Category: Short-Term Goals

I’ve always found Dan to be one of those uncommon academics who is full of surprise and delight. You can tell he enjoys his job, and his enthusiasm infects his audience too.

A couple of notes I took:

• He likes the “canoe test” for relationships; imagine rowing a canoe in rough waters with a partner; can you navigate something tough and unpredictable, where you must cooperate; plus the upside is that it’s an exhilarating outdoor experience, can bring you closer
• First time I heard this concept of the “Lesbian bed death”; around year 7, lesbians stop having sex, and in general the finding is that lesbian couples have the least sex of any pairing; but (my personal opinion) this is probably a common pattern in most relationships, lesbian or not
• When they studied arranged vs love marriages, they found that love marriages start happier (self rated), but decline, while arranged marriages start less happy but rise; the slopes / scores cross at year 3 (!)

Cribbed this from a Hacker News comment and wanted to preserve it here. A powerful idea when we can remember it.

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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.

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As Clay Shirky puts it, “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”.

A Personal Bible is a collection of your favorite writings. The kind of content you want to remember and make a part of your daily life. You know that feeling when you’ve recently read some great essay, but when you explain it to a friend, you’re only able to give her a vague, handwavy description? That’s why I created this document – so I could know deeply and even memorize the text content that’s most affected me.

Below is the stuff I’m reading lately – a lot of re-reading, actually – which I’ve now added into the document. Here’s a PDF of mine. Hope you can be inspired to save more of your own favorites and create one yourself!

Jason Lemkin’s advice on content marketing [link]

From Scott Adams’s How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big book

You might not think you’re an early-morning person. I didn’t think I was either. But once you get used to it, you might never want to go back. You can accomplish more by the time other people wake up than most people accomplish all day.

Bill Gates famously found ways to hone his technical skills by stealing time on a mainframe. Jobs and Wozniak’s first product involved technology that allowed people to steal long-distance phone calls. Where there is a tolerance for risk, there is often talent.

One of the best ways to detect the x factor is to watch what customers do about your idea or product, not what they say. People tend to say what they think you want to hear or what they think will cause the least pain. What people do is far more honest. For example, with comics, a good test of potential is whether people stick the comic to the refrigerator, tweet it, e-mail it to friends, put it on a blog page, or do anything else active.

Positivity is far more than a mental preference. It changes your brain, literally, and it changes the people around you. It’s the nearest thing we have to magic.

From Paul Graham’s essays

Be Good

“Don’t be evil” may be the most valuable thing Paul Buchheit made for Google, because it may turn out to be an elixir of corporate youth.

The idea of starting a company with benevolent aims is currently undervalued, because the kind of people who currently make that their explicit goal don’t usually do a very good job.

Relentlessly Resourceful

If I were running a startup, this would be the phrase I’d tape to the mirror. “Make something people want” is the destination, but “Be relentlessly resourceful” is how you get there.

How To Make Wealth

There is a conservation law at work here: if you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars’ worth of pain.

In industrialized countries, people belong to one institution or another at least until their twenties. After all those years you get used to the idea of belonging to a group of people who all get up in the morning, go to some set of buildings, and do things that they do not, ordinarily, enjoy doing.

I think everyone who gets rich by their own efforts will be found to be in a situation with measurement and leverage. Everyone I can think of does: CEOs, movie stars, hedge fund managers, professional athletes

What made the Florentines rich in 1200 was the discovery of new techniques for making the high-tech product of the time, fine woven cloth. What made the Dutch rich in 1600 was the discovery of shipbuilding and navigation techniques that enabled them to dominate the seas of the Far East.

Number of users may not be the perfect test, but it will be very close. It’s what acquirers care about. It’s what revenues depend on. It’s what makes competitors unhappy. It’s what impresses reporters, and potential new users.

Hiring is Obsolete

It’s hard to judge the young because (a) they change rapidly, (b) there is great variation between them, and (c) they’re individually inconsistent.

How Not To Die

When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing. Often the two occur simultaneously. But I think the underlying cause is usually that they’ve become demoralized.

As long as you’ve made something that a few users are ecstatic about, you’re on the right track. It will be good for your morale to have even a handful of users who really love you, and startups run on morale.