“No solutions, only tradeoffs” – Thomas Sowell
It’s all too easy to come up with solutions when you are lacking the context. But in most cases in life it’s less about finding clever solutions and more about engaging in deliberate trade offs.
Category: Asides
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Words to live by
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The Magic of Acorns
The way to create value in this world is to create things that are big and beautiful. The Builder and the Gardener go about this in different ways.
The Builder looks around and sees rocks of different sizes: things he can use to build. Some of them are small pebbles, and some are large boulders. He picks the biggest one he can feasibly move with his own strength and muscles it into position.
The Gardener, on the other hand, pays attention to the small things, carefully examining the ground at his feet.
Alex Komoroske with a beautiful story about the long-term benefits of investing into systems and talent, which have little pay off in the short-run but build the equivalent of compounding interest over an extended period of time.
Makes me think where I’m working to short-term minded and where I should invest and delegate more.
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When America was ‘great,’ according to data
The good old days when America was “great” aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices. Or when you were 15 and athletes and musicians still played hard and hadn’t sold out.
Lots of interesting stats and charts in the article. It pairs well with Max Kiener’s Why Time Flies and Tim Urban’s The Tail End. The main takeaway: don’t yearn for years past, but make the most of the here and now. The feeling that time accelerates is normal and a reminder that we only have so much left.
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The Impulse Cooktop
It is a rare feat for a stove top to be exciting, but this just sounds remarkable:
And then you learn that the stove has a battery in it, which means that unlike most other induction stoves, it can plug into a standard 120-volt outlet. You don’t have to get a pricy circuit upgrade, or an even pricier electrical panel upgrade, to install it.
Plus, the battery delivers enough power to boil a liter of water in 40 seconds. And you can still cook if the power goes out. And its eligible for a 30% tax credit.
And then, your brain explodes when you learn the battery is a smart energy storage device that can charge up when power is cheap in the morning so that you save money when you use it in the evening, when power prices are highest. You can also participate in programs that will pay you to dispatch power from your stove to the grid when demand is high.
Impulse Labs’ Sam D’Amico Explains How He Built a Mind-Blowing Stove – Heatmap NewsI know, this is a completely random post, but I was just flabbergasted by this. This sounds amazing. Even the name is fun.
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Adam Grant in conversation with Jennifer Garner
What a joy- and insightful way to spend an hour:
Garner was not meant to be the original interviewer and only filled in on the day. But this turned out to be a refreshing blessing in disguise. The conversation focused less on the book and more on personal experiences and challenges in the context of the book.
To be honest I was not a big fan of Adam Grant, but have just added his books to my list of new year’s resolutions. Maybe I should start with Think Again.
The conversation is also available as a traditional podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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The metric is not the goal
Great articulation by Mike Davidson in his reflection of being one year at Microsoft:
Our north star is at least pretty pure — Daily Active Users — and that metric is usually a good indicator that you’ve made something people like, but doctrinaire allegiance to almost any singular metric can quickly make people forget why we are in this profession to begin with: to improve lives. Or to put it squarely in Microsoft parlance again: to help every person and organization on the planet achieve more.
If you ever find yourself asking the question “how can we increase Daily Active Users?” instead of “how can we make our product better for people?”, you’ve already lost. Metrics are trailing indicators of qualitative improvements or degradations you’ve made for your customers… they are not the point of the work.
One year at Microsoft » Mike IndustriesIt’s a great reminder that a KPI is an indicator of value (it says it right on the tin), not the value itself. In large companies, we have created sophisticated systems that drive those indicators that it’s sometimes easy to confuse them. If you work at Microsoft, the easiest way to drive monthly active users is to pre-pin your app on the Windows task bar. Which is when the metric stops being an indicator of customer value. Or as Goodhart’s law states it:
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”
Goodhart’s law – WikipediaComing up with good metrics and keeping them fresh (speak: preventing them from being gamed) continues to be hard.
Hat tip to Isaac for pointing me to Mike’s post.
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Amazon warehouse tour
Amazon warehouses have always been fascinating to me. The sheer scale and thought that goes into the logistics is just mind bending. I remember looking in 2012 at the market for pneumatic tube systems and we discovered a company called Kiva Systems which produced little robots that automate warehouse logistics tasks. Instead of using them as a hardware provider, Amazon bought the whole company for the sole purpose of powering their own warehouses. I guess, when you are big enough it does make sense to buy the whole cow to drink some milk.
I’ve always been fascinated by photos giving an inside peek into Amazon warehouses. Today I discovered that Amazon gives virtual tours and video walkthroughs of their warehouses. Infinitely fascinating. Every video is a little documentary.
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Excellence is a habit, but so is failure – Andreas Kling – I like computers!
I’m a big fan of routines and habits. While they are not a guarantee for outcomes, they do increase the odds and move you closer to where you want to be. This is an interesting reflection by Alexander Kling on habits being a two-way street:
We often hear that making small incremental improvements every day can lead to great things. This popular piece of advice rings true, and it’s a powerful reminder to keep pushing ourselves forward.
But there’s another side to this story that we don’t discuss as often: how incremental neglect and small missteps can accumulate and lead to negative outcomes. Recognizing and addressing these patterns of neglect early can make a significant difference in preventing larger problems down the road.
— Read on awesomekling.github.io/Excellence-is-a-habit-but-so-is-failure/
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Blogroll
In a world, where generative AI is eating itself and clogging the pipes that once made the world wide web a magical place, Chris Glass’ recent update of his blogroll is a fresh glass of water, served with a swirly straw and a tiny umbrella. It is a reminder that while we all might visit the same 3-5 destinations on the web every day, there are so many tiny websites out there, maintained by people who still believe in the classic values of the open web.
In his own words:
Bored with this timeline? I made a blogroll because everything that happens comes to Cincinnati 10 years later than anywhere else.* *Mark Twain never said this.
Chris GlassWhat a wonderful resource: Blogroll (chrisglass.com)
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The three kinds of leverage that anchor effective strategies
Jason Cohen writing on A Smart Bear about one of the fundamental concepts of strategy, durable, differentiated strengths.
“Leverage” means generating a large effect from a relatively small effort, created by riding tailwinds of natural abilities or hard-won assets, rather than fighting a battle for which you are ill-equipped. […] Leveraging strengths is the only way to do great work. (Not “fixing weaknesses.”) Better yet, leveraging differentiated strengths means you beat the competition. Best is when that differentiation is durable over time.
Without leveraging strengths (rather than spending far more energy shoring up a weakness that still won’t be great), the company will not succeed in creating something great. Without leveraging differentiated strengths, the company will not surpass competitors, will have a hard time winning and keeping customers, and will have an even harder time justifying profit-generating prices. Without leveraging durable, differentiated strengths, the company’s success will be short-lived, differentiation will be temporary, and once again it will be reduced to out-spending on marketing or lowering prices until it is unprofitable.
A winning strategy explains which strengths the company will leverage, how it will side-step rather than “attack” its weaknesses, which strengths can be leveraged for differentiated sales today, and which long-term moats the company is constructing.
The three kinds of leverage that anchor effective strategiesOnce you understand that a great idea is not a competitive advantage. It’s a bet that the idea is valuable and you’ll be able to execute better than anyone else. But once an idea is proven competitors will try to copy it. Then it becomes a question of whether the idea is actually tied to a strategic advantage that cannot be copied or compensated for. Then, and only then, you have a durable, differentiated strength.
My favorite quote from the article
How do you beat Bobby Fischer? Play him at anything but chess
Warren Buffet