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Martin Scorsese’s longcut
Martin Scorsese recently donated 50 storage boxes of tapes to the University of Colorado Boulder’s main library. Long before the internet and streaming, Martin hired a full-time video archivist in his New York office to record films and television programs from multiple VCRs and monitors, label the video tapes, and catalog them using a card…
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“Intellectual concentration as entertainment”
Over a decade ago, Nassim Taleb wrote at Facebook: LEARNING TO DO NOTHING (Idleness as a BS detector/cleaner) – At the start of this year I resolved to do “nothing except if it felt like a hobby” i.e., “satisfy interests while providing entertainment value with zero pressure, no schedule and no feeling of duty”. The…
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Monthly hackathons, but for writing
A couple of years ago, I asked a group of experienced developers if engineering blogs had ever made them want to join a company. I received an interesting response from someone who worked at Incident.io, “We see so much ROI that we run monthly content days for the entire company, getting everyone to draft posts…
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Believe it
Donny Deutsch writes in Often Wrong, Never in Doubt: There are 20,000 advertising copywriters in New York City right now. If I polled them, I’m absolutely positive that 19,990 would say they deserve to be a creative director. “I’m working for them, I’m smarter than they are, I do all the work…” Every one of…
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The dirt
In Clear Thinking, Shane Parrish writes: Too often decision-makers get their information and observations from sources that are multiple degrees removed from the problem….You can’t make good decisions with bad information. In fact, when you see people making decisions that don’t make sense to you, chances are they’re based on different information than you’ve consumed.…
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Pivot sooner and slower
My friend Jason Shen writes in his new book, The Path to Pivot: “If your startup isn’t working, don’t wait until you’ve got just a few months of runway left to make a desperate gamble on a new direction. Instead, think about pivoting sooner, and slower so you can make the best decision and bring…
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Delusions and evolutionary fitness
Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler write in Useful Delusions: In recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have shown that the human brain is designed to make a number of errors in perception and judgment. These “bugs”—distortions, shortcuts and other cognitive cross-wiring—produce slanted pictures of reality. They exist for a reason: Evolution found that, on average, the…
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Pain, suffering, and low expectations
When asked about advice for students, Jensen Huang says that one of his key advantages is low expectations: You want to refine the character of your company. You want greatness out of them, and greatness is not intelligence, as you know. Greatness comes from character, [which] isn’t isn’t formed out of smart people. It’s formed…
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Entrepreneurship isn’t a job title, it’s a mindset
Some words from Satish Kanwar came to mind today, which is a lesson he learned after selling his business: The truth is, it took me longer than I care to admit to realize that I had been thinking about my identity the completely wrong way. Being an entrepreneur wasn’t attached to this business. It was…
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Preparation enables presence
Whether you’re playing in a competitive sport, appearing as a speaker, or attending an important meeting, showing up prepared will set you up to be more present.