There’s lots of ways to be as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there. And you never meet the people, you never shake their hands, you never hear their story or tell yours, but somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something is transmitted there. And it’s a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we are, and remember what’s really important to us. That’s what is going to keep Apple Apple, if we keep us us.
All posts filed under “Notes”
Where Good Ideas Come From
Good ideas are like the neo nurture device. They are, inevitably constrained by the parts and skills that surround them. We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings…… We like to think of our ideas as $40,000 incubators direct from factory, but in reality they have been cobbled together with spare parts that happened to be sitting in the garage.
– Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From
Defining Disruption
Timing
Anybody who thinks he knows what’s going to happen in the investment world is deceiving himself. But anybody who thinks he knows when it’s going to happen is really off base, in my opinion. I sometimes talk about what should happen, but I never talk about when it will happen.
Always Invert
Invert. Always invert. Turn a situation or problem upside down. Look at it backward. What happens if all our plans go wrong? Where don’t we want to go, and how do you get there? Instead of looking for success, make a list of how to fail instead – through sloth, envy, resentment, self-pity, entitlement, all the mental habits of self-defeat. Avoid these qualities and you will succeed. Tell me where I’m going to die, that is, so I don’t go there…In other words, if you want to help India, the question you should ask is not, ‘How can I help India?’ It’s, ‘What is doing the worst damage in India?
Scalable Advantage In Customer Acquisition Costs
Individual Contributors Make The Best Managers
If you are a great person, why would you want to work for someone whom you can’t learn anything from? The best managers are great individual contributors who never, ever want to be a manager but decide they have to be a manager because no one is going to be able to do as good a job as them.
The Test Of Time
The problem in deciding whether a scientific result or a new “innovation” is a breakthrough, that is, the opposite of noise, is that one needs to see all aspects of the idea—and there is always some opacity that time, and only time, can dissipate.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile
Being Early
If you want to succeed in the world, you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people. You just have to be one day earlier.