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Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?
Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?
Skeptics argue that many of the classic symptoms of the disorder — fidgeting, losing things, not following instructions — are simply typical, if annoying, behaviors of childhood. In response, others point to the serious consequences that can result when those symptoms grow more intense, including school failure, social rejection and serious emotional distress.
There are two main kinds of A.D.H.D., inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive, and children in one category often seem to have little in common with children in the other. There are people with A.D.H.D. whom you can’t get to stop talking and others whom you can’t get to start. Some are excessively eager and enthusiastic; others are irritable and moody.
Although the D.S.M. specifies that clinicians shouldn’t diagnose children with A.D.H.D. if their symptoms are better explained by another mental disorder, more than three quarters of children diagnosed with A.D.H.D. do have another mental-health condition as well, according to the C.D.C. More than a third have a diagnosis of anxiety, and a similar fraction have a diagnosed learning disorder. Forty-four percent have been diagnosed with a behavioral disorder like oppositional defiant disorder.
This all complicates the effort to portray A.D.H.D. as a distinct, unique biological disorder. Is a patient with six symptoms really that different from one with five? If a child who experienced early trauma now can’t sit still or stay organized, should she be treated for A.D.H.D.? What about a child with an anxiety disorder who is constantly distracted by her worries? Does she have A.D.H.D., or just A.D.H.D.-like symptoms caused by her anxiety?
The subjects who were given stimulants worked more quickly and intensely than the ones who took the placebo. They dutifully packed and repacked their virtual backpacks, pulling items in and out, trying various combinations. In the end, though, their scores on the knapsack test were no better than the placebo group. The reason? Their strategies for choosing items became significantly worse under the medication. Their choices didn’t make much sense — they just kept pulling random items in and out of the backpack. To an observer, they appeared to be focused, well behaved, on task. But in fact, they weren’t accomplishing anything of much value.
Farah directed me to the work of Scott Vrecko, a sociologist who conducted a series of interviews with students at an American university who used stimulant medication without a prescription. He wrote that the students he interviewed would often “frame the functional benefits of stimulants in cognitive-sounding terms.” But when he dug a little deeper, he found that the students tended to talk about their attention struggles, and the benefits they experienced with medication, in emotional terms rather than intellectual ones. Without the pills, they said, they just didn’t feel interested in the assignments they were supposed to be doing. They didn’t feel motivated. It all seemed pointless.
On stimulant medication, those emotions flipped. “You start to feel such a connection to what you’re working on,” one undergraduate told Vrecko. “It’s almost like you fall in love with it.” As another student put it: On Adderall, “you’re interested in what you’re doing, even if it’s boring.”
Socially, though, there was a price. “Around my friends, I’m usually the most social, but when I’m on it, it feels like my spark is kind of gone,” John said. “I laugh a lot less. I can’t think of anything to say. Life is just less fun. It’s not like I’m sad; I’m just not as happy. It flattens things out.”
John also generally doesn’t take his Adderall during the summer. When he’s not in school, he told me, he doesn’t have any A.D.H.D. symptoms at all. “If I don’t have to do any work, then I’m just a completely regular person,” he said. “But once I have to focus on things, then I have to take it, or else I just won’t get any of my stuff done.”
John’s sense that his A.D.H.D. is situational — that he has it in some circumstances but not in others — is a challenge to some of psychiatry’s longstanding assumptions about the condition. After all, diabetes doesn’t go away over summer vacation. But John’s intuition is supported by scientific evidence. Increasingly, research suggests that for many people A.D.H.D. might be thought of as a condition they experience, sometimes temporarily, rather than a disorder that they have in some unchanging way.
For most of his career, he embraced what he now calls the “medical model” of A.D.H.D — the belief that the brains of people with A.D.H.D. are biologically deficient, categorically different from those of typical, healthy individuals. Now, however, Sonuga-Barke is proposing an alternative model, one that largely sidesteps questions of biology. What matters instead, he says, is the distress children feel as they try to make their way in the world.
Sonuga-Barke’s proposed model locates A.D.H.D. symptoms on a continuum, rather than presenting the condition as a distinct, natural category. And it departs from the medical model in another crucial way: It considers those symptoms not as indications of neurological deficits but as signals of a misalignment between a child’s biological makeup and the environment in which they are trying to function. “I’m not saying it’s not biological,” he says. “I’m just saying I don’t think that’s the right target. Rather than trying to treat and resolve the biology, we should be focusing on building environments that improve outcomes and mental health.”
What the researchers noticed was that their subjects weren’t particularly interested in talking about the specifics of their disorder. Instead, they wanted to talk about the context in which they were now living and how that context had affected their symptoms. Subject after subject spontaneously brought up the importance of finding their “niche,” or the right “fit,” in school or in the workplace. As adults, they had more freedom than they did as children to control the parameters of their lives — whether to go to college, what to study, what kind of career to pursue. Many of them had sensibly chosen contexts that were a better match for their personalities than what they experienced in school, and as a result, they reported that their A.D.H.D. symptoms had essentially disappeared. In fact, some of them were questioning whether they had ever had a disorder at all — or if they had just been in the wrong environment as children.
The work environments where the subjects were thriving varied. For some, the appeal of their new jobs was that they were busy and cognitively demanding, requiring constant multitasking. For others, the right context was physical, hands-on labor. For all of them, what made a difference was having work that to them felt “intrinsically interesting.”
“Rather than a static ‘attention deficit’ that appeared under all circumstances,” the M.T.A. researchers wrote, “our subjects described their propensity toward distraction as contextual. … Believing the problem lay in their environments rather than solely in themselves helped individuals allay feelings of inadequacy: Characterizing A.D.H.D. as a personality trait rather than a disorder, they saw themselves as different rather than defective.”
For the young adults in the “niche” study who were interviewed about their work lives, the transition that helped them overcome their A.D.H.D. symptoms often was leaving academic work for something more kinetic. For Sonuga-Barke, it was the opposite. At university, he would show up at the library at 9 every morning and sit in his carrel working until 5. The next day, he would do it again. Growing up, he says, he had a natural tendency to “hyperfocus,” and back at school in Derby, that tendency looked to his teachers like daydreaming. At university, it became his secret weapon
I asked Sonuga-Barke what he might have gained if he grew up in a different time and place — if he was prescribed Ritalin or Adderall at age 8 instead of just being packed off to the remedial class. “I don’t think I would have gained anything,” he said. “I think without medication, you learn alternative ways of dealing with stuff. In my particular case, there are a lot of characteristics that have helped me. My mind is constantly churning away, thinking of things. I never relax. The way I motivate myself is to turn everything into a problem and to try and solve the problem.”
“The simple model has always been, basically, ‘A.D.H.D. plus medication equals no A.D.H.D.,’” he says. “But that’s not true. Medication is not a silver bullet. It never will be.” What medication can sometimes do, he believes, is allow families more room to communicate. “At its best,” he says, “medication can provide a window for parents to engage with their kids,” by moderating children’s behavior, at least temporarily, so that family life can become more than just endless fights about overdue homework and lost lunchboxes. “If you have a more positive relationship with your child, they’re going to have a better outcome. Not for their A.D.H.D. — it’s probably going to be just the same. But in terms of dealing with the self-hatred and low self-esteem that often goes along with A.D.H.D.
The alternative model, by contrast, tells a child a very different story: that his A.D.H.D. symptoms exist on a continuum, one on which we all find ourselves; that he may be experiencing those symptoms as much because of where he is as because of who he is; and that next year, if things change in his surroundings, those symptoms might change as well. Armed with that understanding, he and his family can decide whether medication makes sense — whether for him, the benefits are likely to outweigh the drawbacks. At the same time, they can consider whether there are changes in his situation, at school or at home, that might help alleviate his symptoms.
Admittedly, that version of A.D.H.D. has certain drawbacks. It denies parents the clear, definitive explanation for their children’s problems that can come as such a relief, especially after months or years of frustration and uncertainty. It often requires a lot of flexibility and experimentation on the part of patients, families and doctors. But it has two important advantages as well: First, the new model more accurately reflects the latest scientific understanding of A.D.H.D. And second, it gives children a vision of their future in which things might actually improve — not because their brains are chemically refashioned in a way that makes them better able to fit into the world, but because they find a way to make the world fit better around their complicated and distinctive brains.
#adhd#mental health#drugs#psychology#study#trends#cognition#science#definitions#mental models#Identities
·nytimes.com·
Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?
American Disruption
American Disruption
manufacturing in Asia is fundamentally different than the manufacturing we remember in the United States decades ago: instead of firms with product-specific factories, China has flexible factories that accommodate all kinds of orders, delivering on that vector of speed, convenience, and customization that Christensen talked about.
Every decrease in node size comes at increasingly astronomical costs; the best way to afford those costs is to have one entity making chips for everyone, and that has turned out to be TSMC. Indeed, one way to understand Intel’s struggles is that it was actually one of the last massive integrated manufacturers: Intel made chips almost entirely for itself. However, once the company missed mobile, it had no choice but to switch to a foundry model; the company is trying now, but really should have started fifteen years ago. Now the company is stuck, and I think they will need government help.
companies that go up-market find it impossible to go back down, and I think this too applies to countries. Start with the theory: Christensen had a chapter in The Innovator’s Dilemma entitled “What Goes Up, Can’t Go Down”: Three factors — the promise of upmarket margins, the simultaneous upmarket movement of many of a company’s customers, and the difficulty of cutting costs to move downmarket profitably — together create powerful barriers to downward mobility. In the internal debates about resource allocation for new product development, therefore, proposals to pursue disruptive technologies generally lose out to proposals to move upmarket. In fact, cultivating a systematic approach to weeding out new product development initiatives that would likely lower profits is one of the most important achievements of any well-managed company.
So could Apple pay more to get U.S. workers? I suppose — leaving aside the questions of skills and whatnot — but there is also the question of desirability; the iPhone assembly work that is not automated is highly drudgerous, sitting in a factory for hours a day delicately assembling the same components over and over again. It’s a good job if the alternative is working in the fields or in a much more dangerous and uncomfortable factory, but it’s much worse than basically any sort of job that is available in the U.S. market.
First, blanket tariffs are a mistake. I understand the motivation: a big reason why Chinese imports to the U.S. have actually shrunk over the last few years is because a lot of final assembly moved to countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, etc. Blanket tariffs stop this from happening, at least in theory. The problem, however, is that those final assembly jobs are the least desirable jobs in the value chain, at least for the American worker; assuming the Trump administration doesn’t want to import millions of workers — that seems rather counter to the foundation of his candidacy! — the United States needs to find alternative trustworthy countries for final assembly. This can be accomplished through selective tariffs (which is exactly what happened in the first Trump administration).
Secondly, using trade flows to measure the health of the economic relationship with these countries — any country, really, but particularly final assembly countries — is legitimately stupid. Go back to the iPhone: the value-add of final assembly is in the single digit dollar range; the value-add of Apple’s software, marketing, distribution, etc. is in the hundreds of dollars. Simply looking at trade flows — where an imported iPhone is calculated as a trade deficit of several hundred dollars — completely obscures this reality. Moreover, the criteria for a final assembly country is that they have low wages, which by definition can’t pay for an equivalent amount of U.S. goods to said iPhone.
At the same time, the overall value of final assembly does exceed its economic value, for the reasons noted above: final assembly is gravity for higher value components, and it’s those components that are the biggest national security problem. This is where component tariffs might be a useful tool: the U.S. could use a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer to incentivize buying components from trusted allies, or from the U.S. itself, or to build new capacity in trusted locations. This does, admittedly, start to sound a lot like central planning, but that is why the gravity argument is an important one: simply moving final assembly somewhere other than China is a win — but not if there are blanket tariffs, at which point you might as well leave the supply chain where it is.
You can certainly make the case that things like castings and other machine components are of sufficient importance to the U.S. that they ought to be manufactured here, but you have to ramp up to that. What is much more problematic is that raw materials and components are now much cheaper for Haas’ foreign competitors; even if those competitors face tariffs in the United States, their cost of goods sold will be meaningfully lower than Haas, completely defeating the goal of encouraging the purchase of U.S. machine tools.
Fourth, there remains the problem of chips. Trump just declared economic war on China, which definitionally increases the possibility of kinetic war. A kinetic war, however, will mean the destruction of TSMC, leaving the U.S. bereft of chips at the very moment that A.I. is poised to create tremendous opportunities for growth and automation. And, even if A.I. didn’t exist, it’s enough to note that modern life would grind to a halt without chips. That’s why this is the area that most needs direct intervention from the federal government, particularly in terms of incentivizing demand for both leading and trailing edge U.S. chips.
my prevailing emotion over the past week — one I didn’t fully come to grips with until interrogating why Monday’s Article failed to live up to my standards — is sadness over the end of an era in technology, and frustration-bordering-on-disillusionment over the demise of what I thought was a uniquely American spirit.
Internet 1.0 was about technology. This was the early web, when technology was made for technology’s sake. This was when we got standards like TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, etc. This was obviously the best era, but one that was impossible to maintain once there was big money to be made on the Internet. Internet 2.0 was about economics. This was the era of Aggregators — the era of Stratechery, in other words — when the Internet developed, for better or worse, in ways that made maximum economic sense. This was a massive boon for the U.S., which sits astride the world of technology; unfortunately none of the value that comes from that position is counted in the trade statistics, so the administration doesn’t seem to care. Internet 3.0 is about politics. This is the era when countries make economically sub-optimal choices for reasons that can’t be measured in dollars and cents. In that Article I thought that Big Tech exercising its power against the President might be a spur for other countries to seek to wean themselves away from American companies; instead it is the U.S. that may be leaving other countries little choice but to retaliate against U.S. tech.
There is, admittedly, a hint of that old school American can-do attitude embedded in these tariffs: the Trump administration seems to believe the U.S. can overcome all of the naysayers and skeptics through sheer force of will. That force of will, however, would be much better spent pursuing a vision of a new world order in 2050, not trying to return to 1950. That is possible to do, by the way, but only if you accept 1950’s living standards, which weren’t nearly as attractive as nostalgia-colored glasses paint them, and if we’re not careful, 1950’s technology as well. I think we can do better that that; I know we can do better than this.
#economy#govt/policy#people/Trump#business/strategy#trump-admin-actions
·stratechery.com·
American Disruption
"High Agency in 30 Minutes" by George Mack
"High Agency in 30 Minutes" by George Mack

Summary

High agency is the ability to shape reality through clear thinking, bias to action, and disagreeability—it's the mindset that there are no unsolvable problems that don't defy the laws of physics, and that you have the power to affect outcomes rather than passively accepting circumstances.

  1. Vague Trap: Never defining the problem clearly
    • Escape: Define problems in simple words outside your head (write, draw, talk)
  2. Midwit Trap: Overcomplicating simple actions
    • Escape: Find simple ideas through inversion (what would make things worse?)
  3. Attachment Trap: Being too attached to past assumptions
    • Escape: Ask "What would I do if I had 10x the agency?"
  4. Rumination Trap: Endless "what if" loops without action
    • Escape: Ask "How can I take action on this now?" and frame decisions as experiments
  5. Overwhelm Trap: Paralysis from daunting tasks
    • Escape: Ask "What's the smallest first step I can take?" and break tasks into levels

  • The "Story Razor" tool: When stuck between options, ask "What is the best story?"

    • High agency people maximize the interestingness of their life story
    • An interesting life story attracts opportunities and has compounding effects

  • Some examples of high agency individuals:

    • James Cameron (photocopied film school dissertations while working as a truck driver)
    • Cole Summers (started businesses and bought property as a child)
It’s not optimism or pessimism either. Optimism states the glass is half full. Pessimism states the glass is half empty. High agency states you’re a tap.
The ruminating perfectionist keeps kicking cans down the road because they can’t find a perfect option with zero perceived risk — only to end up with lots of cans and no more road to kick them down.
"I’ve spent the last 5 years thinking about leaving my hometown of Doncaster and going to New York — but there’s no perfect option. When my mind thinks of going to New York, it plays a horror film of the expensive rent draining my bank account and me losing contact with my home friends. When my mind thinks of staying in Doncaster, it plays a horror film of me as an old man wondering what could’ve been if I moved to New York.” — When faced with those horror films, they opt for more ruminating time.
One tool to make this easier is to reframe decisions as experiments. You’re no longer a perfectionist frozen on stage with everyone watching your every move, you’re a curious scientist in a lab trying to test a hypothesis. E.g. “I’m 60% certain that moving to New York is better than 40% of staying in Doncaster…Ok. It’s time to Blitzkrieg.” Book the tickets to New York and run the experiment. Success isn’t whether your forecast is correct and New York is perfect, it’s that you tested the hypothesis.
Video games break us out of the overwhelm trap by chunking everything down into small enough chunks to create momentum — Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 etc. Each level is small enough to not be overwhelming, but big enough to be addicted to the progress.
The person in the vague trap often spends countless hours thinking — without once thinking clearly. The average person has 10-60,000 thoughts per day. Can you remember any specific thoughts from yesterday? Thoughts feel so real in the moment and then disappear into the memory abyss. Most thoughts aren’t even clear sentences. It’s a series of emotional GIFs, JPEGs and prompts bouncing around consciousness like a random Tumblr page.
Each time you transform your thoughts out of your head, keep trying to refine problems and solutions in the simplest, clearest, most specific language possible. As you transform out of your head, remember: The vague trap is often downstream from vague questions. Vague question: What career should I choose? ‍Specific question: What does my dream week look like hour by hour? What does my nightmare week look like hour by hour? What’s the gap between my current week and the dream/nightmare week?
#self improvement#essays
·highagency.com·
"High Agency in 30 Minutes" by George Mack
F*ck you. Pay me. : r/Design
F*ck you. Pay me. : r/Design
when one of us gives something away, be it an actual design or even just telling someone their choice of typefaces suck and maybe even why, you have devalued your own work in addition to everyone else's.
Get something for you work. Always, always, always get something of actual value for your work. Money is ideal, but barter is certainly an option. In my twenties I went for a span of about five years without paying for a drink anywhere I went out because I made everyone's fliers, and I went out a lot.
What you do is valuable. I don't mean that it enriches society or gives us a more robust culture or any touchy-feely bullshit like that, I mean it's worth money. It is a skill that other people should be paying you to use.
·reddit.com·
F*ck you. Pay me. : r/Design
Derek Thompson on X: "Every defense of the Trump tariffs is at odds with the actual underlying policy. Like, how do you go into office thinking "We must build a durable and dependable supply chain that reduces our reliance on China, a geopolitical adversary" and then - attack the CHIPS and Science https://t.co/0gVFnR70Yn" / X
Derek Thompson on X: "Every defense of the Trump tariffs is at odds with the actual underlying policy. Like, how do you go into office thinking "We must build a durable and dependable supply chain that reduces our reliance on China, a geopolitical adversary" and then - attack the CHIPS and Science https://t.co/0gVFnR70Yn" / X
·x.com·
Derek Thompson on X: "Every defense of the Trump tariffs is at odds with the actual underlying policy. Like, how do you go into office thinking "We must build a durable and dependable supply chain that reduces our reliance on China, a geopolitical adversary" and then - attack the CHIPS and Science https://t.co/0gVFnR70Yn" / X
Mike White Slams ‘White Lotus’ Composer Quitting: “A B**** Move, He Didn’t Respect Me”
Mike White Slams ‘White Lotus’ Composer Quitting: “A B**** Move, He Didn’t Respect Me”
“I honestly don’t know what happened, except now I’m reading his interviews because he decides to do some PR campaign about him leaving the show,” White said. “I don’t think he respected me. He wants people to know that he’s edgy and dark and I’m, I don’t know, like I watch reality TV. We never really even fought. He says we feuded. I don’t think I ever had a fight with him — except for maybe some emails. It was basically me giving him notes. I don’t think he liked to go through the process of getting notes from me, or wanting revisions, because he didn’t respect me. I knew he wasn’t a team player and that he wanted to do it his way. I was thrown that he would go to The New York Times to shit on me and the show three days before the finale. It was kind of a bitch move.”
“By the time the third season came around, he’d won Emmys and he had his song go viral, he didn’t want to go through the process with me, he didn’t want to go to sessions. He would always look at me with this contemptuous smirk on his face like he thought I was a chimp or something … he’s definitely making a big deal out of a creative difference.”
“They’re criticizing the show in certain ways and they’re meaner in certain ways [now that the show is popular],” White said. “I’m used to being this underdog indie writer that people are championing. Certain things will hurt my feelings or I’ll feel misunderstood. The mean ones have gotten meaner. It’s like they don’t like me. I guess I need to either avoid that stuff or get tougher, because it does bum me out.”
Some of the finale gripes that bothered White the most were — for instance — complaints that the surviving characters should be getting interviewed by Thai police after the tragic resort murders in the last episode. “Little logic police — really, you can’t enjoy the vibe and the emotional arcs because you’re so caught up in the — this isn’t a police procedural, this is a rumination-type show,” he said. “It makes me want to pull my hair out. Is this how you watch movies and TV shows? Constant literal police?”
In fact, White says he’s about to hit the road again to get out of Los Angeles and clear his head. “I’m going to Colombia today just to get the hell out of here,” he said. “I’ve never been there. I don’t think [season four is] going to South America, but I’ve never been there. Maybe one day. I just got to get out of L.A. I’m scrolling on my phone and reading shit about the show and this is not the finish line that I want.”
#writing/screenwriting#creativity#interviews#amusing#quotes#entertainment#music#tv#soundtrack
·hollywoodreporter.com·
Mike White Slams ‘White Lotus’ Composer Quitting: “A B**** Move, He Didn’t Respect Me”
The global response to Trump's tariffs.
The global response to Trump's tariffs.
Trump was interviewed, and he explained a very simple and also absurd view: He believes “a deficit is a loss” and therefore wants to be “even” or have trade surpluses with every country.  It’s worth pausing here to explain how nonsensical Trump’s actual position is. The United States is the richest nation on earth with the most prolific consumers in the world. In most cases, that makes us net buyers of other countries’ products, but in some cases countries want more of our own exports. For instance, we lump our trade policies towards Germany and the Netherlands into one broad policy on the European Union, but we have a trade deficit with Germany and a trade surplus with the Netherlands. Why? As a Council on Foreign Relations primer explains, we love German cars and machinery, and the Netherlands loves American medical equipment and pharmaceuticals. Dynamiting this free, beneficial exchange with Germany to make it look like the relationship we have with a different country — as Trump apparently wants to do — doesn't make any sense.
A cohesive industrial policy would be good for American workers, but a major stock market crash and recession would not. Obviously. Tens of millions of American workers are in the services industry that could be crushed by these tariffs. If you manage a business that involves importing parts for construction, you are also headed for very big trouble. There has to be an off-ramp or a fleshed-out plan for success — and there has to be a way to navigate the storm that’s coming. But I don’t get the sense we have that right now.
If you really want to be intellectually honest, you have to acknowledge the possibility (however slim) that Trump’s tariff gambit induces better trade deals, raises billions or trillions in tariff revenue, refinances our debt, and helps us confront China on trade. Still, to help manage the immediate pain and uncertainty, the administration ought to set some parameters: What do success and failure look like? What deals are we hunting with adversaries in global trade? How much manufacturing investment do we want to bring home? How much tariff revenue do we want to raise? Despite the lack of answers to these questions, I hope this is all part of some larger plan to refinance the debt and invite better trade deals — but I also know that is me projecting my wants onto this administration again. Contrary to my hope, a good deal of reporting indicates that Trump’s economic team spent months working on individualized tariff plans for different countries before he instead opted for a simple, broad formula to apply to all of them.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said over 50 countries have already approached him to make tariff deals. If true, this is good news, as successful negotiations could help us avoid a worst-case economic downturn. But simultaneously, the administration has insisted they aren’t going to negotiate, and Axios reported on internal frustration within the administration over the lack of structure to even conduct such negotiations. This constitutes a pattern: We’ve seen it with the Department of Government Efficiency, with deportations, and now with tariffs. Trump could be approaching popular ideas like efficiency reforms or reworking trade policies with fleshed-out plans, but instead all the signals out of the White House show them shooting from the hip and trying to figure the mess out as it happens.
The annoying truth, though, is that the consensus is usually the consensus because it’s accurate. If The Experts are right here — which I have an increasingly hard time doubting — we are headed for an economic storm I’m not sure people have totally prepared for.
·readtangle.com·
The global response to Trump's tariffs.
Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor)
Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor)
The “sales, then logistics” framework: Always sell people on why something matters before diving into how to do it. Even executives who seem rushed need 30 to 60 seconds of context for why this matters now.
Being concise is about density of insight, not brevity: “Being concise is not about absolute word count. It’s about economy of words and density of the insight.” The bottleneck to being concise is often unclear thinking.
Use “signposting” to guide your audience: Words like “for example,” “because,” “as a next step,” and “first, second, third”
Before sharing an idea, spend just a few seconds anticipating the most obvious objections.
Don’t overstate hypotheses as facts or understate strong recommendations. Match your conviction level to the evidence available.
Focus on motivating behavior change rather than venting your frustrations. “Trim 90% of what you initially want to say and keep only the 10% that will make the person want to change.”
he CEDAF delegation framework: Comprehension: Ensure they understand what needs to be done Excitement: Make the task meaningful and motivating De-risk: Anticipate and address potential issues Align: Confirm mutual understanding Feedback: Create the shortest possible feedback loop
#best practices#communication#business#advice#language
·lennysnewsletter.com·
Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor)
How the 2025 US Financial Crisis is Different than 2008
How the 2025 US Financial Crisis is Different than 2008
Whatever tools may be at the disposal of the Federal Reserve and the US federal government will not be able to undo the damage to reputation and relationships upon which so much commerce bases its functions on day-to-day. As much as humans fancy themselves civilized and sophisticated, as a whole, societies still have serious trust issues internally and therefore externally. That’s why the concept of “credit” exists worldwide for the most part and is a component of trade, of alliances, and of good will.
By first taking a chainsaw to the global relationships of a worldview nature — most easily seen in the conflict of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the rightful concern expressed by Western interests…credit has been damaged. By next taking a chainsaw to the global trade relationships which have functioned for decades and, while problematic, have enabled commerce to proceed at a reasonable level…credit has been damaged. By exploiting internal divisiveness of the political spectrum and the wealth inequality where the investor class seemingly has unchecked rule over hundreds of millions of disenfranchised people in the United States…the nation can no longer trust itself.
#economy#history#finance#trends#business
·samhenrycliff.medium.com·
How the 2025 US Financial Crisis is Different than 2008
The One Word that Explains Globalization's Failure, and Trump's Response
The One Word that Explains Globalization's Failure, and Trump's Response
The proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible.” By this logic, anything that slows the flow of imports, or raises their cost, would indeed be a self-inflicted wound. If the Chinese Communist Party wants to block the sale of U.S. electric vehicles in China, let it. We should still want as many cheap Chinese EVs as possible flooding into our market.
Even Friedman’s claim that “the proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible,” runs directly counter to what Smith actually wrote, which was: “If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry.”
With some part of the produce of our own country. A vital assumption of the classical model was that trade would be balanced—something made here for something made there
#trump-admin-actions#economy#govt/policy#people/Trump#international#politics
·understandingamerica.co·
The One Word that Explains Globalization's Failure, and Trump's Response
Trump's "liberation day" tariffs.
Trump's "liberation day" tariffs.
Most of the economists I trust and follow (regardless of their political orientation) are absolutely, 100% sure that President Trump is in the process of making a massive, term-defining mistake. They are predicting rampant inflation, a recession, and an era of economic disruption that is entirely of his making. They similarly predict that this tariff strategy will isolate us from our most important trading partners and push them into China’s sphere of influence, an outcome that would be antithetical to one of Trump’s core goals.
I’m open to the idea that our trade policies, founded on an obsession with growth and cheap goods, are hurting us.
If Trump’s goal is to reduce the barriers on American exports other countries have erected, he may well get a few wins. Israel, for instance, already agreed to lift all duties on U.S. imports in an effort to be exempted from new tariffs. Trump can already point to Apple, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, and Hyundai as major companies who have been talking about expanding their manufacturing operations in the United States. Yes, Trump’s belief that trade deficits represent us being taken advantage of is totally wrong, but it doesn’t make those potential gains any less real.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent believes a lower yield will force the Federal Reserve to cut rates, which the administration wants. After the tariff announcements, the ten-year T-note yield fell — potentially the exact indicator Bessent was looking for.
Even if those goals amass into coherence, with no articulation of the administration’s long-term strategy on file, supporters are left offering haphazard, conflicting explanations.
If the point is to force other countries into reciprocity and fair trade, then why did Trump move forward with a large tariff increase on Israel after it removed all its tariffs on us? If it’s to impose reciprocal tariffs, why is the Trump administration using a custom formula to levy these tariffs based on trade balances rather than tariff rates?
How should small developing countries react? Some of the territories on the tariff list don’t even have inhabitants. It could take a country like Cambodia years to prepare before reducing its tariffs on the U.S. without cratering its own economy. Lesotho, an African country with a GDP smaller than that of most U.S. territories, just got hit with a 50% tariff rate because it’s a part of the South African Customs Union (SACU). How does Lesotho work its way out of these tariffs without South Africa? And why did South Africa get a lower tariff rate than Lesotho when both tax us equally?
Our treatment of Indonesia is another head scratcher. Indonesia has a high tax on coffee imports because it is a major exporter of coffee. Trump has slapped a 32% tax on coffee imports from Indonesia, even though the United States exports zero coffee to Indonesia. Where’s the reciprocity there?
We import 98% of the clothing sold in the U.S. — primarily from Southeast Asia. Are we supposed to divert hundreds of thousands of Americans from higher-paying jobs to manufacture clothing, stand up those manufacturing plants, and start producing our own clothes? How does that help us?
How does this help us confront China? If they are a more open trading partner than we are, won’t we lose trading partners — and therefore political power — to them? What’s the plan there?
What is the explanation for the exceptions? Oil imports have been exempted from Trump’s tariffs, as have semiconductors (something we actually need to be re-shoring the production of). What are the administration’s explanations for making these exemptions if the impacts of the tariffs are supposed to be so uniformly strong? We don’t know, and they don’t say.
Let’s not forget that we are mostly living in Trump’s trade world — the one he created in his first term by abandoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership, signing new trade deals, and levying new tariffs — most of which Biden did not change in any meaningful way. He called those deals the greatest in history; now he’s trumpeting broad tariffs by arguing they are all terrible deals.
he’s also been beating the drum of “short-term” pain for long-term gain.  How short? Six months? A year? His entire term? We don’t know and he doesn’t say — but his administration will be kneecapped in 2026 if the plan is to let Americans’ stock portfolios and retirement plans crater while he promises a golden age of manufacturing sometime in the undefined future.
Murphy claims what Trump really wants is a means to compel loyalty from every business leader and industry — to solicit donations, public support, and fealty in exchange for sanctions relief. I don’t doubt that Trump relishes the power or influence these tariffs may afford him, but I think Murphy is wrong.  For starters, I don’t think this plan is going to draw industry leaders to the president for favor. I think it is going to draw their ire, and probably cost Trump some support.
I think Trump’s fundamental belief that the United States is getting ripped off by globalism is much like his view on immigration: It is one of the few genuine ideological perspectives that he is rigid and consistent on. He’s had it since long before he was in office, and tariffs have always been a key part of the resolution in his mind. With only one term left, he seems to earnestly believe he can pursue them without facing real political consequences — and without inflicting too much economic damage on the American people.
·readtangle.com·
Trump's "liberation day" tariffs.
‘The White Lotus’ Uncensored Oral History: Mike White and Cast Spill Season 3’s Secrets
‘The White Lotus’ Uncensored Oral History: Mike White and Cast Spill Season 3’s Secrets
ROCKWELL I pitched Mike some ideas, and we read it through, and he was on board with the take I had on this guy. We wanted to make him feel possibly ex-military, super masculine and kind of nonchalant, which worked in contrast to Mike’s writing in the scene.
And the incest thing, it’s really more about someone who is trying to connect with his brother and his sister through the things they value. Saxon is all about getting off, and Piper is renouncing the materialistic.
MONAGHAN The three of us originally just referred to them as “the ladies.” People have taken to referring to them as “the toxic trio,” but Mike’s original inspiration for us was “the big blonde blob” — this group of women that moves together and sort of sounds alike and looks alike. Interchangeable. Once the season starts to progress, you start to see them individuate from each other. WHITE I knew I didn’t want to do, “Here’s the short dumpy one, here’s the pretty one …” I wanted them all to be variations on the same idea when they show up. I’d been on a vacation where there were these three women who I couldn’t even tell apart until one would peel off and you’d hear the other two talking [about her].
GOGGINS The very first conversation he and I had was me asking, like, “How does Rick move through the world? Where has he been? How does he dress?” Mike said, “I don’t know.” I go, “Well, I do know.” And he said, “OK, let’s do that.”
COON Mike will do this thing where he scream-laughs at the monitor if he thinks you’re funny. We’re actors, so as soon as you know that’s happening, you become obsessed by it. “He didn’t do the scream-laugh! It’s not funny! I’m not as funny as this person!” You just spiral.
#interviews#quotes#tv#bts#companies/hbo#Entertainment#oral history#hollywood
·hollywoodreporter.com·
‘The White Lotus’ Uncensored Oral History: Mike White and Cast Spill Season 3’s Secrets
Discussion of The Atlantic's article "The White Lotus Is the First Great Post-‘Woke’ Piece of Art" on r/redscarepod
Discussion of The Atlantic's article "The White Lotus Is the First Great Post-‘Woke’ Piece of Art" on r/redscarepod
What makes The White Lotus feel like the cultural product of a new era is that White doesn’t try to build shallow morality plays around these or any other characters. Nor does he drop in stock “Karens”—think of the way And Just Like That turned Sex and the City’s leads into idiot middle-aged ladies whom minor characters endlessly lecture about their outdated attitudes—whose primary job is to provide teachable moments.
White’s most countercultural belief is that a heavy focus on identity is a prison, not a liberation. He told Sullivan that his time as an actor made him feel limited by his appearance, whereas writing allowed him to explore the way that “we’re all monkeys, first of all—we’re all apes—and we also share so much.”
Viewers crave yachts, and hot people, and terrible mistakes, and hot people making terrible mistakes on yachts. Give them that, and underneath you can smuggle the message that it’s all incredibly hollow and unfulfilling.
Post-something doesn't mean it's reversed. We're post-communism, but its effects are forever. Post-modernism doesn't mean that we're back to horse carriages and revolutionary portraits, it means that the mechanisms that created modernism are finished and we live in their wake. Applied to wokeness, everything we make now has to have some sort of reaction to woke for the foreseeable future. White lotus does adopt many woke tropes, but instead of adopting them as a way to push them as an agenda, it's adopting them as themes that Mike White riffs off of.
·reddit.com·
Discussion of The Atlantic's article "The White Lotus Is the First Great Post-‘Woke’ Piece of Art" on r/redscarepod
you are what you launch: how software became a lifestyle brand
you are what you launch: how software became a lifestyle brand
opening notion or obsidian feels less like launching software and more like putting on your favorite jacket. it says something about you. aligns you with a tribe, becomes part of your identity. software isn’t just functional anymore. it’s quietly turned into a lifestyle brand, a digital prosthetic we use to signal who we are, or who we wish we were.
somewhere along the way, software stopped being invisible. it started meaning things. your browser, your calendar, your to-do list, these are not just tools anymore. they are taste. alignment. self-expression.
Though many people definitely still see software as just software i.e. people who only use defaults
suddenly your app stack said something about you. not in a loud, obvious way but like the kind of shoes you wear when you don’t want people to notice, but still want them to know. margiela replica. new balance 992. arcteryx. stuff that whispers instead of shouts, it’s all about signaling to the right people.
I guess someone only using default software / being 'unopinionated' about what software choices they make is itself a kind of statement along these lines?
notion might be one of the most unopinionated tools out there. you can build practically anything with it. databases, journals, dashboards, even websites. but for a tool so open-ended, it’s surprisingly curated. only three fonts, ten colors.
if notion is a sleek apartment in seoul, obsidian is a cluttered home lab. markdown files. local folders. keyboard shortcuts. graph views. it doesn’t care how it looks, it cares that it works. it’s functional first, aesthetic maybe never. there’s no onboarding flow, no emoji illustrations, no soft gradients telling you everything’s going to be okay. just an empty vault and the quiet suggestion: you figure it out. obsidian is built for tinkerers. not in the modern, drag and drop sense but in the old way. the “i wanna see how this thing works under the hood way”. it’s a tool that rewards curiosity and exploration. everything in obsidian feels like it was made by someone who didn’t just want to take notes, they wanted to build the system that takes notes. it’s messy, it’s endless, and that’s the point. it’s a playground for people who believe that the best tools are the ones you shape yourself.
notion is for people who want a beautiful space to live in, obsidian is for people who want to wire the whole building from scratch. both offer freedom, but one is curated and the other is raw. obsidian and notion don’t just attract different users. they attract different lifestyles.
the whole obsidian ecosystem runs on a kind of quiet technical fluency.
the fact that people think obsidian is open source matters more than whether it actually is. because open source, in this context, isn’t just a licence, it’s a vibe. it signals independence. self-reliance. a kind of technical purity. using obsidian says: i care about local files. i care about control. i care enough to make things harder on myself. and that is a lifestyle.
now, there’s a “premium” version of everything. superhuman for email. cron (i don’t wanna call it notion calendar) for calendars. arc for browsing. raycast for spotlight. even perplexity, somehow, for search.
these apps aren’t solving new problems. they’re solving old ones with better fonts. tighter animations, cleaner onboarding. they’re selling taste.
chrome gets the job done, but arc gets you. the onboarding feels like a guided meditation. it’s not about speed or performance. it’s about posture.
arc makes you learn new gestures. it hides familiar things. it’s not trying to be invisible, it wants to be felt. same with linear. same with superhuman. these apps add friction on purpose. like doc martens or raw denim that needs breaking in.
linear even has a “work with linear” page, a curated list of companies that use their tool. it’s a perfect example of companies not just acknowledging their lifestyle brand status, but actively leaning into it as a recruiting and signaling mechanism.
#software#branding#taste#lifestyle#tech#culture#companies/notion#companies/obsidian#tools/knowledge-tools
·omeru.bearblog.dev·
you are what you launch: how software became a lifestyle brand
Podcast Overload (Published 2023)
Podcast Overload (Published 2023)
a guest in November 2021 was Alex Jones, the founder of the misinformation website Infowars and a prominent conspiracy theorist who described the killings of 27 people, including 20 children, at the Sandy Hook Elementary School as a hoax. The hosts were apparently trying to rehabilitate his reputation, asking him softball questions like, “Do you feel like a caricature that the liberal media made you out to be?”
·nytimes.com·
Podcast Overload (Published 2023)
Hasan Piker has a plan to rescue young men from the right | Vox
Hasan Piker has a plan to rescue young men from the right | Vox
self-improvement can turn into hyper-individualism very quickly, which is also another incredibly American attitude in general
right-wing commentary is like a warm blanket that you can surround yourself with that says: “You’re right to be angry and you should be angry at vulnerable populations. You should be angry at people who have no power over you. And then if you dominate them a little bit, then that gives you a little bit of power, right?”
there’s definitely a lot of interest amongst the American working class to to change things. Some people have associated that change with Donald Trump. I find that kind of change to be worse because I think Donald Trump is further breaking the system that was broken previously prior to this.
That’s the attitude that many Americans have. They’re just like, “Yeah, everything is messed up. At least this guy wants to break the system. And I don’t really like the system anyway. I don’t like the institutions anyway. They, what have they done for me? So let’s test this out.”
#identities/masculinity#right-wing#social-media/strategy#influencers#politics#social media
·archive.is·
Hasan Piker has a plan to rescue young men from the right | Vox
What kind of disruption? — Benedict Evans
What kind of disruption? — Benedict Evans
Where previous generations of tech companies sold software to hotels and taxi companies, Airbnb and Uber used software to create new businesses and to redefine markets. Uber changed what we mean when we say ‘taxi’ and Airbnb changed hotels.
But for all sorts of reasons, the actual effect of that on the taxi and hotel industries was very different. The regulation is different. The supply of people with a car and few hours to spare is very different from the supply of people with a spare room to rent out (indeed, there is adverse selection in that difference). The delta between waving your hand on a street corner and pressing a button on your phone is different to the delta between booking a hotel room and booking a stranger’s apartment.
Sometimes disruption is much more about new demand than challenging the existing market, or only affects a peripheral business, as happened with Skype.
it’s always easier to shout ‘disruption!’ or ‘AI!’ than to ask what kind.
#startups#definitions#business/strategy#business#platforms#trends
·ben-evans.com·
What kind of disruption? — Benedict Evans
Apple innovation and execution — Benedict Evans
Apple innovation and execution — Benedict Evans
since the iPhone launched Apple has created three (!) more innovative and category-defining products - the iPad, Watch and AirPods. The iPad is a little polarising amongst tech people (and it remains unfinished business, as Apple concedes in how often it fiddles with the keyboard and the multitasking) but after a rocky start it’s stabilised as roughly the same size as the Mac. The Watch and the Airpods, again, have both become $10bn+ businesses, but also seem to have stabilised. (The ‘Wearables, Home and Accessories’ category also includes the Apple TV, HomePods and Apple’s sizeable cable, dongle & case business.)
Meanwhile, since both the Watch and AirPods on one side and the services on the other are all essentially about the attach rate to iPhone users, you could group them together as one big upsell, which suggests a different chart: half of Apple’s revenue is the iPhone and another third is iPhone upsells - 80% in total.
I think the car project was the classic Apple of Steve Jobs. Apple spent a lot of time and money trying to work out whether it could bring something new, and said no. . The shift to electric is destabilising the car industry and creating lots of questions about who builds cars and how they build them, and that’s a situation that should attract Apple. However, I also think that Apple concluded that while there was scope to make a great car, and perhaps one that did a few things better, there wasn’t really scope to do something fundamentally different, and solve some problem that no-one else was solving. Apple would only be making another EV, not redefining what ‘car’ means, because EVs are still basically cars - which is Tesla’s problem. It looks like the EV market will play out not like smartphones, where Apple had something unique, but like Android, where there was frenzied competition in a low-margin commodity market. So, Apple walked away - it said no.
People often suggest that Apple should buy anything from Netflix to telcos to banks, and I used to make fun of this by suggesting that Apple should buy an airline ‘because it could make the seats and the screens better’. Yes, Apple could maybe make better seats than Collins Aerospace, but that’s not what it means to run an airline. Where can Apple change the fundamental questions?
It ships MVPs that get better later, sure, and the original iPhone and Watch were MVPs, but the original iPhone also was the best phone I’d ever owned even with no 3G and no App Store. It wasn’t a concept. it wasn’t a vision of the future- it was the future. The Vision Pro is a concept, or a demo, and Apple doesn’t ship demos. Why did it ship the Vision Pro? What did it achieve? It didn’t sell in meaningful volume, because it couldn’t, and it didn’t lead to much developer activity ether, because no-one bought it. A lot of people even at Apple are puzzled.
The new Siri that’s been delayed this week is the mirror image of this. Last summer Apple told a very clear, coherent, compelling story of how it would combine the software frameworks it’s already built with the personal data in apps spread across your phones and the capabilities of LLMs to produce a new kind of personal assistant. This was the eats of Apple - taking a new primary technology and proposing way to make it useful for everyone else
#companies/apple#history#business/strategy#apple-intelligence#product strategy#tech
·ben-evans.com·
Apple innovation and execution — Benedict Evans