Stripe Atlas: Guide to getting your first 10 customers
[Tell them that you know what you're doing, then show them an example, try to provide value just for making the time to read your message.]
[Scheduling is cognitive load, remove the burden and make it easy to say Yes: Do you have 15 minutes free this Thursday?]
[If they're busy Thursday, let them tell you that. Be respectful of their reading time.]
Goal Setting: A Scientific Guide to Setting and Achieving Goals
[Goal setting is as much about the pain and sacrifices you are willing to endure as the desired outcome.]
[Goals determine the destination, systems determine your progress.]
[Increase the likelihood of sticking to your goals by planning specifically when, where, and how you will do it.]
[Hook new plans before or after existing habits.]
[Opt in while you're feeling motivated so that when the time comes you will have to justify opting out.]
Paradigm shifts for the decentralized Web
[In a decentralized model, the pattern of 'wait for the 'query and operate on all results' becomes 'query and respond to the result stream as updates arrive' because completeness can never be assumed.]
posted to Blog
Secrets about People: A Short and Dangerous Introduction to René Girard
[The product being advertised is not nearly as important as membership in the group that buys the product.]
[One is more likely to envy their peer than the king, because even though the king has much more, there is less distance between you and you peer. We fight not because we are different but because we are the same.]
[In Silicon Valley, envy is productive and creates more founders, as opposed to destructive with many people competing over a CEO title.]
[The collapse of distance online compromises our ability to desire things in a healthy way.]
[Trumpism rejects the idea that 'everyone is equal and we ought to be undifferentiated.]
The Psychology of Loneliness: Why You're Lonely and What to Do About It
[Even being around others with shared interests might make one feel lonely because values are different. Sharing values can outweigh connections based on shared interests")
[Keeping oneself busy to avoid their own thoughts; intellectualizing emotions, trying to 'fix' emotions instead of understanding them can create self-disconnection, making one feel lonely in their own body.]
[Chronic business can keep your connections shallow and not leave enough space to cultivate more meaningful connections.]
[Make a list of your three happiest days. Recall as many details as possible. Try to list common patterns between these days. Pick an activity that seems most appealing and list people that would also enjoy it.]
[Describing your emotion as 'stressed' or 'tired' is avoiding the actual emotion.]
Each node on the network increases the potential for discovering the other nodes. Plant seeds.
[Email is a hotter medium because its one-shot nature necessitates being clear and concise, leaving out ambiguity.]
[Hot and cool processing are like muscles: more use makes them stronger which makes us use them more.]
[The ubiquity of headphones has created more demand for hot, unambiguous content.]
[Do it 100 times.]
- fucking is labor, fuckability is capital.
[Instead of calling it out, help others see how it is cringeworthy.]
[It started a feminist awakening in me because I saw those cringeworthy patterns within myself.]
[argument from ridicule.]
How Substack Became Milquetoast
[Blogging has capped downside and unlimited upside. If create something mediocre, nobody talks about it. If it resonates, everyone thinks your a genius. Having more content gives you more options for someone to develop an interest in your work and follow what you're doing.]
[Better for authors to think persistently and write occasionally instead of the other way around.]
[A book that took 4 years to write and 10 hours to read is a 3500x return on time investment.]
[Nothing great will ever be written on Substack because the dynamics of monthly payments force you to publish at faster schedules and leave you with less space to think.]
[Each day you work endures is a closer step towards longevity and the possibility that it will become immortal.]
Social Capital in Silicon Valley
[Knowing the patterns as well as how you fit into them: 'I would like to join the group and I have something to offer'.]
[The opaqueness of each group members social status makes the ecosystem of social capital antifragile: if the fog clears and makes everyone's real ranking visible, groups fracture into those with less and those with more.]
"Building political viewpoints into the platform" versus "Using the desire for apolitics to further adoption". In this context, not taking a political stance can ultimately serve your political interests because moderation and censorship ultimately social not technical.
Technology is not neutral. The model is more neutral than the implementation. Politics is in the details.
Pinduoduo and Vertically Integrated Social Commerce
[Game-like mechanics such as: a leaderboard ranking who saved the most money; colorful images and discounts hidden throughout the app.]
[Suppliers were fined ten times the value of any counterfeit goods they attempted to sell.]
[Pooling demand allowed suppliers to pass savings onto customers, which fed into the growth engine of 'more savings, more fun'.]
[They started selling products over a livestream as a way to build trust amongst skeptics, and gave discounts for inviting friends to watch.]
[Style is an alternative ideal to beauty that can be achieved at any age and with any physical circumstances. It's a personal aesthetic that you have complete control over.]
[Day thinking affords testing hypotheses and determining if they are true. Night thinking affords open exploration without an objective. Hunting versus fishing.]
[Having a hypothesis can blind you to what doesn't conform to your expectations.]
Taylor Swift, iOS, and the Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution is Vanishing
[Transitioning from scarcity to abundance will likely change distributions from normal to bifurcated.]
Homesteading the Twittersphere
[Status and capital in a gift economy is determined by what you give away.]
[As opposed to an exchange economy where there are transactions that try to match a precise value, the returns on imprecise contributions can far outweigh their 'real' value.]
Q&A with Sönke Ahrens on How to Take Smart Notes
[Think of the notes as a dialogue partner where they answer each other as opposed to as a collection that must be sorted and organized.]
[Painters design a course for the eye to move through using lines that are implied in the visual content.]
[Distinctions between foreground and background can go beyond spatial position and include things like color, level of detail, whitespace.]
[Think Vitamin uses visual prominence to create a hierarchy for your eye to move through, starting with the title/logo, followed by navigation, then the most recent post, followed by other posts.]
[Bleeding off the edge makes something appear larger and thus more in the foreground.]
[The most dominant element is like a magnet but also like an anchor that the eye repeatedly returns to while exploring other parts of the composition.]
