Media – Page 22

New additions to the Personal Bible: Warren Buffett, Robert Greene, and a Hacker News comment

I created a Personal Bible for myself so I could re-read and re-re-read my favorite essays, poems, and passages of text. Below are new additions including a snippet from a Warren Buffett shareholder letter, a raw and honest comment on Hacker News, and some small snippets from other writers that I like.

Here’s my latest version as a PDF. Hope one day you can create one for yourself!

Warren Buffett’s 1989 letter to shareholders
http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1989.html

My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in business of an unseen force that we might call ‘the institutional imperative.’ […] I thought that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn’t so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play.

For example: (1) As if governed by Newton’s First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.

[…] After making some expensive mistakes because I ignored the power of the imperative, I have tried to organize and manage Berkshire in ways that minimize its influence. Furthermore, Charlie and I have attempted to concentrate our investments in companies that appear alert to the problem.

I was the ambitious one, the one that strayed far from home, chasing the dream, getting caught up in the consumerism. I’m glad that by the age of 38 I have come to realize that I had everything that was important before I left. The remainder was a constant cycle of churn, want more, want bigger, want better, want newer, want more convenient. Except it’s hard when it’s being fed to you every day by every billboard, every sign, every menu, every advert, every press release, every news story, every TV show to differentiate between want and need. When you stop to analyze what you actually need – I mean really need: Clean air, clean water, shelter, nutrition, sanitation, family, community, companionship; how much of what you’re being sold every day is truly “needed” and how much of it is a want to fulfill some notion that has been sold to you by the media? – a Hacker News commenter

David DeAngelo: Prove to yourself over and over that you can cope with rejection

From Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power [Amazon]

Law 28: Enter Action with Boldness
When […] entering any kind of negotiation, go further than you planned. Ask for the moon and you will be surprised how often you get it.

Jeff Bezos on Amazon’s culture and strategy: “Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied”

This is from his 2015 Amazon letter to shareholders [source]. So much good stuff on what makes Amazon such a sustaining high performing culture, how to align vastly different business units and products, what challenges he’s faced – and the lessons he’s learned from them – as the company has grown and grown and grown.

On alignment and shared values

[AWS and Amazon retail] share a distinctive organizational culture that cares deeply about and acts with conviction on a small number of principles. I’m talking about customer obsession rather than competitor obsession, eagerness to invent and pioneer, willingness to fail, the patience to think long-term, and the taking of professional pride in operational excellence.

There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.

On managing big company process and complexity

As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2. A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes

The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won’t or can’t embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you’re probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind.

On decision making

Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.

Recognize true misalignment issues early and escalate them immediately. Sometimes teams have different objectives and fundamentally different views. They are not aligned. No amount of discussion, no number of meetings will resolve that deep misalignment. Without escalation, the default dispute resolution mechanism for this scenario is exhaustion. Whoever has more stamina carries the decision.

Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups.

$30B Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing shares gems in this Bloomberg interview

was a refugee from China to HK during the Japan invasion

“cashflow is the most important thing”

“whatever industry I get into I buy books about that industry”

believes in a Western management model mixed with a Confucian life philosophy

wears a simple Citizen solar-powered watch and runs his watch 30 minutes fast because he can be anywhere in HK in 30 minutes (!)

named one of his two holding companies Cheung Kong after the Yantze river because many other rivers flow into it, metaphor for how he should be (welcoming and truly modest, not just superficially so)

“I’ve always believed that it is very important for people to have faith”

his life philosophy in two sentences:
1. Always be industrious
2. The virtuous welcome onerous duties

framed a share of AIG stock, explains that AIG was worth almost $200B and seemingly overnight dropped to $17B, losing 91% of its value. serves as a reminder to his two sons: manage the company carefully, “don’t invest like gambling”

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping.

My favorite part of DFW’s Kenyon College commencement speech (after this post, I listened to it again :)

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

12 favorite YouTube talks that will be part of my audio bible

I wrote previously about the concept of having a personal bible, a collection of text that has changed your life and will continue doing so the more you read and review it. A sort of wisdom manual for your life. One that grows and changes as you do.

Maybe there’s a better word than “bible” but I suppose it communicates my point. The idea of a personal bible is like the actual Bible, something you read and re-read and discuss and share with others because its contents are that important, that powerful.

And along with a personal bible of just text, it makes sense to do the same for audio. So I’m starting to collect and save my favorite podcast episodes and TED talks and YouTube speeches. Below are 12 such examples.

Still not sure what the final format will be. Ideally I’d launch a podcast to publish all of them in one place. A podcast is a great format: you can listen at your own pace, access the archives on your own time, and share with others. But publishing rights prevent me from doing so. There isn’t a way to create a curated podcast episodes playlist like you can create a YouTube videos playlist, a user created list of episodes that people can subscribe to and listen to at their pleasure. But maybe someday.

So here are 12 of my favorites for the audio bible collection (please note, this doesn’t include specific podcast episodes, because I’m still collecting them, and will publish a future update):

1. Richard Hamming, You and Your Research

“Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.”

2. George Saunders’ commencement speech at Syracuse University

“they cause us to prioritize our own needs over the needs of others, even though what we really want, in our hearts, is to be less selfish, more aware of what’s actually happening in the present moment, more open, and more loving.”

3. Jeff Bezos on using regret minimization to make decisions

4. David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”

5. Robert McKee on writing and writers

“Many years ago the worst thing that could happen was you’d die. So stories were about how to survive. There are far worse things today. People in living hells. People could understand the plague. Who today can understand banking? Parenting?”

6. Jack Ma on startups, technology, and changing the world (wrote about it here)

“I don’t understand technology, I’m afraid of it, as long as it works I’m happy”

7. David Brooks’s commencement speech at Dartmouth College (wrote about it here)

“In the realm of action, they have commitments to projects that can’t be completed in a lifetime.”

8. A discussion between Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Business School (wrote about it here)

“The third thing about juggling, though, is you’ve got to catch the falling ball. The most important ball is the one that’s about to hit the ground.” – Howard Stevenson

9. Glenn Greenwald’s TED talk on privacy

“he who does not move, does not notice his chains” — Rosa Luxemburg

10. Rupert Sheldrake’s banned TED talk on the science delusion

“Terrence McKenna likes to say modern science is based on the principle, give us one free miracle and we’ll explain all the rest”

11. Tim Keller’s sermon on faith and work (wrote about a related sermon here)

12. Jim Carrey’s commencement speech at Maharishi University (wrote about it here)

“So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality.”