’re constantly letting people down. In the end, idolization hurts everyone involved.
Beware of intellectual dementors and clout demonsIntellectual dementors will try to eat your ideas and interestingness — not necessarily to copy you, but to wring your brain dry to amass knowledge themselves. They often play mini IQ games/tests of will in conversation and masquerade as investors while never actually investing. Clout demons are similar, but view people less as brains and more as stepping stones towards supreme social status. The power move to protect yourself from both is to simply abstain from playing their games — give as little info on yourself and your ideas as possible and reflect their questions directly back at them.
People will help you if you ask for what you want clearly and concisely
Knowing what you want requires a lot of upfront soul-searching, followed by strategic and long-term thinking once you’ve committed to a thing (I can’t really demystify this more). Once you’re all in, I highly recommend diligently keeping a list somewhere of the top three things you currently need help with so when people ask, you’re ready.
You don’t want to make people feel like you’re using them but you do want to use your social capital for things you care about. General rule of thumb: ask for things either 1) after a positive interaction or 2) completely out of the blue with a concisely written and compelling email/text. Tone matters because you don’t want to sound desperate and you do want to show you know how to play the game (write like the founder you most admire talks).
once we’ve taken action on behalf of something, our brain assigns more value to said thing. Tim Keller: “The feeling of love follows the action of love.” Love is a strong word here, but the point stands — help people help you. Startups are long-term games, so it only makes sense to do them with people you truly want to be around for a very long time.
#ambition#advice#finance#startups#guides#hiring#business#relationships#pseudo#interviews#vc#funding
·mothfund.substack.com·
the earnest ambitious kid's guide to investors
Accepting Your Potential with ADHD - everyonehasamnesia on Tumblr
Accepting Your Potential with ADHD - everyonehasamnesia on Tumblr
I was so used to hearing from teachers and family that if I just didn’t procrastinate and worked all the time, I could do anything! I had all this potential I wasn’t living up to! And that’s true, as far as it goes, but that’s like saying if Usain Bolt just kept going he could be the fastest marathon runner in the world. Why does he stop at the end of the race??
Now, I’ve found that I do need to work on not procrastinating. Not because the product is better, even, but because it’s better for my mental health and physical health to not have a full, sweating, panicked breakdown over every task even if the task itself turns out excellently. It’s a shitty way to live! You feel bad ALL the time! And I don’t deserve to live like that anymore.
I don’t have an ocean of productivity and accomplishments inside of me that I could easily, effortlessly access if I just sat down 8 hours a day and worked. There’s no fucking way. That’s not real. It’s an illusion. It’s fine not to live up to an illusion.
#philosophy#advice#mental health#attention#work/productivity#adhd
·tumblr.com·
Accepting Your Potential with ADHD - everyonehasamnesia on Tumblr
101 Additional Advices
101 Additional Advices
Forget trying to decide what your life’s destiny is. That’s too grand. Instead, just figure out what you should do in the next 2 years.
Try to define yourself by what you love and embrace, rather than what you hate and refuse.
Where you live—what city, what country—has more impact on your well being than any other factor. Where you live is one of the few things in your life you can choose and change.
Once a month take a different route home, enter your house by a different door, and sit in a different chair at dinner. No ruts.
Every now and then throw a memorable party. The price will be steep, but long afterwards you will remember the party, whereas you won’t remember how much is in your checking account.
Most arguments are not really about the argument, so most arguments can’t be won by arguing.
invent your own definition of success. Shoot your arrows first and then paint a bull’s eye around where they land. You’re the winner!
There should be at least one thing in your life you enjoy despite being no good at it. This is your play time, which will keep you young. Never apologize for it.
You have 5 minutes to act on a new idea before it disappears from your mind.
The patience you need for big things, is developed by your patience with the little things.
When you are stuck or overwhelmed, focus on the smallest possible thing that moves your project forward.
For steady satisfaction, work on improving your worst days, rather than your best days.
Your decisions will become wiser when you consider these three words: “…and then what?” for each choice.
If possible, every room should be constructed to provide light from two sides.  Rooms with light from only one side are used less often, so when you have a choice, go with light from two sides.
There is a profound difference between thinking less of yourself (not useful), and thinking of yourself less (better).
Always ask yourself: what would change my mind?
Becoming one-of-a-kind is not a solo job. Paradoxically you need everyone else in the world to help make you unique.
If you need emergency help from a bystander, command them what to do. By giving them an assignment, you transform them from bewildered bystander to a responsible assistant.
The most common mistake we make is to do a great job on an unimportant task.
Don’t work for a company you would not invest money in, because when you are working you are investing the most valuable thing you have: your time.
Fail forward. Failing is not a disgrace if you keep failing better.
Do not cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.
For small tasks the best way to get ready is to do it immediately.
What others want from you is mostly to be seen. Let others know you see them.
When you try something new, don’t think of it as a matter of success / failure, but as success / learning to succeed.
use your honesty as a gift not as a weapon. Your honesty should benefit others.
A good sign that you are doing the kind of work you should be doing is that you enjoy the tedious parts that other people find tortuous.
Celebrating the success of others costs you nothing, and increases the happiness of everyone, including you.
To tell a good story, you must reveal a surprise; otherwise it is just a report.
a long horizon allows you to compound small advances into quite large achievements.
Often ideas are rejected because of the tone of voice they are wrapped in. Humility covers many blemishes.
When you are right, you are learning nothing.
Very small things accumulate until they define your larger life. Carefully choose your everyday things.
If you are impressed with someone’s work, you should tell them, but even better, tell their boss.
Humility is mostly about being very honest about how much you owe to luck.
#advice#opinion#guides#philosophy#work/productivity#work-life#careers#list
·kk.org·
101 Additional Advices
A good image tells a good story
A good image tells a good story
Forget trying to decide what your life’s destiny is. That’s too grand. Instead, just figure out what you should do in the next 2 years.
Visuals can stir up feelings or paint a scene in an instant. However, they may not always nail down the details or explain things as clearly as words can. Words can be very precise and give you all the information you need. Yet, sometimes they miss that instant impact or emotional punch.
For each visual you add to your presentation, you should ask yourself “What does it really say?” And then check: Does it enhance the meaning of my message, or is it purely decorative? Does it belong at this point in my presentation? Would it be better for another slide? Is there a better image that says what I want to say?
Computers don’t feel, and that means: they don’t understand what they do, they grow images like cancer grows cells: They just replicate something into the blue. This becomes apparent in the often outright creepiness of AI images.
AI is really good at making scary images. Even if the prompt lacks all hints of horror kitsch, you need to get ready to see or feel something disturbing when you look at AI images. It’s like a spell. Part of the scariness comes from the cancer-like pattern that reproduces the same ornament without considering its meaning and consequence.
Placing pictures next to each other will invite comparisons. We also compare images that follow each other. Make sure that you do not inadvertently compare apples and oranges.
When placing multiple images in a grid or on one slide after the other, ensure they don’t clash in terms of colors, style, or resolution. Otherwise, people will focus more on the contrast between the images rather than their content.
Repeating what everyone can see is bad practice. To make pictures and text work, they need to have something to say about each other.
Don’t write next to the image what people already see. A caption is not an ALT text.
The most powerful combination of text and image happens when the text says about the image what you can’t see at first sight, and when the image renders what is hard to imagine.
Do not be boring or overly explanatory. The visual should attract their attention to your words and vice-versa.
If a visual lacks meaning, it becomes a decorative placeholder. It can dilute your message, distract from what you want to say, and even express disrespect to your audience.
#presentations#design#writing#storytelling#pitches#business#advice#best practices#guides#ai#synthography#assets#photo
·ia.net·
A good image tells a good story
On Openings Essays, Conferences Talks, and Jam Jars
On Openings Essays, Conferences Talks, and Jam Jars
how to write better openings and introductions / intros in non-fiction writing
The beginning is almost never the most compelling or important part. It's just the bit you thought of first, based on your subjective chronology.
Signposting what you're going to write about is good, but starting with an exhaustive list of definitions is extremely boring.
Invoking paleolithic people is an overplayed way to convince us your topic is cosmically important.
Openings need tension – paradoxes, unanswered questions, and unresolved action
Good openings propose problems, pose questions, drop you into an unfinished story, or point at fundamental tensions within a topic. Ideally within the first paragraph or two.
"Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché ("Since the dawn of time"), not with a banality ("Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the questions of..."), but with a contentful observation that provokes curiosity."A Sense of StyleStephen Pinker
Creating tension in non-fiction work is trickier because your story is (hopefully) constrained by reality. You are not at liberty to invent suspicious murders, salacious extramarital affairs, or newly-discovered-magical-powers to create tension and mystery. You have to deal with the plain, unexotic facts of the world.
Your job becomes much harder if you pick topics with no tension, problems, or puzzles within them. To paraphrase Williams, it is more of a failure to pose an uninteresting problem, than to poorly articulate an interesting one
Your interest in the topic is your best directional clue for finding the tension or interesting paradox. Your urge to write about the thing hopefully comes from a place of curiosity. You have unanswered questions about it. It feels important or consequential for unexplained reasons. You think you've seen things in it other people haven't. Pay attention to that interest.
Problems are a destabilising condition that has a cost for a community of readers that needs a solution. Destabilising condition is just a fancy word for “change” here – a change in the status quo. Put another way, a problem is an expected turn of events, that has undesireable consequences, for an audience who will care about it, that we want to explore solutions to.
Williams is speaking to a community of academic writers in his book. They're trying to present scientific and research problems in plain, objective language, which isn't necessarily what we want to do with narrative writing like blogging or personal essays. We have a little more liberty to put interesting padding around the change, consequences, and solution, such as telling an opening anecdote, or drawing readers in with characters, rich details, and sensory descriptions.
Williams suggests we try to state our problem and then ask a series of so what?'s to get at the underlying problem
For your writing to be worth reading, you need to be exploring something of consequence for someone
When McPhee writes, after first immersing himself in his raw material (field notes, interview transcripts, official documents) for weeks, he then draws a structure for the work. The structure lays out the major themes and scenes he'll work through, in the order that will make them most compelling and coherent.
Developing a structure requires navigating the tension between chronology and theme. Chronology is what we default to, but themes that repeatedly appear want to pull themselves together into a single place. The themes that really matter should be in your opening. Even if the moment that best defines them happens right before the end of the timeline.
#storytelling#multidisciplinary#non-fiction#fiction#writing#presentations#pitches#advice#best practices#examples
·maggieappleton.com·
On Openings Essays, Conferences Talks, and Jam Jars
90% of designers are unhirable?
90% of designers are unhirable?
Many case studies read to me like school homework: they knew what the answer and the process were “supposed to be” according to the textbook, so made up the story to fit. In reality, as you point out, it’s never smooth and linear. It’s messy and loopish. If you’re doing a good job, you rarely end up with anything remotely like you anticipated when you started out.
abandon your dogmatic and idealistic view of the design process, and keep learning about how flexible, messy, and beautiful it is.
I don’t speak about the “ideal” design process for a simple reason: it doesn’t exist. Design is never linear, and all projects are unique. The point is to show and explain your path from the kick-off to the final result in the portfolio.
If you tell a story, include the details and the things that didn’t work and how you adapted to overcome the problem, the design manager will empathise with you. For the five minutes it takes to read your case study, they’ll be in your shoes. It’ll remind them of all the times when they had similar problems and it’ll make them appreciate you and your struggles as a designer.
#design/processes#case-study#best practices#design#jobs/creative-industry#portfolios#advice
·uxdesign.cc·
90% of designers are unhirable?
Seeking Calmness: Stop Drifting
Seeking Calmness: Stop Drifting
I think a lot of folks feel like you should be doing these certain things like writing the great American novel or reading the 100 Greatest Movies of All-Time when in actuality these are achievements that have no real guarantee of happiness. Unless you are truly enjoying those journeys, there is no reason to set upon them.
I don't think there is anything wrong with having hopes and dreams, but I do feel that maybe we allow those things to be excuses for not living a content life. I also think at times we hold onto old dreams that no longer serve us, instead of focusing on something new and more applicable to your current situation.
adulthood wasn't full of Ferraris and mansions, and I found out rather quickly that I wasn't going to save anyone, because I was struggling to save myself.
#introspection#career#ambition#self improvement#mindfulness#philosophy#mental health#advice#work/productivity
·brandonwrites.xyz·
Seeking Calmness: Stop Drifting
Don’t Give Advice, Be Useful
Don’t Give Advice, Be Useful
on being a good consultant and advisor
resist the urge to add immediate value. Instead we have to hold space for a more vulnerable, honest and open relationship with our client - to allow them to open up more fully and to work on things that are useful, even if not in scope.
While giving advice can help you be seen as knowledgeable, it doesn’t necessarily build trust.
“You should…” It’s a simple sounding phrase but it gets you in trouble more often than not. It’s problematic for two reasons: it assumes a control of client resources and it’s too prescriptive in form
We typically don’t have a complete view of everything that the company is working on, we don’t have a detailed understanding of how long things actually take or the full range of dependencies required for them.
Example: working with a client where I wanted to re-design a landing page on their site to improve it. Unfortunately I was under-estimating the number of people who need to be involved since the landing pages were still owned by the product team and are technically part of the same codebase as the full tech product. So a “small” change required detailed security scrutiny and QA before going live. Making “simple” changes was not in fact simple at all here.
Example: working with the NYTimes cooking team I suggested that they should re-tag their content. This kind of “you should…” recommendation seemed straightforward but neglected the political considerations - the team had just spent 6-figures on re-tagging all their recipes - so to ask for further budget to re-do a task they had just done would lose them face internally. A “straightforward” change that actually carried a bunch of political baggage.
Some other types of complexity that you might be under-estimating with regards resource allocation: Regulation/compliance complexity - which either prevents you even doing your recommendation or makes it slower. Technical complexity - while something might be technically easy, doing it with the client’s existing technology might be hard. Data complexity - a simple seeming request on the surface (make a landing page for every neighborhood) might actually depend on a robust, maintained data set that doesn’t yet exist. Maintenance complexity - even if the initial request to create something or do something is not resource intensive, it might come with an implicit agreement to continue to maintain it - expanding the resources allocated. Production complexity - where what you’re proposing isn’t that expensive or resource intensive to do, but the client (for whatever reason) has a higher quality threshold, making the recommendation more expensive/slower/harder than you anticipated. Narrative complexity - where what you’re recommending seems reasonable but either the company has tried it before, or a competitor has tried it before or there’s a general sense that “this doesn’t work”. Which can make your recommendation extremely hard to actually get done.
When we say “You should…” we’re essentially offering a problem diagnosis AND a solution at the same time. The consequence of this is that we’re essentially asking the client to accept or reject both together.
most of your work would be more effective at actually changing clients if you stopped to clearly separate the diagnosis from the solution.
if you’re asking “You should…” to the client, stop and examine if you’ve properly defined the situation and provided evidence for the problem, to help the client deeply internalize the problem and win over the necessary stakeholders before you propose any kind of solution.
A good mental exercise to ensure you’re doing the work here is to ask yourself: what happens if the client takes no action? What is the consequence of the current trajectory, or the null case of no investment?
By showing what’s possible, clients are able to feel more invested in designing the solution with you, rather than just being told what to do.
clients deeply appreciate you clearly separating out expert opinion and judgment from evidence-based analysis.
A good process for the advisor to follow is: Give them their options Give them an education about their options (including enough discussion for them to consider each option in depth) Give them a recommendation Let them choose
Taking a collaborative stance with your client is powerful. There are many aspects of consulting that are almost combative by nature - like pointing out problems the client has (that the client was complicit in creating!).
I find in my own work that senior executives are often blocked by some inability to see what’s actually going on - and that telling them is useless! Instead you need to help them see it for themselves.
Because of their distance from the day to day work, senior executives are especially prone to replacing some version of reality with a compressed narrative. And when this compressed narrative is wrong in some key way you need to return to first principles to show them (not tell them!).
Your sense of “what’s going on” with a client is intermediated by your point of contact and it turns out that your client is an unreliable narrator.
When a client comes to you asking for a “content strategy” or support “hiring a VP marketing” it all seems so straightforward, rational and well defined. But as you unpack the layers of the onion you begin to realize why it’s been so hard for the client to help themselves. And that’s when the emotional and political complexity of the problem starts to come into view.
if the work is done effectively, it requires that the consultant be both involved enough in the dynamics so as to experience their impact and detached enough so as to analyze what is transpiring. These demands make imperative the use of oneself as tool.
always work on the next most useful thing. This mantra helps remind me that consulting isn’t about being right, it’s about being useful.
I delivered what I think is good quality work with a deeply researched and evidence-based 66-page strategy for producing content and…. Nothing happened? They were happy enough with the work product but it didn’t lead to any material change in their strategy or an ongoing consulting relationship. In hindsight the key mistake here was not asking myself enough what the next most useful thing was. I think if I’d been more honest about what would add value and show momentum for the client it would have been either a) condensed one or two slide summary of the content opportunity for their fundraising deck and/or b) supporting their VP marketing recruitment effort.
Either you’re telling the client “draw some circles” and the client is frustrated the advice is too basic and high level. Or you’re telling the client to “draw the rest of the fucking owl” and are ignoring the detailed reality of the situation and the limitations of teams, resources and capabilities.
Or worse, the client asked you for help drawing owls but what they’re really doing is painting a woodland scene…
Think about this image next time a client comes to you for help drawing owls - your first response shouldn’t be “Oh, that’s easy, first you draw some circles”, it should be “Show me how your owls look today. What do you think is holding you back from drawing better owls? And why is drawing owls important to you right now?”
Remember - it’s about adopting a collaborative, trusted stance with clients. And that might require resisting your initial urge to give advice. Instead you need to listen to the full emotional and political situation and then work with the client to re-examine reality in new and surprising ways. Always work on the next most useful thing. And that doesn’t always involve doing what the client asked for.
#relationships#work/productivity#business/strategy#language#advice#philosophy#consultancies
·tomcritchlow.com·
Don’t Give Advice, Be Useful
on being ready
on being ready
As the “am I ready?” question continues to ricochet off myself and others, I’m finally viewing it for what it is: a clever, creative way to procrastinate self-actualization. If you’re asking yourself whether you’re ready, or finding reasons why you aren’t, it’s a sign you have let the gap grow too wide between idea and action. Your mind is probably convincing you that there is some existential reason for that buffer, when in reality, you’re just scared to do a new thing wrong or to look weird doing it. That’s okay. Now that you’ve noticed your inaction, you can act. You are as ready as you’ll ever be, because ready-ness is not measured by thinking, it’s measured by starting.
If you keep waiting for permission from some external source long after anyone is responsible for giving it to you, your ideas and ambitions will whither while you become bitter that no one is letting you do what you wanted to do. But in the end: it’s your responsibility to give yourself permission. This doesn’t need to be daunting. It can be the most liberating epiphany of all to realize that you can start now.
are you ready? to be in the relationship? to start the business? to say i love you to your partner? to forgive the person you resent? to have the hard conversation? to tell the truth? to publish the piece? to admit you were wrong? to create the life you imagine? to do what scares you?
what I’ve leapt at before I felt ready has consistently lead to the most expansive journeys of my life. Pursuing jobs I was too young for. Applying for scholarships that seemed impossible to get. Reaching out to people that I had no business knowing.
The whole notion of needing to be ready is highly corrosive to action. Because how can we really measure ready-ness? What if the only measure of “being ready” is just… starting? Trying? Doing the thing. What if ready is something you prove to yourself you are while you’re making the attempt, instead of trying to prove it before you start? What if being ready is not something you can cognitively analyze, but something that can be only demonstrated through action.
The reframe I am now internalizing is that ready is a felt state you can consciously bring yourself to.
You can imagine what the version of you that is ready would feel like and fill yourself up with those feelings. Or to make it even simpler: you can just start. If it doesn’t work, you can ask why, integrate your learnings, and try a different way. Or move on. Or whatever. But action—action!—is the path to ready-ness, not more thinking.
limiting beliefs. Poor attempts at protecting me from some imagined danger. Blocks created by my mind, designed to keep my ideas inside me and keep my creativity away from the world—away from reaching you. I’m now weeding out this ready-ness block and seeding the belief that the ability to imagine is the only sign of ready-ness you need.
You can go back later to refine what you’ve done. But by then, you’re already in the act. You’ve done it instead of remaining stuck in thought. So, the next time you find yourself wondering if you’re ready: don’t. Instead: start. We become ready by trying, not by thinking. Because ready-ness is a question of boldness, and as Bradbury so eloquently reminds us: intellect doesn’t help you very much there.
#self improvement#introspection#existential#ideals#advice
·mindmine.substack.com·
on being ready