Tag: personal bible

Excerpts from Slack founder’s essay “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here” (adding to Personal Bible)

He wrote the essay to align and hype Slack employees pre-launch. Nuggets on user behavior, business strategy, and startup life.

Source: https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c59524d650d

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The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behaviour. In fact, it is useful to take this way of thinking as definitional: innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave. No small innovation ever caused a large shift in how people spend their time and no large one has ever failed to do so.

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Or, they could sell horseback riding. Being successful at selling horseback riding means they grow the market for their product while giving the perfect context for talking about their saddles. It lets them position themselves as the leader and affords them different kinds of marketing and promotion opportunities (e.g., sponsoring school programs to promote riding to kids, working on land conservation or trail maps). It lets them think big and potentially be big.

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My favorite recent example is Lululemon: when they started, there was not a large market for yoga-specific athletic wear and accessories. They sold yoga like crazy: helping people find yoga studios near their homes, hosting free classes, sponsorships and scholarships, local ambassadors and training, etc. And as a result, they sold just under $1.4 billion worth of yoga-specific athletic wear and accessories in their most recent fiscal year.

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A central thesis is that all products are asking things of their customers: to do things in a certain way, to think of themselves in a certain way — and usually that means changing what one does or how one does it; it often means changing how one thinks of oneself.

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It is very difficult to approach Slack with beginner’s mind. But we have to, all of us, and we have to do it every day, over and over and polish every rough edge off until this product is as smooth as lacquered mahogany.

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That’s it, thanks for reading.

Excerpts from “Acceleration of Addictiveness” by Paul Graham (adding to Personal Bible)

Going into my bible.

Source here: https://paulgraham.com/addiction.html

All below are copied verbatim:

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Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don’t want to want — when it transforms opium into heroin — it seems bad. But it’s the same process at work

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Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can’t compete with Facebook

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Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don’t think you’re weird, you’re living badly.

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As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of addicts do outside the doors of office buildings

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We’ll have to worry not just about new things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That’s what bit me. I’ve avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it

Your relationship with time (from Auren Hoffman)

Really thought provoking piece from Auren (his podcast is great too):

https://auren.substack.com/p/seconds-to-strategy-how-your-relationship

To quote:

There are five types of time:
1. Micro Time (sub-second)
2. Engagement Time (Seconds)
3. Business Time (Minutes to Hours)
4. Strategy Time (Days to Weeks)
5. Big-Thinking Time (Months to Years)

If forced to choose, I’m probably a 3. Leaning towards 4.

I also wonder how correlated this is with age and context. For example in university, I was definitely more 2, and during my Wall Street internship I was very 1 and 2.

And:

If you are one of those people that has a great “gut”, you likely should be in a career where quick-time decisions rule. The more you trust your gut, the more you should choose a profession where you are making decisions quickly.

And:

The longer the timescale you are optimizing for, the more you should spend reading (and gathering information). The shorter your timescale, the more you should spend doing (for muscle memory).

Definitely going in the bible.

Oldie and goodie: “there is real joy and meaning to be found outside the secular system of wealth, status and eternal youth”

An article I re-read time to time, Chris Michel’s The Puzzle (which I’m adding to my personal bible). Some excerpts below:

I’ve spent sweltering afternoons in monasteries, sheltered in the high Himalayas, zodiacked around Antarctic Icebergs, cruised at the edge of Space, wandered among remote South Pacific tribes, ridden through endless tea plantations, worked the fishing lines in Indonesia, and cried at more than one sunrise. I’ve seen and experienced more than I deserve, hoping that somewhere along the way, I’d find myself. What self-respecting explorer communes with Buddhist Monks at the foot of Everest and doesn’t have a spiritual awakening? In the movies: none.

I know that there is real joy and meaning to be found outside the secular system of wealth, status and eternal youth. It’s not our fault; it’s our programming. But the answers can’t be found in accumulating more. You knew that already.

Go read it!

Nat Friedman – Some things he believes: “Energy is a necessary input for progress”

Lovely list of perspectives and insights he’s gained over the years, at nat.org

A few of my favorites (copied verbatim):

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The efficient market hypothesis is a lie
-In many cases it’s more accurate to model the world as 500 people than 8 billion

We are often not even asking the right questions

Where do you get your dopamine?
-The answer is predictive of your behavior

Going fast makes you focus on what’s important; there’s no time for bullshit

Enthusiasm matters!
-Energy is a necessary input for progress

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Added to my personal bible