On learning

• How to Do What You Love

  Do what you love doesn’t mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first…
  The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn’t mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.
  Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something…
  It’s hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don’t underestimate this task. And don’t feel bad if you haven’t succeeded yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you’re discontented, you’re a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial. If you’re surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you find contemptible, odds are they’re lying to themselves. Not necessarily, but probably…
  Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do. So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems.
  Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it’s rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you’ll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you’re in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you’re practically there.

  tags: inspiration career work advice paul_graham essay life wp

• How Companies Like Amazon Use Big Data To Make You Love Them | Co.Design: business + innovation + design

  When a customer calls the support number, sends an email, or talks to a store employee, he is initiating a conversation. You have his undivided attention, even if he’s annoyed, and that makes it a crucial brand-defining moment. He’s hoping for a conversation, but bracing for an ordeal. He knows you’ve collected information on him for your own purposes and wondering why you don’t do something useful with it. Not useful to you–useful to him.
  Synchronized data is worth the expense because it’s a hallmark of human interactions. If I talk to a friend and they keep asking me for information I know they already have, I have a right to get irritated. In the age of Big Data, I hold brands to the same standards. The few that meet those standards earn my trust and loyalty. But if you’re hoping to use personal data successfully, there are a few things you have to get right…
  1. Give your employees the right tools.
  2. Let the customer know you know. Then listen.
  3. Give the customer a sense of control

  tags: data customer_service amazon big_data analytics wp

• Neil Gaiman Shares His Reading Habits – NYTimes.com

  When and where do you like to read?
  When I can. I read less fiction these days, and it worries me, although my recent discovery that wearing reading glasses makes the action of reading more pleasurable is, I think, up there with discovering how to split the atom or America. Neither of which I did. (I clarify this for readers in a hurry.)…

  If I started it, I’d read it to the end: until I found myself a judge of the Arthur C. Clarke Awards in the U.K., and obliged to read every science-fiction book published in the U.K. in the year of eligibility. I was a judge for two years. The first year, I read everything. The second year, I read a lot of first chapters and took delight in hurling books across the room if I knew I would not be reading the second chapter.
  Then I’d go and pick them up again, because they are books, after all, and we are not savages.

  tags: neil reading habits books neilgaiman wp

• Turning 60: The Twelve Most Important Lessons I’ve Learned So Far – Tony Schwartz – Harvard Business Review

  Tomorrow is my birthday — always an opportunity for reflection, but especially this time. For several weeks now, I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learned during the past six decades that really matters.
  (A great list!)

  tags: leadership management lessons life hbr tony_schwartz wp

• The One Thing CEOs Need to Learn from Apple – Greg McKeown – Harvard Business Review

  Deciding to cut options can be terrifying — but it is the very essence of what we mean by making strategic decisions. The Latin root of the word “decision” — cis — literally means to cut…
  Jobs said in an interview with Betsy Morris in 2008, “People think focus means saying ‘yes’ to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying ‘no’ to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.”
  Since my initial conversation at Apple, I have made a point of asking leaders to define strategy. I’ve polled more than 200 leaders since and they have universally defined strategy as: “Saying what you want to do and how to do it.” Not one person has opted for Jobs’ definition.

  tags: leadership management leaders work apple jobs strategy wp

• Turning 60: The Twelve Most Important Lessons I’ve Learned So Far – Tony Schwartz – Harvard Business Review

  Tomorrow is my birthday — always an opportunity for reflection, but especially this time. For several weeks now, I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learned during the past six decades that really matters.
  (A great list!)

  tags: leadership management lessons life hbr tony_schwartz wp

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3 links

• From the Philippines, with gratitude – Indian Express

  It is particularly heartening to note that there are persons in India who are determined to wreck one of the few industries where India has achieved world class and where Indian companies are considered formidable operators. I brought to the attention of the finance minister of China the fact that Indian IT companies who till the other day were poster boys of India are now being harassed despite earlier explicit and emphatic assurances that on-site project implementation revenues would be treated as export income. The finance minister of China was salivating. He is now looking forward to global corporations and for that matter, Indian IT companies are moving more and more of their activities to China. He plans to write to you in order to congratulate you on the wonderful steps that your government is taking that will be of immense benefit to China.
  Sincerely yours,
  Finance Minister of the Philippines

  tags: jerry_rao bpo indian_express indian_it policy government stupidity wp

• Management Secrets: Core Beliefs of Great Bosses | Inc.comAverage bosses buy into the notion that work is, at best, a necessary evil. They fully expect employees to resent having to work, and therefore tend to subconsciously define themselves as oppressors and their employees as victims. Everyone then behaves accordingly.
  Extraordinary bosses see work as something that should be inherently enjoyable–and believe therefore that the most important job of manager is, as far as possible, to put people in jobs that can and will make them truly happy.

  tags: leadership management leaders boss beliefs motivation work bosses wp

• Thoughts on the Future of Content – Gautam John’s BlogI think the models of protection, be it law or technology, are fast dying and we need to move from protection to sharing. That solitary consumption of content will move to group and shared experiences. And what’s tremendously powerful there is that you then have the ability to influence not only what other people will watch and hear and listen to, but also the kinds of content that are being created. That the content industry needs to move from being gatekeepers of content to curators of content, and that top-down models of content creation will go the way of the dinosaur very soon because (a) we have the Internet to distribute content and (b) tools are available to everyone. So the high priest model of content creation will very soon be challenged, as we saw in the case of Encyclopaedia Britannica, by the community models of content creation.

  tags: thoughts future content publishing gkjohn friends books reading creation wp

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reading, publishing & giving away books

• The books we give away – Books – Salon.com

  We like to think that books line our shelves because we ask them inside, but the simple truth is that they cross our thresholds whether we invite them or not. Books alight under the Christmas tree or beside a birthday cake as presents from people we love. Like a thistle hitching a ride on the household dog, books attach themselves to our palms as we walk through bookshops or rummage sales…
  But any book weeder, no matter how lenient, inevitably wonders if he’s weeding too much. Like many readers, I’ve often confronted the basic dilemma of culling one’s shelves, which is that the book one gives away today is the very title that will be needed — or fervently desired — tomorrow. I feel a tinge of grievance each time I’m required to visit my public library and borrow reference books that, in some previous clean-out, I donated to the collection. As if plotting to spring them from jail, I sometimes wonder if I can secretly steal them back…

  tags: books bookshelves salon reading

• Only Six Books: Excerpt From Jeanette Winterson’s New Memoir – The Daily Beast
• This suggests to me that the pursuit of happiness, which we may as well call life, is full of surprising temporary elements—we get somewhere we couldn’t go otherwise and we profit from the trip, but we can’t stay there. It isn’t our world, and we shouldn’t let that world come crashing down into the one we can inhabit. The beanstalk has to be chopped down. But the large-scale riches from the ‘other world’ can be brought into ours, just as Jack makes off with the singing harp and the golden hen. Whatever we ‘win’ will accommodate itself to our size and form—just as the miniature princesses and the frog princes all assume the true form necessary for their coming life, and ours…
  I was very quiet for a while, but I had realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe…
• tags: books memoir reading writing wp

• The Reader and Technology | New Writing | Granta Magazine
  If the computer games which exist now had existed back in 1979 I would not have read any books, I think; I would not have seen writing as an adequate entertainment; I would not have seen going outdoors as sufficiently interesting to bother with. Similarly, I find it difficult to understand why any eleven-year-old of today would be sufficiently bored to turn inward for entertainment.
  This raises the question as to how future writers will come about, without ‘silence, exile and cunning’ – without the need for these things?…
  Readers more accustomed to screens – web pages, iPhone displays – will scan a page of text for its contents, rather than experience it in a gradual linear top-left to bottom-right way. This will make for increased speed and decreased specificity. These readers will be half-distracted even as they read; their visual field will include other things than just the text, because they won’t feel happy unless those things are there. A writer of long, doubling-back sentences such as Henry James will be incomprehensible to them. They won’t be grammatically equipped to deal with him. They won’t be neurologically capable of reading him. Their eyes will photograph fields rather than, as ours do, or did, follow tracks…
  Proposition: ‘The human race is no longer sufficently bored with life to be distracted by an art form as boring as the novel.’
  Perhaps novels will continue, but instead of the machine it will be the connectivity that stops, or becomes secondary.
• tags: reader technology writing reading novels literature fiction wp

• Why trailblazing Amazon should take on the publishing establishment | Books | guardian.co.uk
• I’ve long been curious about why so many people are frightened of a potential future Amazon monopoly while simultaneously so sanguine about the real existing monopoly run by New York’s so-called Big Six. And it’s been interesting for me to see people try to explain away the evidence of collusion between the CEOs of the major publishers as set forth in the US Justice Department’s suit against these publishers and in the equivalent suit brought by 16 states…
  I wasn’t around for previous technology-driven disruptions of industries, but I’m confident that as cars displaced horse-drawn carriages, electric lights displaced candles, and digitally distributed music displaced CDs, to name just a few, the establishments of the day decried the newcomers’ methods and aims and predicted that the new way would inevitably cause The Destruction of Civilisation and the End of All That Is Good. And yet the doomsayers’ predictions have never come true. In all these transitions, something was lost, but more was gained. The same dynamic is now playing itself out as a hidebound and moribund publishing industry, notable chiefly for its decades-long failure to involve itself in even a single innovation, is displaced by something more efficient and effective. And the dynamic will go on repeating itself, again and again, long after the legacy publishing industry has gone the way of the icebox, the telegraph, and the Vulgate Bible. As internet guru Clay Shirky recently put it, “Institutions will try to preserve the problem for which they are the solution,” and in this regard legacy publishing is in no way unique.
  Though I’m certainly rooting for legacy publishers to successfully adapt (and why wouldn’t I? When someone is sick, you don’t want him to die; you want him to get well), I also think Amazon has been an enormous boon to readers and authors. Does anyone really believe that, without Amazon’s innovations, readers would be paying less, or authors making more? Or that there would be remotely as big and vibrant a digital and self-publishing market for books if Amazon hadn’t blazed the trail with the Kindle, the Kindle Store, and digital self-publishing?…
  In the meantime, the publishing establishment wants you to believe that in order to prevent Amazon from possibly one day charging higher book prices, the establishment has to charge you higher prices today. Or, to put it another way, “Hey, you might get robbed if you carry all that cash around, so I’ll just save you the trouble by taking your wallet right here.” This isn’t an argument; it’s a con job. Consumers ought to recognise it as such.
• tags: amazon publishing establishment books reading wp
• You Are Not Your Bookshelf | BOOK RIOT
• But I thought I was!
• tags: books reading wp
• How to Send Web Pages and Documents to your Kindle
  Let’s say there’s an interesting article on the web that you would like to read on your Amazon Kindle while on your way back home. Or maybe you have a couple of PDF eBooks on your desktop that you want to transfer to your Kindle. How do you initiate the transfer wirelessly? You can either use bookmarklets to send web pages to your Kindle or email the documents as attachments to your @kindle.com address. However, a more convenient option is the Send to Kindle app from Amazon.com – this app has been available for Windows PCs for quite some time now and today, Amazon released a Mac version as well.tags: kindle reading web apps labnol technology wp

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Censorship & Lying

• Kiran Nagarkar on Censorship | Tehelka – India’s Independent Weekly News Magazine

  We would, however, be deluding ourselves if we make believe that it is only the arts that suffer because of censorship. A free, uninhibited and open atmosphere is the oxygen that allows scientists, mathematicians, architects and those from other disciplines to think without walls, taboos and claustrophobia; and to dare to take risks and venture into unknown and unexplored territories.
  But that too does not reveal the insidious but palpable far-reaching effects of an atmosphere of Big Brother looking over your shoulder every minute. The openness that should be the hallmark of all universities, educational and research institutions goes out the window. Much worse, the horizon shrinks at an alarming rate and all your values get skewered. Your air supply starts to dwindle. Creative minds in the sciences as well as in the humanities and the arts can breathe, thrive and contribute to their disciplines only when there are no barriers to knowledge and ideas.

  tags: censorship free_speech freedom kiran_nagarkar india politics wp

• Mike Daisey Is a Liar, and So Am I | Inside Higher Ed

  The thing is, that these lies, these distortions, these fabrications, these untruths don’t make for a better story. They make for an easier one, a story with fewer thorns to swallow on the way down, a less complicated story…
  Maybe I’m just suspicious of these “better” stories because to me, the best stories are the most complicated ones, the ones that refuse to resolve in easy ways. Those are the stories that are most true because resolution is something that always remains just beyond our grasp.
  It would be a comforting story, an easy story to think that what ails these men is some kind of pathology unique to them, runaway egos, rooted in childhood psychic damage maybe. But who hasn’t told a lie to look a little bigger, a smidge more important, to see the impressed looks in someone else’s eyes…
  Let us also acknowledge the rationale that we tell these lies in service of some greater truth is also complete and utter bullshit. Mike Daisey and Greg Mortenson and John D’Agata and James Frey, and me will tell you that we tell the lie not to enrich ourselves, or for reasons of self-preservation, but because, in the words of Daisey, we “want to make people care.”
  This is convenient, and maybe we even believe it, but that doesn’t make it true. It would even be handy to blame these lies on simple greed. Mortenson and Frey have profited to the tune of millions. It’s possible Daisey is approaching that.
  But I think there’s a deeper truth here, a motivation that extends beyond the transparent B.S. that these lies are in the service of a higher calling.
  What these lies invariably do to the stories is take the focus off the story itself, and place it on the storyteller…

  tags: life morals morality lies lying wp

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On Careers & Business

• The 5 Mistakes That Nearly Killed My Career (And Can Save Yours) | TerryStarbucker.com

  1) Understand that a “immutable” budget can be a trap door (Mistake #1)
  2) In business, it’s always the content that matters – don’t hide it in a “pretty” format (Mistake #2)
  3) Experts don’t “know” everything (Mistake #3)
  4) “No News Is Good News” doesn’t apply in business (Mistake #4)
  5) Fear poisons everything, and robs your common sense. Conquer it, or suffer the consequences (Mistake #5)

  tags: mistakes career business life lessons wp

• What Do Fact-Checkers and Anesthesiologists Have in Common? – David Zweig – Entertainment – The Atlantic

  Their reward is in the work itself, in the satisfaction both in the good result for the end user and in the private fulfillment that focused, detailed work with consequence can provide. Though I’ve only focused on a few members of this club, in my research I found again and again these same unique traits in other Invisibles, and I’ve been humbled by them. Meticulousness, savoring great responsibility, and seeking only internal satisfaction are a trifecta of traits—a near antithesis of our societal ethos of insouciant attention-cravers—as a culture we’d all do well to follow.
  When we read a respected magazine, though we may disagree with the angle of a piece, we rarely think of the veracity of the facts. And that’s one of the reasons great magazine journalism can be so enjoyable—we’re able to read it and enjoy it with our lie-detector, if not turned off, then at least turned way down (the errant Stephen Glass or John D’Agata be damned). Dr. Feaster noted that the reason we rarely think of the anesthesiologist is “because as a specialty we’ve been so focused and successful at making anesthesia safe.” It’s The Invisibles’ own success that keeps them invisible. So the next time you go to the philharmonic, think of the piano tuner. If you marvel at a Gehry building, think of the engineer who figured out how to keep it standing. Send a fruit basket to your anesthesiologist. And when you read a great magazine article, take a moment and think of the fact checker.

  tags: atlantic profession life wp

• In a Culture of Cutbacks, Innovation Is Stifled – NYTimes.com

  Most employees I meet accept that these days, more work is expected of fewer people. They realize that performance that might have been good enough last year isn’t good enough today. Many consider themselves fortunate to be working at all. The factories and offices I visit are filled with realists who are convinced that job security ended when their parents retired.
  But workers still want their leaders to spend less time voicing uncertainty and more time making things happen. They are disappointed in their immediate managers for making it more politic at staff meetings to recommend cuts than to suggest hiring a top-flight employee…
  CAUTION bred at the top is contagious, and it’s been drawing oxygen from the workplace. If the economy is to rebound, it will require a burst of confidence in employees who are now more cautious than creative, more tentative than decisive. That confidence needs to come from their managers, and the managers of those managers, all the way up to the chief executive.
  Employees hunger for leadership that will make it safe again to act creatively and decisively. They don’t expect their senior management to ignore the realities of the marketplace or the flux of government policies. But they do want — and deserve — leaders who inspire them to commit the best of themselves to their work.

  tags: culture innovation business recession wp

• Four Things I Want You to Remember Me By – Clif Reichard – Harvard Business Review

  Everyone knows a business needs profits, customers, and ethics. What not everyone knows is which of those should come first, second, and third. A lot of companies fail because they get the sequence wrong…
  Ethics, customers, profit. Don’t forget that…
  employees do best when they are led, not managed. When employees are asked for their advice, rather than being told what to do, they bring their best efforts, talents, and abilities to the table…
  to be fully engaged, people need to know where the company is going. Everyone needs to be aligned around a goal that makes sense.

  tags: success hbr life business wp

• Seth’s Blog: Easy and certain

  Most people are searching for a path to success that is both easy and certain.
  Most paths are neither.

  tags: success sethgodin wp

• Deloitte Review | A Delicate Balance | Organizational barriers to evidence-based management | James Guszcza | John Lucker

Generally speaking, data analysis is only part of an “analytics” project; and ironically it often isn’t the hardest part. It is not uncommon for sophisticated technical work to end up on the cutting room floor—resulting in unrealized value—for reasons having more to do with human and organizational behavior than the finer points of data quality or statistical methodology…

The biggest challenges of executing on analytics are often found where algorithmic indications should be integrated with human professional judgment. Because of the range of personnel involved, this is an inherently organizational issue. Unsurprisingly, challenges often arise from such sources as office politics, inertia, principal/agent issues and organizational dynamics. Such generic project implementation issues often take on added force because business analytics may often be poorly or inconsistently understood by the various stakeholders within the organization…
Often it is senior leaders and decision-makers who are skeptical about the economic value of predictive models. In light of Kahneman’s observations, this makes sense. After all, such individuals have had the longest time to form an “associatively coherent” body of narratives pertaining to their domains…Perhaps their eminence has resulted, in part, from their skill at weaving convincing narratives that impress their colleagues. Their seniority lends them an air of authority, and indeed part of their success might be attributable to their charisma and ability to convince their colleagues with their narrative accounts. Unfortunately, given the authority that such individuals enjoy within their organizations, their resistance can seriously hinder the progress of analytics projects…

tags: analytics models statistics decision_making science organization wp

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Immortality, Ray Dalio & Contentment

• Stephen Cave – Stayin’ alive | New Humanist

  the ways of men are incomprehensible until you see that they are striving for eternal life. This struggle to project ourselves into an unending future is the foundation of human achievement: the wellspring of religion, the architect of our cities and the impulse behind the arts…
  The reason why we need such comforting stories is simple. Even though the desire for immortality can sound fanciful and metaphysical, it is in fact rooted in our most basic biological nature. We are, as Richard Dawkins puts it, “survival machines”. Like all creatures, we are only here because our ancestors strove to survive and reproduce – to propel themselves into the future. This is a truism in today’s life sciences: the preservation and reproduction of self in some form belong to all definitions of what life is; it is what makes the difference between evolution’s winners and losers.
  But in humans this will to live becomes the will to live for ever. It is a consequence of our overgrown brains, with our ability to project into the future. Our desire to avoid death is not limited to face-to-face confrontations with predators or precipices – we can use our powerful imaginations to summon the prospect of all sorts of mortal perils at any moment. And, of course, we can see that the universal processes of disease and degeneration will eventually claim us too. Thus we alone of creatures must live with the fact of mortality; this is what WB Yeats meant when he wrote that “Man has created death”.
  So we are born with the same desire to keep going that marks all living things, yet we can see that this desire will one day be thwarted. This realisation is potentially devastating: we must live in the knowledge that the worst thing that can possibly happen to us one day surely will. Extinction – the ultimate trauma, a personal apocalypse, the end of our individual universe – seems inevitable.
  And thus we create our immortality strategies to cope with this terrifying insight. These strategies come in countless colours and creeds, from pyramid-building to yoga, from the Eucharist to cryonics, from the self-elevation of eternal fame to the self-submission of tribal loyalty. All human cultures have some way of reassuring us that death is not so bad as it seems

  tags: life immortality psychology wp

• Ray Dalio: Man and machine | The Economist

  In the early 1980s Mr Dalio started writing down rules that would guide his investing. He would later amend these rules depending on how well they predicted what actually happened. The process is now computerised, so that combinations of scores of decision-rules are applied to the 100 or so liquid-asset classes in which Bridgewater invests. These rules led him to hold both government bonds and gold last year, for example, because the deleveraging process was at a point where, unusually, those two assets would rise at the same time. He was right…
  Mr Dalio admits to being wrong roughly a third of the time; indeed, he attributes a big part of his success to managing the risk of bad calls. And the years ahead are likely to provide a serious test of whether the economic machine is as simple as he says.

  tags: success ray_dalio mistakes hedge_fund Investing business economics wp

• » being OK with things as they are :mnmlist

When we are unsatisfied with how things are, including ourselves, we make changes, but then what? We are still unsatisfied, because the root cause of this problem isn’t the things around us (or how we look, etc.), but our expectations. We expect things to be different.

This means we are always unhappy in some way. Things don’t meet our expectations. We try to correct this problem by changing the world around us, trying to get others to change, trying to change ourselves. Our compulsion to spend, to consume, to buy more stuff … it’s rooted in this as well…

Once we become happy with things, people, and ourselves … as they are … we can become whole, without the need to spend money to fill a hole in our lives.

tags: minimalism things stuff clutter wp

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