Daily Habits Checklist (April 17 – May 14): Netflix & work chill

A good 4 weeks. The three blank days you see in the middle are the result of a 4-day vacation to Cebu. I have the workaholic tendency to loathe beach vacations after about the 2nd day, but to my surprise I didn’t want this one to end.

The “evening to do’s” habit (a grab bag of little activities to prep for tomorrow such as packing my work bag) has morphed into the “evening work sesh” habit (where I load a Netflix movie of the fast food variety on the living room TV after dinner, and do an hour or two of busy work while watching it). This has been a nice modification. Having a fun movie playing in the background helps me to squeeze an extra bit of productivity juice from the day’s orange…or something.

A quick review of each habit…

Waking early: in addition to exercise, one of the biggest levers for my day. Waking up at 7am is not just one hour better than waking at 8am. It’s at least 90 minutes better

Pushups: the idea is that each year you increase your goal not decrease it. My hope is that at 80 years old I can manage 80 pushups…even if I have to do 5 at a time from morning til dusk lol

Write: because good writing is good thinking and it’s one of my favorite things to do

Meditate: remains hard but worth it

Exercise: along with waking early, one of the best ROIs on time and a force multiplier for just about everything

Publish: can’t keep your work to yourself if you want to improve and connect and grow. Need to improve here

Stretch back & neck: because I’ve had recurring stiffness problems which have by and large gone away since I started to do these exercises

What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and own no superior? – Walt Whitman

Why do I track and share this stuff? Click here. Thanks for reading!

Warren Buffett on the institutional imperative: “Any business craving of the leader…will be quickly supported”

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”.

29 things I re-learned in 33 years

When I turned 29 I wrote this essay, a list of 29 lessons that were meaningful to me.

Now 4 years have passed and I’m 33, the age that Murakami calls “a kind of crossroads in life”. Because I don’t have the desire to write an entirely new essay of “33 things I learned in 33 years”, I settled instead for a review of the original essay.

Of the 29 items, here are the ones that still resonate:

1. You understand your parents better as you get older – still working on this one. It hasn’t gotten much easier…

2. Relationships are like cars – rings increasingly true. Relationships require continual care and maintenance. The more you put in, the more you get out, but you can’t use the expectation of “getting out” as your primary motivation for “putting in”

5. Never stop learning – the following may feel counterintuitive, but it’s even MORE important as we get older to stretch our intellectual and experiential boundaries. Take up surfing at 60, learn a new language at 47, start writing software at 35…

6. Make 5-year commitments – the exact number of years isn’t important, the long-term commitment is. Determine a priority, commit to it, and build a daily habit to support it. So for example if you want to become a good cook, it’s good to think about where you’d like to be as a chef in 5 years. And then find a reason and routine to cook every day

7. It’s never too late – “the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is today”

8. Conquer fear and you’ll be unstoppable – Scott Adams: “When you see a successful person who lacks a college education, you’re usually looking at someone with an unusual lack of fear.”

11. Re-think, re-do, and re-learn what’s important. And again. And again. And again – this gets back to my concept of a Personal Bible and memorizing wisdom (usually in the form of quotes) by using Anki cards. Those two practices have given me much, although they have also doled out equal amounts of frustration and annoyance. Consuming new content is perhaps 90% of my content consumption bandwidth. Ideally it would be closer to 60%, or maybe even 50%

12. In startups and relationships, pick the right market – there is a delicious juxtaposition between my many years spent in the stagnant world of book publishing and now investing in the explosive and world changing world of bitcoin and blockchain. Andy Rachleff’s observation still rings true, “When a lousy team meets a great market…”

14. Buy less stuff – yes please. The environment is always underestimated. When I’m in Shanghai, I want to buy things. In Taipei, less so. On a beach anywhere, even less so. Except maybe sunscreen

15. Break the rules – Nietzsche: “society tames the wolf into a dog and man is the most domesticated animal of all”

19. Own a word – this might be the most powerful thing you can do in marketing. Coin a word or phrase and you’ve laid the foundation for a lasting brand. From memes like Pepe the frog to slogans like Nike’s Just do it to concepts like Tim’s 4-hour anything

20. Don’t make exceptions – Clay Christensen: “It’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time”

23. We know nothing – the more we learn about anything, the less we know about everything

28. What do you think about in the shower? – this question is useful but not perfect, because during shower time, limited as it is, your mind will sometimes preference the urgent over the important

29. Write often and much – My goal is to write meaningfully for 2 hours every day. Most days I can reach that target, but only just. Momentum is important: if I hit the goal yesterday, than it’s easier today, and still easier tomorrow. But the opposite is equally true.

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.

New additions to the Personal Bible: Paul Graham, Jason Lemkin, and the Dilbert guy

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.