415 entries under "article"

Forget About Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead.

[Winners and losers have the same goals. What differentiates is their system.]

[Focus on the system that creates the results you want.]

[Ditch your goals and fall in love with systems.]

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.]

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.]

The Audio Revolution

[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.]

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.]

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.]

A Hypothesis is a Liability

[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.]

Collective intelligence with Alexandra Elbakyan

[Ancient religions had gods of information (such as Hermes, Thoth, of Nabu) and in the Bible, the Word of God is a proxy for the information which creates the world.

Half-assing it with everything you've got

[To save your energy by directing perfectionism not at unachievable or insignificant things but at the process, which you can control and apply to other things even if the current project fails.]

[Working hard to be lazy is about succeeding without wasting motion.]

A Founder's Farewell

[A creative project that designs a system probably needs to start as a cathedral to coordinate everything, and eventually transition to a bazaar when the foundations are secure so that the details can be perfected.]

[One way for someone to grade themselves is to provide three ways they succeeded and three ways they failed.]

[A name that means something is a commitment to a specific explanation, whereas a meaningless name commits to nothing.]

[Procrastinate and come back when it's easy.]

Common Objections to Urbit

[Teaching it is more important than fixing it, which is more important than making it useful.]

[It's designed to achieve decentralization, not to be born with it.]

[A young network requires central governance so that it acts as a unit.]

The Poisoned Chalice of Hashtag Activism

[Twitter can be considered the opposite of a public square because it is the platform of a private company with the power to evict, censor, obscure as they see fit.]

A desperate activist tweets. An aspiring activist uses Facebook. A fledgling organizer uses email. An established organizer has phone numbers. A successful organizer is offered addresses.

Platform Decay, Decentralized Marketplaces, and Urbit

[Ad-supported web dominates because banks failed to make micropayments and other 'real money' infrastructure accessible.]

[As centralized marketplaces secure most of the vendor marketshare, the long-tail loses prominence to paid 'premium' placement because the deal has a greater impact on earnings - the vendors become competition.]

[Ad sales incentivize the 'sharing' or 'renting' economy because people are less likely to return after buying to own.]

[When search results make it difficult to buy a hammer, it causes the culture of 'building things' to suffer.]

[The test of any tool is its ability to shape the world.]

[Calm commerce follows naturally from calm computing.]

The Princess Rescuing Application: Slides

[Games can be played immediately and they steadily increase your skills over time, shortening the learning curve.]

[Games are fun because they employ exploratory learning: there is a goal with no indications of how to achieve it, players can faill and be told that they failed, they can also succeed and it feels good when they figure it out alone, during the learning process they explore the possibility space.]

[Games are built of STARS atoms that create learning feedback loops: Stimulate the player to experiment with Skills to discover Tools and Actions that play out within the environment's Rules.]

[Games assume that the people change, that the player at the beginning is not the same as the player at the end because of the skills they picked up along the way. Apps could adapt themselves to the dynamic people who use them, rather than providing a static set of tools for everyone.]

[Apps could be organized into levels based on the experience of who uses it, people advance through gated environments where they can safely practice important skills, they continue after mastering.]

[Rather than presenting all possibilities the same way forever, games employ a 'items' or 'powerups' or 'widgets' or 'addons' or 'extensions' pattern that celebrate modular bits of functionality earned with experience.]

[Quests are easy to understand and provide to reason to try each activity. LinkedIn has 'profile completeness' and prompts people to 'add a picture' and 'ask for a recommendation'.]

[The score provides a simple always-visible metric of progress.]

[Some games progress from a more guided 'advancement' mode to an 'elder' mode where the player needs to figure more out on their own.]

[Games have three skill types: 'pre-existing' are used in the first few minutes and help the interface feel intuitive; 'rewarded' are finite and not initially known but taught through STARS atoms via punishment and reward; 'emergent' are potentially infinite and not rewarded.]

[Gamification is profitable because it combines delightful experiences with ease-of-use and depth.]