267 entries from "Berlin"

[When the price is too high, a wince or verbal "How am I supposed to do that?" offers your no to the problem rather than the person.]

[Most job listings start as a love-letter to "whom it may concern".]

I'll invest in you as much as you're investing in yourself.

Whenever I can pay to steal someone's ten thousand hours, I do so.

[In real estate the terms are so standardized that most people sign and date without reading them. Buying a business has no standard format.]

[Avoid fixating only on price: instead adjust the terms to give the seller more or less based on performance — control the terms, control the deal.]

[Find closing or closed businesses and propose the owners a referral percentage for each of their customers or transactions, then find an adjacent business that would pay ongoing for those warm leads. This also effectively gives them stake in your business, skin in the game.]

[If you know how to turn a failing business profitable, offer them a percentage of the upside as they let you fix it.]

[Find the best lawyers in your area by asking professionals (like accountants), wealthy friends (who often have good attorneys), and local luxury magazines (or vault.com) for their "best of" in the legal field.]

[Attorneys will give you hourly rates, but you can express the list of things you need and ask how much it would cost, then comparison shop ideally for a flat rate.]

[You may want to change lawyers if the deal is of a different type, as there's probably an appropriate specialization for each type. Mid-size firms might be easier as they probably "have a guy" for everything, but make sure to change the guy with the deal type.]

[Contracts can cost 3–25k depending on deal complexity.]

[A seller with few buyers might be willing to accept installments spread over longer terms to close faster, minimize taxes, and earn more money in the end.]

[How much opportunity there is depends on your ability to notice it.]

44

Knowing what I want to offer is more important than knowing what another person expects.

I don’t want to reward myself with things that undermine my efforts.

My empathy extends beyond my capacity; therefore, my boundaries should not exist at the edges of my empathy.

When I feel self-righteous and sure of myself: tone it down about 25%. When I feel uncertain and hesitant: crank it up about 25%.

The Hero as Flexible Bureaucrat

[Bureaucrats that are incorruptible become like machines (until they're replaced by machines), and this inflexibility counterintuitively makes them anti-human.]

“I’d bend the rules too, if I knew it would save millions of lives”. Yes sure of course so would I, but would you bend the rules to save someone an hour of unnecessary paperwork? Knowing that if your boss found out he might use it as a pretext to fire you? That’s the kind of subtle, small-scale heroism that, repeated millions of times, creates a more humane society.

Corporations and governments are already rushing to replace many customer-facing jobs with language models. This makes a lot of sense if you take the State-eye view and see human bureaucrats as faulty robots. But if you see the work of a flexible bureaucrat as noble, sometimes even heroic - these are precisely the jobs we should protect.

[Sellers sell their businesses because of death, divorce, disease, distress, dullness, departure, disagreement.]

[Features of good seller opportunities are: 1. founded 10+ years ago; 2. profit under 1 million per year; 3. little competition to buy the business; 4. brick and mortar, or highly-commoditized online; 5. owner in charge for 5+ years; 6. lacking a successor; 7. owner near retirement age; 8. not applicable for bank loans; 9. overpriced for its balance sheet; 10. financials not clean; 11. no leadership team; 12. distressed business; 13. asset sale; 14. established relationship with seller; 15. owner prefers larger exit over long-term or cash flow instead of immediate lumpsum; 16. other sources of income besides the business.]

[Be a walking billboard by: 1. telling everyone you meet that you buy businesses, and 2. asking businesses who the owner is.]

The Most Valuable Bit of Information You Wish You'd Known Sooner

[Forms of leverage to gain more output from your input: labour (from employed, to self-employed, to employing), media (made once, licensed infinitely), capital (no need to sacrifice time), technology (build once, many people use it); stack different forms together.]

mocking your opposition without reducing their power is not a flex.

[Bring some cookies to your neighbour for no reason other than they might need to smile today.]

[I didn't give her a tip or make her famous, just told her I loved her voice.]

[The point of leaving the flock to go after the lost sheep isn't to bring them back, but to let them know they're loved.]

Erin Kissane leaving the internet

[Pretender technologies may only appear to be the next thing, without eventually changing anything, but they can function as a playspace to try possible futures.]

[If we want better networks, we must concretely understand what happened to us, and then use that knowledge to try new things deliberately, with painstaking attention to the human cost.]