This was a great and easy advice-interview on how to write, from a corporate blog of all places. The advice comes from Scott Dikkers, The Onion’s longest serving editor in chief. If you don’t know The Onion, please read this piece of genius.
Below are some verbatim nuggets of gold:
1. Concept is king
“Your concept — and I would equate that with your headline or title — is the flag you’re raising, it’s the shingle on your door. And if it’s not a good concept or the right concept, then you’re sunk before you’ve even written a word.”
2. The key to quality is quantity
“This is how professionals work,” said Dikkers, “because they understand that most of what they write is dreck.”
[…]
4. Ruffle some feathers
“Thing is, Horatian satire isn’t really remembered because it’s toothless,” said Dikkers. “It might get a lot of laughs today but it’s not going to live in our cultural memory. Only satire that angers or offends people will be remembered.”
[…]
10. Know your joke and make sure the reader knows your joke
“Readers want to know they’re in the hands of a master who is going to manipulate them,” he said, “the way Spielberg does in his movies. He takes you on a ride, through the highs and lows.
I start a lot of books these days but quit somewhere in the first act. But I finished Jeff’s new book The Price of Tomorrow in a relatively frenzied week, because he makes a compelling argument and writes in an easy manner. The book has provided me a framework to analyze and understand a critical topic (the global economy) — the ideal outcome of a great nonfiction book. Other books which have yielded similar outcomes include The Power of Habit and Alain de Botton’s writings, specifically Religion for Atheists.
I’m also reading Albert Wenger’s book in progress, World After Capital, which diagnoses the same problem (an excess of capital driving inequality and decreasing productivity growth and perverting economic incentives), but proposes a different set of solutions.
Good stuff.
Here are my highlights from Jeff’s book:
With digital technologies we have universal machines at zero marginal cost. All of a sudden the idea that we might be like horses, and have fewer and fewer uses, doesn’t seem quite so impossible.
Yes we humans can be incredibly creative and think of new things to spend our time on. But the operative question for people selling their labor is not if they can think of something to do, but if they can get paid for it. Not just get paid something, but enough to cover all of one’s basic needs.
As my friend Thuan Pham, the chief technology officer of Uber, recently said to me over breakfast, “I am a firm believer that talent is distributed evenly around the world, but opportunities are not.”>
The only thing driving growth in the world today is easy credit, which is being created at a pace that is hard to comprehend.
in the United States, the top 5 percent of the population now holds more than two-thirds of the wealth, while the remaining 95 percent of the population fights for their share of the other third. Just three people—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett—account for more wealth than 50 percent of the population.
Deflation, put simply, is when you get more for your money—just as inflation is when you get less for your money.
In 2000, the total debt in the world was approximately US$62 trillion. At the same time, the world economy in 2000 was about US$33.5 trillion. Since 2000, the world economy has grown from US$33.5 trillion to about US$80 trillion, but to achieve that growth, the total debt has grown to over US$247 trillion as of the third quarter of 2018, according to the Institute of International Finance. In other words, it has taken approximately $185 trillion of global debt to achieve $46 trillion of global growth.
But when a business continues to spend more than it earns, or invests its debt in things that do not provide an economic return, the debt becomes a weight on future growth as current dollars need to be allocated to pay the servicing cost of the interest or payments.
Dalio concludes that in the end, “Policy makers always print. That is because austerity causes more pain than benefit, big restructurings wipe out too much wealth too fast, and transfers of wealth from haves to have nots don’t happen in sufficient size without revolution.”
Owners of assets and those who have access to debt and leverage have been tremendous winners. So have technology companies that are using it to create monopolies
As the theorist Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in Antifragile, “we notice what varies and changes more than what plays a larger role but doesn’t change. We rely more on water than on cell phones, but because water does not change and cell phones do, we are prone to thinking that cell phones play a larger role than they do.”
Flanders notes that the United States actually used to regulate where spitting was allowed on trains, stations, and on platforms. A 1917 conference of boards of health, held in Washington, D.C., mandates that “an adequate supply of cuspidors shall be provided” in train cars. Today, both the word “cuspidor” (meaning spittoon) and the object have virtually vanished (though Supreme Court Justices still get one). Its disappearance is not because some technology went obsolete. It is because our behavior has changed.
Deflation is being caused by technology and, because of that, it will ride the same exponential wave that technology does. That means that the rate of deflation (without printing more money) will only accelerate from here.
And when culture does change, the precipitating events can be surprisingly random and small. As the writer Charles Duhigg describes in The Power of Habit, one of the landmark events in the evolution of gay rights in the U.S. was a change, by the Library of Congress, from classifying books about the gay movement as “Abnormal Sexual Relations, Including Sexual Crimes,” to “Homosexuality, Lesbianism—Gay Liberation, Homophile Movement.”
Consumer spending or personal consumption (C) Investments (I) Net exports (X) Government spending (G) The mathematical formula to calculate the components of GDP (Y) is simple: Y = C + I + X + G.
We should ask whether those same assets would have gone up over the last twenty years if there hadn’t been $185 trillion of new capital injected into economies over that time. When that stops, which it eventually will, things will change very quickly.
By nature, though, quantitative easing also causes currency devaluation, even if that’s not what it’s specifically intended to do. The government doesn’t actually have more assets; it’s just representing its assets with more units of currency, which means each unit of currency is worth less—like cutting a pizza into twelve slices instead of eight, or dividing an estate between ten heirs rather than nine.
A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier.
Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.
Everyone is shy. Other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them, they are waiting for you to send them an email, they are waiting for you to ask them on a date. Go ahead.
To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.
Perhaps the most counter-intuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you’ll get. Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.
Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It’s the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows.
You really don’t want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person.
Beautiful book. Easy to read. With pearls on every page.
Some verbatim highlights below, which I’ve also added to my personal bible.
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Humanity has given rise to many talented artists, musicians, and architects, but how many of us have mastered the art of creating a happy moment—for ourselves and those around us?
To meditate is to look deeply and see the things that others cannot see, including the wrong views that lie at the base of our suffering. When we can break free from these wrong views, we can master the art of living happily in peace and freedom.
We too are full of so many things and yet empty of a separate self. Like the flower, we contain earth, water, air, sunlight, and warmth. We contain space and consciousness. We contain our ancestors, our parents and grandparents, education, food, and culture. The whole cosmos has come together to create the wonderful manifestation that we are. If we remove any of these “non-us” elements, we will find there is no “us” left.
The Buddha said, “Where there is a sign, there is always deception.”
It is up to each one of us to develop a strong spiritual practice body every day. Every time you take one peaceful step or one mindful breath, your spiritual practice grows. Every time you embrace a strong emotion with mindfulness and restore your clarity and calm, it grows.
Use your time wisely. Every moment it is possible to think, say, or do something that inspires hope, forgiveness, and compassion.
Just as it tastes bitter to utter words that are negative or unkind, it feels wonderful to say something full of understanding and love.
Master Lin-Chi exhorted his students to be “business-less.” It means to not be getting busy all the time, to be free from busyness. If we can be business-less, we can touch the spirit of aimlessness in our daily life, not being carried away by our desires, plans, and projects.
You are about to start an argument. But then you remember to close your eyes and contemplate impermanence. You imagine your beloved three hundred years from now. He will be nothing but ash. It may not take three hundred years; perhaps within thirty or fifty years you will both be ash.
Breathing is a kind of celebration, celebrating the fact of being alive, still alive.
I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. They are the ground upon which I stand.
Later, when you turn into rain, you will have no regrets.
The art of happiness is the art of living deeply in the present moment.
When you wake up in the morning, you can choose how you want to start your day. I recommend you start the day smiling. Why smile? Because you are alive and you have twenty-four brand-new hours ahead of you. The new day is a gift of life offered to you. Celebrate it and vow to live it deeply. Vow not to waste it.
Often we are not eating our food; we are eating our worries and our projects.
A strong emotion is like a storm that comes, stays a while, and passes. Everyone must learn to survive a storm. The practice of belly breathing is essential. Every time a strong emotion like anger, fear, sadness, or despair comes up, we should go back to our breathing right away so we can take care of the storm raging within us.
As we learn to handle our suffering, we are learning to generate moments of nirvana.
Time is not money. Time is life, and time is love.
Here are my favorite highlights from Matt Mochary’s The Great CEO Within. Matt is a repeat successful founder and now an executive coach. He generously shares a wealth of immediately usable management and leadership advice, in a simple Google doc.
Highlights:
If you want the most effective and efficient decision-making process, require that anyone who wants to discuss an issue write it up, along with the desired solution, ahead of time.
Culture is the unspoken set of rules that people in a group follow when interacting with each other.
It is important to determine the company’s five or six most significant KPIs, then track them religiously and make them available for the entire company to easily see on a daily basis.
Create a document listing every possible function in the company. Next to each function, list the directly responsible individual (DRI). This is the AOR list. It serves as a routing layer for any questions and ensures that no functions fall through the cracks. Make sure everybody in the company knows how to access the list, and update it as new functions arise or as responsibilities shift.
The only way to prevent politics is to never allow lobbying to be successful, and the only way to do this is to have a written policy about as many situations as possible, particularly around compensation, raises, and promotions. Apply this policy to all team members, all the time.
For an organization to work well, three things must occur at every level of the organization.
Accountability
Coaching
Transparency
(I use these particular words only because they form an easy-to-remember acronym: ACT.)
DO NOT use a 1-way communication method (email, text, voicemail) to give feedback, unless it is 100% positive.
As the hiring manager, write out a ninety-day roadmap for the position you need to fill. This roadmap includes all the goals that the new team member will be expected to hit within the first ninety days of joining. This is critical for successful onboarding. During the interview process, share this roadmap with the candidate to make sure that she is excited about these goals.
The granting and accepting of a job offer is a very emotional moment for a person. Making a big deal out of it is a good thing. We recommend that you make a ceremony out of it. Invite the candidate to receive the offer in person. Create a ritual out of this process.
To make a sale effectively, you need to do the following three things:
Build trust
Identify the customer’s specific pain
Sell results, not features
Through a series of questions, your aim is to understand 3 things:
What are their goals?
What are the challenges preventing them from reaching those goals?
What are their ideal solutions to overcoming those obstacles?
