Michael Rill

Einfach machen

Category: Asides

  • 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 Glass

    What a wonderful resource: Blogroll (chrisglass.com)

  • 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 strategies

    Once 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

  • Everything Must Be Paid for Twice

    One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice. There’s the first price, usually paid in dollars, just to gain possession of the desired thing, whatever it is: a book, a budgeting app, a unicycle, a bundle of kale. But then, in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price.

    […] But no matter how many cool things you acquire, you don’t gain any more time or energy with which to pay their second prices—to use the gym membership, to read the unabridged classics, to make the ukulele sound good—and so their rewards remain unredeemed.

    […] This scarcity feeling creates one of the major side-effects of our insurmountable second-price debt: we reflexively overindulge in entertainment and other low-second-price pleasures –- phone apps, streaming services, and processed food — even though their rewards are often only marginally better than doing nothing.

    Everything Must Be Paid for Twice by David Cain

  • … and then?

    Interesting contemplation about how recent advancements in AI will make us all more productive:

    You rush through the writing, the researching, the watching, the listening, you’re done with it, you get it behind you — and what is in front of you? … But in the more immediate future: you’re zipping through all these experiences in order to do what, exactly? Listen to another song at double-speed? Produce a bullet-point outline of another post that AI can finish for you? 

    The whole attitude seems to be: Let me get through this thing I don’t especially enjoy so I can do another thing just like it, which I won’t enjoy either. 

    and then? – The Homebound Symphony (ayjay.org)

  • The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small

    Nice essay by Kelsey McKinney to remind us that the internet has – despite growth and broad adoption – become too small and limiting in recent years. It’s a call to action for us to break out of our echo chambers and embrace the vastness and potential for growth that the internet can offer.

    It is worth remembering that the internet wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight. Instead, like most everything American enterprise has promised held some new dream, it has turned out to be the same old thing—a dream for a few, and something much more confining for everyone else.

    Source: The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small | Defector

  • God Did the World a Favor by Destroying Twitter

    By far the best paragraph that I read this week came from Paul Ford:

    How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. Happy people, the kind who eat sandwiches together, are boring. They don’t buy much. Their smartphones are six versions behind and have badly cracked screens. They fix bicycles, then they talk about fixing bicycles, then they show their friend, who just came over for no reason, how they fixed their bicycle, and their friend says, “Wow, good job,” and they make tea. That doesn’t seem like enough to build a town square on.

    God Did the World a Favor by Destroying Twitter

    I’m off going to the library to get a book about bicycle repair.

  • Lyft’s 3P’s ritual

    Simple framework for a weekly status update. I’ve been tinkering with quite a few of these recently in the context of commentary for OKRs and this one looks intriguing.

    • Progress: What have you accomplished in the last few weeks?
    • Plans: What are your upcoming plans for the next few weeks?
    • Problems: What challenges or blockers are you facing?
    Lyft’s 3PIs ritual: How 5k employees tune in to what’s actually important

  • A love letter to my website

    “Not long ago, the web was still the future. It was a big deal for companies to have their own site, much less individuals. Technology evolved. We picked up a few HTML and CSS tricks, discovered the wonders of Flash. We started spinning up our own sites, complete with guest books and visitors counters.

    […]Having my own website says I care about what I do beyond clocking in and out and cashing a paycheck.

    [..] In those days, our website was our home. An extension of ourselves. Every day we visited our page, tweaked it a bit here, adjusted something there, stood back and admired it. Our site was a little corner of the internet we could own.”

    A love letter to my website – DESK Magazine via Instapaper

  • Managing Your Career Without a Manager

    Interesting post by Saswati Saha Mitra about how to take charge of your career in the absence of a manager/ leader to provide you with direction. Interestingly, the categories she lays out are also good ones to use as a manager to provide guidance to your team:

    • Craft: It was clearly vital to continue expanding my hands-on knowledge of how to do research and communicate its impact. With so many new tools and ideas emerging in our field all the time, I needed to dedicate some time to keeping up with them.
    • Connections: I also wanted to deepen the relationships I was making within WhatsApp and Meta, and to build a strong peer group that could help me learn how to do my job better.
    • Stretch opportunities: These are side projects that might fall outside of my daily remit, but would advance my growth by pushing me to explore new and interesting areas.
    • Organizational intelligence: I wanted to continue deepening my understanding of how Meta works and makes critical decisions.
    Managing Your Career Without a Manager | by Saswati Saha Mitra | Meta Research | Medium

  • Out of Sight