[Technical skill alone is insufficient to kickstart a successful business and can easily lead to unsustainable models where the founder does everything.]
[Turnkey businesses are popular because they have a far higher success rate; they consider and plan all aspects of the business beforehand so that the owner doesn’t need to be present.]
[Every single process needs to be documented in order for someone to run the business without you.]
[Structure all aspects of the business to support your personal objectives.]
[Your marketing should consider the customer and ignore everything else. Get to know their profile as best as you can and market in ways that are appealing to them. Adapt your strategy as they change.]
[All of this ‘business development process’ never stops, continuing as you learn while in motion and understand through testing.]
[Note down every recent read and your reason for each; having clear purpose optimizes your perception and naturally goal-seeking tendencies for what’s relevant.]
[Perceive the outline or structure beforehand to give yourself a mental model to fill in as you read.]
[Shift your gaze to the spaces between words or slightly off center to use your peripheral vision.]
[Inhibit subvocalization by closing your mouth firmly, humming, or listening to instrumental music.]
[Having an idea of the author’s main message before reading helps move beyond a set of random words and into reinforcement of a larger concept. Reflect after each chapter on how the details support the main point. Mark new words and research them after each chapter to put them in better context.]
[Reduce eye strain with exercises such as: looking from side to side without moving your head, rolling them in a circle, or making figure eights.]
[Human labour transforms raw resources into commodities that have a ‘use value’ and ’exchange value’.]
[Work is a means to survive, rather than express creativity or humanity, and alienates workers from each other by forcing them to compete against one another for limited jobs.]
[Value comes from human labour, and transitioning entirely to mechanized labour generally reduces the rate of profit.]
[Habits compound when repeated but results are not noticeable day-to-day.]
[Focus on your trajectory instead of the result.]
[Habits are by being led from cues that triggers you to act, to cravings for a specific outcome, to responses that alleviate yhe craving, to an eventual reward that gives you a positive feeling.]
[Help strengthen your cue by changing your environment and implementing an intention or plan.]
[As it’s uncommon for many people to debate purely with logic, telling stories lets you appeal to their emotions while also making rational arguments.]
[Distract from subvocalization with instrumental music or by chewing gum.]
[Chunk a few words at a time, or vertically divide the text into three sections to try and take in groups of words, covering what’s upcoming if needed.]
[Rereading as a habit might not be necessary and can be helped by following your finger or another visual marker.]
[Look at the center of each line to engage your peripheral vision into taking in the whole thing.]
[Division of labour enables members to specialize, which encourages focus, innovation, and thus productivity.]
[Money enables a form of labour division by alowing suppliers to specialize rather than providing too broad a selectiong of goods.]
[Trading provides financial compensation to the workers, factory owner, and land owner. This product of labour called “stock” of is used to sustain the recipient and surplus can be directed towards other assets.]
[Convert numbers into sounds based on their shape or story, and use those sounds to create words and corresponding scenarios. For example, 1969 turns into 9 / B, 6 / sh, and 9 / P, which could be a bishop landing on the moon.]
As it currently exists, foreign reporting implicitly defers to the priorities of the state and of business, occupying itself almost exclusively with events which touch on military, commercial or humanitarian concerns. Foreign news wants to tell us with whom and where we should fight, trade or sympathize[, but] these three areas of interest really aren’t priorities for the majority of us.
[We might not find Italian politics interesting if we’re living in a different country, yet it’s conceivable to watch a two hour Shakespearean play about Julius Caesar. This is because underneath stories that may have a different reality to ours in the specific, there lies the universals which transcend those gaps. The news might not write like Shakespeare, but would do well to pay attention to these universals.]
A journalistic gaffe is something a powerful person inadvertently says or does in a momentary lapse which (as everyone knows) in no way reflects their considered views and yet which the news seizes upon and refuses to let go of, insisting that the gaffe must be an indicator of a deep and shameful truth.
We should at least be somewhat suspicious of the way that news sources, which otherwise expend considerable energy advertising their originality and independence of mind, seem so often to be in complete agreement on the momentous question of what happened today.
the news cruelly exploits our weak hold on a sense of perspective.
having perspective involves an ability to compare an apparently traumatic event in the present with the experiences of humanity across the whole of its history – in order to work out what level of attention and fear it should fairly demand.
With perspective in mind, we soon realize that – contrary to what the news suggests –hardly anything is totally novel, few things are truly amazing and very little is absolutely terrible.
As currently structured, the news does not ‘see’ the property developer who condemns thousands of people to live in humiliating environments but who nevertheless breaks no laws and steals no money. The most assiduous reporter concerned with fraud won’t be able to put a finger on anyone criminally responsible for the commercial messages that subtly erode the dignity and intelligence of public life or find anyone who can be arrested for a decline in politeness or respect between the sexes.