Perspectives

Steve Blank: The Path of Our Lives _ there is a small set of humans who don’t act like their lives are predestined. For better or worse, regardless of circumstances, country or culture they struggle their entire lives wanting to change the outcome. And a small percentage of these translate the “wanting to change” into acting on it. This small group is dissatisfied with waiting for life to hand them their path. They act, they do, they move, they change things.

Tom Johnson: Failing. Reading a piece of text while playing a piece of music. Hilarious!

Gaping Void: The Myth of Maslow Curiosity rules. We’re only as good as who we are.

Annie Mueller’s question Do You Dabble/Meander/Peruse/Putter resonates strongly. I’m good at getting lost and good at turning around. This can be seen as a lack of skill, I know. I see it more as the development of skills, crucial skills, key capabilities, refined and honed over years, allowing me even more freedom to wander, dabble, peruse, stroll, and meander, wherever I happen to have ended up.

Kaiser Fung: How hard can counting be?

Uplifting news of the day: Hiker found after 13 days in the Australian bush

This note from Nikhil Suresh. My life has changed massively over the past two years, largely as a result of deciding to start writing. In this matter of writing, we have a difference: he writes publicly, I write privately. He has gained internet fame among a group of his peers. He’s young, and has been getting offers of work that are liberating him from the tedium of a corporate job. Suffice it to say that I hadn’t realized how much my growth had been stunted by the culture of the typical company and from working with people who were checked out.

His friend Adolfo Ochagavia also writes about why he writes publicly – broadcasts.

Finished listening to this Hidden Brain podcast with Erica Bailey titled Be Yourself. What authenticity is, and what it really means to be yourself. Fabulous listen.

“I want AI to be a hammer in my hand, not a replacement for my mind.”
— Vlad Prelovac, CEO of Kagi

John Durrant: The Psychology Behind The Sneer. a form of defence mechanism referred to as ‘reaction formation’ where we express our opposition to something in an exaggerated way when it is actually something we want for ourselves. By putting another person down with slurs and derogatory remarks we feel less uncomfortable about our own inadequacies.

Manuel Moreale is encouraging when it comes to blogging: If you’re doing it, you’re doing it right.

Tracy Durnell is apparently reading my mind: Disrupting my reading habits to read more of what I want. She does a far better job of explaining how she’s tackling the problem of information hoarding. I don’t know if I can even try this, let alone succeed at it.

One of the songs in our band’s playlist is Yesterday. One day this year, I’m going to sing it to these lyrics instead:

Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.

Suddenly,
There’s not half the files there used to be,
And there’s a milestone hanging over me
The system crashed so suddenly.

I pushed something wrong
What it was I could not say.
Now all my data’s gone
and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.

Yesterday,
The need for back-ups seemed so far away.
I knew my data was all here to stay,
Now I believe in yesterday.

Quotes

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.
— Isaac Asimov

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Word of the Day

Lower Slobbovia: A place regarded as isolated, underdeveloped, or unimportant. Coined by Al Capp in a comic strip Li’l Abner.

Links

Prompt from James Clear: What good things have you done quietly today?

Simon Willison gets a nod from John Gruber on his post from yesterday.

Scott Eblin: Let Your Words Be Your Guide This Year. I like the idea of a single word north star for the year. Eblin takes this further with his Life GPS framework. A small number of words describe him at his best, and he turns them each into a question to ask himself every day.

Rands in Repose has a Slack Leadership Community that will celebrate its 10th anniversary this year with nearly 35000 members. How the hell did he manage to do this? Just Hard Work

The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.
—John Vance Cheney, poet (29 Dec 1848-1922)

Ben Werdmuller has OKRs for 2025 while Sahil Bloom has intentions. Both appear to have done the work to make this their own, not copied from someone randomly.

Stewart Brand’s Pace Layering is a framework to think about how each stack within a system operates, the time scale etc..

Hunter Walk: If you don’t like sales, don’t start a company.

Allen Pike: An Unreasonable amount of time

Artisans are those who weave what doesn’t change into what does. They host the spaces between our imaginations and the changing practices of daily life. They produce the artefacts and services that symbolise who we see ourselves as, grounding us in our identity and society, whether at a local level or connecting a diaspora. Artisans are the innovators who turn new ideas and technology into the first clunky prototypes that catalyse revolutions, and they are the mycelium that helps ideas spread.
— Richard Merrick

Beannacht (Gaelic word for Blessing), a poem by John O’Donohue

Simon Willison: My Approach to Link Blog.

Seth Godin: Winging it. If we’re here to make a difference, we often get there with better, not with more.

A smorgasbord over the last few weeks

• Thermidor: Lobster dish!
• Mendacity: Dishonesty
• Hypochondria – excessive and undue worry about having a serious health condition. I could not recall the word today and had to look it up.
• Category error: is a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category, or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property.
• What do Language Models actually model? _"The idea is that cognition doesn’t end at the brain and the person doesn’t end at the the skin. Rather, cognition is extended. Personhood is messy, ambiguous, intertwined with the existence of others, and so on." Human language is an activity is one in which "various opportunities and risks are perceived, engaged with, and managed."
• Hendrik Karlsson on Becoming Perceptive
• The Ruthless Edit – advice from Rick Rubin, on Jim Nielsen’s blog, that is so immediately relevant to my current circumstance. Reminds me of this post I saw from Dr. Jason Fox

NYTimes on early retirement: The schemers and savers obsessed with ending their careers as early as possible

A smorgasbord over the last few weeks

• Thermidor: Lobster dish!
• Mendacity: Dishonesty
• Hypochondria – excessive and undue worry about having a serious health condition. I could not recall the word today and had to look it up.
• Category error: is a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category, or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property.
• What do Language Models actually model? _"The idea is that cognition doesn’t end at the brain and the person doesn’t end at the the skin. Rather, cognition is extended. Personhood is messy, ambiguous, intertwined with the existence of others, and so on." Human language is an activity is one in which "various opportunities and risks are perceived, engaged with, and managed."
• Hendrik Karlsson on Becoming Perceptive
• The Ruthless Edit – advice from Rick Rubin, on Jim Nielsen’s blog, that is so immediately relevant to my current circumstance. Reminds me of this post I saw from Dr. Jason Fox

NYTimes on early retirement: The schemers and savers obsessed with ending their careers as early as possible