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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
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
Productive Procrastination
Productive Procrastination
I do a pretty good job of channeling my procrastination into adjacent creative tasks which, in the end, influence, shape, and improve the chunks of work I do complete. And that looks like productivity from the outside. But trust me, from the inside, it usually just feels like avoidance and procrastination. But I’ve learned to accept that’s the cost of doing the kind of work I feel good at, so I let it be what it is.
The particularly nice thing about coding is that it offers many little “wins”: I get a function working, I figure out a piece of design
“Can’t face work? Then cultivate some side projects — and channel your work-avoidance into fun opportunities to learn” and once you’re done, you’ll 1) have something productive to show for it, and 2) be much more fit, rested, and ready to tackle that project at work. In other words: rather than fight your penchant for procrastination, work with it. It’s a judo move: don’t fight your enemy, use its momentum against it for your benefit.
Niche InternetNiche Internet#work/productivity#advice#dev#learning
·blog.jim-nielsen.com·
Productive Procrastination
The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online - David Perell
The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online - David Perell
I started writing because I was jobless and needed to turn my life around. I was an over-saturated news consumer with nothing to show for it.
Desperate for a solution, I started writing online. At the time, I was nameless and stuck on the sidelines because I didn’t have the gumption to share my ideas. I experienced a cocktail of searing emotions — envy, inspiration, fear, curiosity, rage, hope, hopelessness, excitement, and self-loathing. But with each article, things got a little better. For the first time in my life, I made use of the information I consumed. The friends I made shared my obsession with ideas. As I published, I realized that everything I wrote was a magnet to attract opportunities that felt like magic in the moment, such as a $20,000 grant from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures program and a podcast interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, arguably the world’s most famous scientist.
becoming an online writer has shown me that I can succeed by bringing out more of myself
Niche InternetNiche Internet#blog#Writing#advice#inspo#career
·perell.com·
The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online - David Perell
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
What I've learned so far about design advising and angel investing
What I've learned so far about design advising and angel investing
When I first started meeting founders, I wanted to help with anything and everything. Unfortunately, that's neither realistic or possible. For example, I have many responsibilities at my day job that must come first. Over time, I have honed in my pitch to be explicit about how I can and can't help. See the notes above about ways to be helpful, and find your own unique combination of value to bring to the table.
My contract typically looks like this: We agree to meet ~X hours per quarter/half/year Multiply by Y contracting rate Y ⨉ X = some dollar amount Z Divide Z by the startup's latest price per share to arrive at a number of advisor shares to grant
Be founder-friendly! It's a big deal and a lot of paperwork to get a smaller check or advisor on the cap table (unless they already have a lot of operational infrastructure in place) – this usually means being relaxed about the commitment paperwork or helping out pro-bono for the first few hours while they work through the logistics.
Finding founders you work well with can be a numbers game; you won't be sure what you like doing until you've met a handful of founders, done several advisory meetings, and poked at different types of problems. It's okay to dip your toe and warm up to the process before committing a lot of time and energy to this. I started slow, and have been steadily sharpening my own intuition about what kinds of products and founders get me excited, and where I can add unique value
#advice#startups#career#sales#marketing#best practices#design
·brianlovin.com·
What I've learned so far about design advising and angel investing
How to Read a Production Budget - Staffmeup Blog
How to Read a Production Budget - Staffmeup Blog
Most budgets split production costs into above-the-line, below-the-line and post-production sections. Some budgets may be divided further, but it’s a good idea to use at least these main segments: Above-the-line (ATL) costs include the wages for the cast, producers, director(s) and writer(s). The costs associated with the development, rights and creation of the script are also in this section. Costs for adapting a script from some other source, such as a book or video game, would fall into this category as well. It’s important to diligently review this portion of the budget, as these fees are often contractually defined and strictly enforced. As we’ll see below, some other items in the budget are more flexible, but ATL costs are more likely to be steadfast. Below-the-line (BTL) costs generally cover the bulk of the production expenses in terms of dollar amount. BTL costs include behind-the-scenes crew members like hair and makeup stylists, grips, camera operators, location managers and production accountants. This portion also covers expenses such as office and stage rentals, camera equipment, trucks, set dressing and construction materials.
most budgets contain dozens of smaller sections, usually called accounts, for specific costs that may be relevant to the movie or show. These accounts are usually separated by department. Each department’s account is then further separated into line items. For example, the property department may be given its own account number and within that account there may be a line item for the prop master, property assistants, property rentals, property purchases, a property trailer and so on. Each line item will have its own code number and budgeted amount, allowing the department, as well as the accountant and producers, to quantify how much they can spend on each item.
A carefully laid out budget is not worth much if the same attention is not paid to categorizing and reporting expenses as they come in.
When a department needs to make a rental or purchase, they will issue a PO to the vendor providing those goods or services. A copy of the PO also goes to the producers and the accountant and will include the account code and cost of the item. This allows the accounting and production teams to estimate the spending in real time, without having to wait for an invoice to arrive from the vendor, which may take days or weeks. A PO allows the cost to be recorded right away and avoids surprise costs down the line.
Production companies also commonly issue credit cards to crew members to make smaller purchases, such as lunches and office supplies. These credit cards can be linked directly to the accounting software to rapidly track expenses, depending on the software the project is using.
If the actual expenses of certain line items exceed the budgeted amount, the department head, accountant and producers need to work together to find a solution that satisfies creative and financial concerns. This may involve shifting money from other line items in the budget, or could be as drastic as cutting or rewriting scenes, depending on the scale of the overage.
When a department head suspects that a cost for a certain scene or location may differ substantially from their budgeted amount, they should notify the accountant and producers as soon as possible. This allows all parties more time to find a solution without risking delays to the shooting schedule, which can be incredibly costly in and of itself.
#filmmaking#advice#finance#business
·blog.staffmeup.com·
How to Read a Production Budget - Staffmeup Blog
How to take negative feedback well
How to take negative feedback well
A simple four step process: Take a deep breath to chill out. They’re trying to help you. Don’t make them regret it. Thank them for the feedback and really mean it, because giving it to you was probably scary and took courage. Only ask questions. Make ZERO statements. Anything you say will almost definitely be defensive, and your job is to be curious. Thank them again and tell them you promise to take it seriously and use it to grow.
#work/productivity#relationships#advice
·critter.blog·
How to take negative feedback well
Small b blogging
Small b blogging
As Venkatesh says in the calculus of grit - release work often, reference your own thinking & rework the same ideas again and again. That’s the small b blogging model.
I think most people would be better served by subscribing to small b blogging. What you want is something with YOUR personality. Writing and ideas that are addressable (i.e. you can find and link to them easily in the future) and archived (i.e. you have a list of things you’ve written all in one place rather than spread across publications and URLs) and memorable (i.e. has your own design, logo or style). Writing that can live and breathe in small networks. Scale be damned.
#blogging#writing#career#advice
·tomcritchlow.com·
Small b blogging