Author: obsidian_ns

Daily Reads:

Continuing re-reading the Art of Possibility.

Steve Blank’s been writing a riveting ‘secret’ history of Silicon Valley – here is Part V

Bob Ewing: The Stories we tell has some simple ideas on how to tell stories that propel us forward, rather than hold us back.

Listened to Seth Godin’s podcast Akimbo on psephology (the science of voting). I like his compelling call to action at the end of the episode – don’t leave a comment, tell someone about this!

• 7 Japanese techniques to overcome laziness on Instagram
  • Ikigai: having a purpose in life, the reason you wake up each morning. Do what you love. Do what you’re good at. Do what the world needs. Do what you can be paid for.
  • Kaizen: Focus on small improvements every day
  • Shoshin: Approach things with a beginner’s mindset. If your mind is empty, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind, there are few. – Shunryu Suzuki.
  • Hara Hachi Bu: Stop eating after you’re 80% full.
  • Shinrin-yoku: Forest bath, spend more time in nature. Reminds me of Oji’s comment in his podcast yetserday.
  • Wabi-sabi – Find beauty in imperfection.
  • Ganbaru: Be patient and do the best possible.

QOTD:

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials.
-Lin Yutang

Music:

Simon & Garfunkel’s Scarborough Fair Canticle

Daily Reads:

How Coda runs effective multi-threaded meetings with a meeting template included.

Listened to Lenny’s podcast with Oji Udezue. The single biggest idea to take away for me from this 75min podcast is on finding the sharpest problem and solving it effectively. Customers love when it saves them time (3x is when they open up wallets says OU), and are a lot more forgiving of mistakes.

Ash Maurya: How to deliver an effective elevator pitch. The short version of this article is "When {customer} encounters a {job trigger}, they need to do {job} to achieve {desired outcome}. They would typically use {existing alternatives}, but because of {macro switching trigger}, these {existing alternatives} no longer work because of {these problems}. Left unaddressed, then {this is what is at stake.} So we built a solution that helps {customers} achieve {desired outcomes} by helping them {unique value proposition.}"

QOTD:

Hallux: A device for finding furniture in the dark.
More anatomically correct, the name for the the big toe.
– From Anu Garg’s AWAD newsletter today.

Music:

Kent Nishimura does a wonderful acoustic solo on guitar. Sara Smile Darryl Hall and John Oates

Daily Reads:

Arnold Kling: the trouble with booksis that they are too long. They have low information density. Instead of writing a book, write a Substack instead. That’s the premise of this Substack.

This HBR article makes a rather bold claim – You can radically change your organisation in one week. That’s less time than it gets to find time in an exec’s calendar in some of the organisations I’ve worked in!

Roger Martin: Who Should Do Strategy I’m beginning to see why Roger Martin ranks so high in my networks’ reading. Any line executive who abdicates responsibility for creating strategy to an external strategy consultant deserves to be removed. That person isn’t really an executive officer.

Seth Godin counters the advice on getting it right the first time with "Get it wrong the first time". Yep, that’s right – because NEVER does a masterpiece happen on the first try.

QOTD:

Ouch.

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
– Stephen King, novelist

Music:

Caravania full album of their Gypsy Jazz Session, recorded in one take. Sensational!

Daily Reads:

Ben Evans Unbundling AI: You could ask Alexa anything, but it could only answer ten things. ChatGPT will answer anything, but can you use the answer? It depends on the question. Nearly a year on, the hysteria has died down a bit. What can it actually be used for? It’s a question with few answers beyond code, brainstorming ideas, and first drafts.

A thoughtful piece by Om Malik on Steve Jobs. What would SJ have thought of our Industry Now

I’m now learning Indifference on the guitar. I have learnt, at a much slower tempo of course, both Tico Tico & Montagne Saint Genevieve. Gypsy jazz, particularly as performed by Django Reinhardt is fascinating. Although he had fewer fingers, Django found a way to improvise using arpeggios, different time signatures and rests. His playing speed, the stretch of his finger muscles… so much amazement!

QOTD:

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
– Nasseem Nicholas Taleb

Music:

Toni Lindgren covers John Prine/ Blaze Foley’s classic Clay Pigeons

Daily Reads:

National Parks Service hilarious Insta post with words of inspirationconfusion

Events of the last week or so have permitted little time to read. I’m going to be claiming feedreader bankruptcy again this week. Doing it at the end of each week is also cathartic – I have not felt the obsessive need to ‘catch-up’ on reading online. The Art of Possibility, The Journals of Anais Nin, The Daily Stoic, Seneca’s "On the Shortness of Life" have all got a good workout.

QOTD:

It’s good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it’s good, too, to check up once in a while and make sure that you haven’t lost the things that money can’t buy.
– George H. Lorimer

Music:

Jordan Thomas covers Bob Dylan’s "Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright", performing on a 1943 Martin D-28 guitar.

Daily Reads:

I barely got any time to read today. Between phone calls and driving a young person to get urgent repair on a musical instrument, I’ve had neither the opportunity nor the energy to do it, besides these two quick ones.

Stop Mumbling 6 useful tips to stop mumbling. For a non-native English speaker like me, these are practical.

Jim Nielsen’s note about his Notes page made me happy.

QOTD:

You have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.
-Ken Kesey, novelist

Music:

Violinist Csongor Korossy-Khayll & organist Xaver Varnus perform Schindler’s List in the largest synagogue in Budapest.

Daily Reads:

When no one was looking, he was at his best Marcus Aurelius explained.

Corporate Rebels The 8 Trends I wish they’d called it loose principles rather than trends of progressive teams and businesses.

Lenny Ratchisky has a wonderful podcast, and I love the way he engages with his guests. He also writes a Substack, with occasional guest authors, and this post by Ethan Evans, titled the Magic Loop, may be useful for someone looking to grow rapidly in their careers.

Lenny’s podcast episode with Bob Moesta on the Jobs To Be Done framework is without doubt a favourite. It’s a masterclass in discovery. Some gems I wrote down on my first pass, may make no sense until I explore this in more detail:

Nobody wants to change. So find out why people change. Therein lies the magic!
Unpeel the layers of language – pablum, fantasy, real-reasons. It takes a criminal investigator mindset to find out the real reasons.
When you arrive at the "edge of language" – where people can’t describe the moment of change, find contrasting and even incorrect ways of getting them to speak more.
What will people stop using when they start using your product?
There are no new jobs – how technology delivers the project

QOTD:

The unrestricted competition so commonly advocated does not leave us the survival of the fittest. The unscrupulous succeed best in accumulating wealth.
– Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th US president

Music:

This particular episode of Interpretations of Music Lessons for Life Masterclass was a tough one to watch. Ethan DePuy is a talented tenor, and clearly wants the world to know it, and to take him seriously. Yet, Zander shows him that he has a long way to go, and does it in a most beautiful way. He’s written about this episode in his Art of Possibility book too (pg 88) with some editorial changes I suppose.

Daily Reads:

Technically they were videos, rather than reads, but hey this is my blog 🙂

All these links were from going down the Tina Roth Eisenberg rabbit-hole. She calls herself an accidental businesswoman, and runs a bunch of companies that started as side projects. Swiss-Miss is her original blog, and is full of great links. Like me, she seems to be using it as a way to publicly share stuff she finds interesting. It was startling to see how many things we have in common – books, quotes, music, music sources, etc etc. A veritable gold-mine of insight from every one of her projects, starting with this 2013 Do lecture.

Trust Breeds Magic

Louis, the 90 year old gentleman on The Art of Letting Go was a heartwarming instagram video from

Carl Sagan on Books

Ever wondered what’s in a name? A school teacher explains 🙂

QOTD:

Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
-Thomas Wolfe

Music:

Sinead O’Connor & Willie Nelson’s rendition of Don’t Give Up gives me the chills every time. Sinead’s angelic voice blends perfectly with old man Willie’s well worn story-telling voice.

Don’t give up
‘Cause you have friends
Don’t give up
You’re not beaten yet
Don’t give up
I know you can make it good

Daily Reads:

Sequoia Capital says follow the GPU’s. What will all this AI capex capacity in the form of GPU’s be used for?

OMG, Ben Werdmuller eloquently puts into words the jumbled mess of ideas I have floating around in my head about this topic that every company is a community.

Tracy Durnell’s approach to writing her blog posts is awesome

QOTD:

Civilisation is the encouragement of differences.
– Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Music:

Richard Smith: The Entertainer

Daily Reads:

Tom Kerwin on why OKR’s don’t work. I found myself nodding in agreement. Recent events at my work have revealed similar if not identical phrasing, while the inexorable march towards mediocrity continues unabated.

Get your Mac Python from Python.org and other helpful advice which is, of course, too late for this particular user.

Asimov’s The Last Question was a breathtaking read. I remember some quotes from this but I hadn’t read the whole thing before.

Began re-reading The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data, Google’s 2009 article in the IEEE.

Richard Merrick’s weekly reflections are food for thought, and more importantly, action. His idea of type 2 fun and work resonates very strongly with me: Type two work as the long, hard slog of seven years to become a doctor in public practice, an artist grasping the means to convey a feeling or a business that has no desire to be a unicorn but rather a part of a community it serves and is respected in.

Nate Kadlac: Define your own visual style in 5 steps also has some practical tips for a collector of ideas like me 😉. The five steps are:

1. Get personal: Connect to a favorite place or story to find inspiration for your visual style.
2. Get curious: Create a visual research board to collect images, icons, and typography that resonate with your theme.
3. Embrace frequency bias: Look for patterns and recurring elements to solidify your visual direction.
4. Check yourself: Confirm your theme is personal and relevant to you.
5. Create a definitive visual taste palette: Compile an edge-to-edge board filled with visuals, type, color, and shapes that expresses your unique visual style.

QOTD:

“Of all the strife in the world — strife of every imaginable variety, from conflict over crumb cake to conflict in the Middle East — a staggering amount of it arises from the clash of mutually incompatible, entirely unshakable feelings of rightness.”
– Kathryn Schulz

Music:

I loved this simple, clear explanation of the style of guitar playing I’m currently trying to learn. Introduction to Arpeggios and the Rest Stroke Picking The accompanying chords, backing tracks, and written explanations are here