Highlights from the Internet: Part 4
Below you'll find part 4 of my collection of highlights from the internet. I read and highlighted most of it in the Pocket app.
The Root Cause of Scarcity (and the Solution)
When I do things for the love of doing them, and when I understand that the role of money is to help facilitate interesting growth experiences and I treat money as such, then I usually have plenty of money flowing through my life. In fact, it’s generally pretty easy to earn money from this perspective.
Calendar time vs clock time (AKA why “should I quit my job?” is a bad question)
If you’ve got a job and want to start having a startup, then “should I quit” is the wrong question. Instead, ask yourself how you can make the most progress during your mornings and lunch break. You won’t be able to design and code a whole product, but you don’t need to just yet, since you probably wouldn’t be building the right thing anyway. And a lunch break is plenty of time to set up some conversations with potential customers to learn more about their problems and current behaviour.
After talking to a few people, you may find that you need some product mockups (or whatever) to confirm that you’re heading in the right direction. That task might take a couple days (clock time), and it might be tough to find enough good hours alongside a full-time job. But instead of quitting, why not take some vacation days and use them to do enough of the work to reach the next stage in your conversations? You’ll eventually reach a point in your conversations where, for example, a bunch of people are desperate to use (or even pay for) your product, but the product doesn’t yet exist. That’s a gap which can only be filled with more hours, and it’s a great reason to quit your job and take the leap.
So don’t ask yourself whether you should quit to start. Ask yourself how you can start right now, in spite of and alongside your other commitments. You can make more progress than you think with just a couple hours per week. And once you find yourself blocked by large “clock time” tasks, then take the leap with confidence, knowing that you’ve maximised your savings and made the most of your runway.
Twist & Tweak
I tell you what went wrong in school. And I’m not talking papers. Every time, a kid put some effort in learning a task and doing the test, they almost always fail. Yes, They Do! They get three red stripes and a 7/10, which for most kids actually says: ”You are just not good enough. You are lacking from the [my] ideal.” So imagine if it is a 4! Some of them, will try to work and work and work to prove they are good enough… striving for the ideal and what they think it means. (Often it means burnout (6)) Others just gave up. They learned: “Whatever I do, I am not good enough anyway. So why bother?” For the brain this is simple: if it put real, even shortly, effort into something, and it is not properly rewarded, even punished, it avoids.
So, for now, I suggest with every test she’ll show you, you take a green marker, and put a stripe at everything that was right and encircle the grades in green as well. Màke her notice what she mastered and ask her what she has learned. Ask her how she did it. At first, don’t say anything about the red. She will notice herself. If it matters or if she’s comfortable, she wants to know herself: “Why isn’t that correct?”. And she will like to problem solve it, since she learned that she has the confidence to solve it– I am good, I am the best!- and it brings her benefit. She’ll want to master it all!
Coordination Problems in Evolution: The Rise of Eukaryotes
One important point to understand is that, however we feel about cows being slaughtered, from the population genetics point of view it's a mutually beneficial arrangement. Homo Sapiens gets steaks. Bos Taurus becomes one of the most common terrestrial vertebrates around.
4 Ideas that changed my life
It's not too late to start
I only started to see growth when I started writing consistently. Consistent inputs equal consistent outputs.
Anyone can build an audience. Most just aren’t willing to.
The formula is pretty straightforward.
- Learn something.
- Teach it to other people.
- Repeat.
The Benjamin Franklin Method of Reading Programming Books
Read your programming book as normal. When you get to a code sample, read it over.
Then close the book.
Then try to type it up.
Simple, right? But try it and watch as you’re forced to learn some of the structure of the code.
It’s a lot like the way you may have already been doing it, just with more learning.
Solving Problems by Blaming Others
In fact, if you want a simple way to test your own mental hardware, eat 100% raw vegan for 30 days. That will give you a glimpse of what you’re missing out on due to toxicity.
And if you’re already suffering from weak motivation, chronic self-doubt, procrastination, anxiety, fear, depression, and other issues, then please switch to a low toxicity diet for a while, if only to give your brain a chance to show you how it’s actually supposed to function.
But as important as it is to reduce your intake of toxins, I think it’s even more important to work on removing the toxins that are already in your body.
I actually got much bigger gains not from dietary or lifestyle changes but from exploring more intensive detoxification protocols. Over the years I’ve done many different cleanses – liver cleanses, kidney cleanses, salt water flushes, hydrocolonics, a green smoothie cleanse, and a bunch of cleanses I’ve forgotten. These cleansing rituals helped. I gained an especially nice boost in mental and emotional clarity after doing a 30-day juice feast several years ago.
Ironically, perhaps your mindset really is the problem, but not in the way you originally thought. Maybe you’ve been overplaying the idea that you need to improve your internal software, causing your mind to get stuck in endless self-analytical loops. And maybe the solution is to notice that your external input has included way too much garbage, so you’ve been caught in a GIGO pattern – garbage in, garbage out. If that’s the case, maybe your mental software is running just fine, and you simply need to provide it with different input, such as a new school, a new work environment, smarter people, cleaner food and water, and so on.
Perhaps you’re awesome just as you are, and with a few adjustments to your external world, you’ll be able to fully express your awesomeness.
Why You Should Do a Tiny Product First
We’re not designers, or programmers, or information architects, or copywriters, or customer experience consultants, or whatever else people want to call themselves these days… Bottom line: We’re risk managers. Designers who sell “design,” programmers who sell “code,” information architects who sell “diagrams” are selling the wrong thing. The thing to sell is reduced risk for the client. That’s what people want.
Entrepreneurs Grow at Warp Speed – Part 2
In business we have the opportunity to learn something and apply it immediately. This adds depth, power, and drive to learning that makes us soak up information faster and with greater retention.
As an entrepreneur you’ll see plenty of evidence that your personal weaknesses are holding your business back. Knowing that you’re going to have to work on yourself to help your business can motivate you to tackle some intense growth challenges.
Entrepreneurs Grow at Warp Speed – Part 3
To make decisions based on truth, love, and power is fairly straightforward.
First, I take a step back and try to see the truth of a situation, as if it’s someone else’s decision.
Second, I look at the love aspect. What do I want? What would I love to experience? How do I define desirable? What do I want to move towards? What do I want to shed or avoid? What excites me?
Third, I use the power principle. When I feel I have an option that looks good objectively and subjectively, I move into that new space. I immerse myself in the new decision. I tend to slam the accelerator at this point, which is often necessary to overcome inertia and get moving.
What if I’m not sure? I’m never totally sure. But when I catch myself waffling too much, I use some simple heuristics to make a decision. One heuristic is Embrace the New. All else being equal, I favor going in new directions. But the more important higher-level heuristic is to embrace learning and growth. Usually the newer path will yield new lessons, so it’s a decent short-cut to use.
Another heuristic I use is to explore and experiment. Sometimes the only way to understand the possibilities is to test them.
Entrepreneurs Grow at Warp Speed – Part 4
Imagine how much you’d gain if you could learn how to consistently motivate yourself, for instance. Do you already know how to do that? If not, the lessons of entrepreneurship can teach you.
Entrepreneurs Grow at Warp Speed – Part 5
What are you already spending money on now? Technology? Travel? Fitness equipment? Please tell me you’re not spending thousands of dollars on purchases with after-tax dollars that you could easily be deducting if you had a small business aligned with your hobby.
Do you realize that your business doesn’t even have to be financially successful for you to make these deductions? You do have to try to earn a profit, so your business can’t be a sham, but if you try to make money and don’t earn as much as you’d like, you can still deduct many more expenses than you could without a business. Even when you have a bad year and lose money, you can typically punt your loss to a future year and use it to offset your income during a good year.
Business is full of value-based decisions. You’ll need to decide when to work hard and when to rest, when to pursue a timely opportunity and when to stick to your original plans, when to seek help and when to solve problems alone, etc. Facing such decisions in seemingly endless variations will help you explore, understand, and refine your values. After a few decades as an entrepreneur, you’ll have a strong sense of what it means to be you, and you’ll probably like the result.
Overachievement - by John Eliot
If you have to address an audience, even a tiny one, you had better rehearse in front of some kind of audience.
“To be a leader, you have to make people follow you, and nobody wants to follow someone who does not know where he is going.”
Simplify and narrow what you think about: Just go out target shooting.
Once you’ve selected a focused, research-backed target, execute it single-mindedly and without reservation. If you start second-guessing your strategy and switch to another in the middle of the sale, you will have taken your mind’s eye off the target. Such doubt (and the subsequent loss of concentration) is more likely to cost you the sale than a bad strategy is.
9 Perfect Products for Devs
9 Plugin or extension
8 Library
7 Tool
6 Kit
5 Integration
4 Screencast, audio, presentation, webinar
3 Course
2 Book
1 Last but not least ... SaaS
In conclusion…
- Take control.
- Make things.
- Make products.
- Start small…
- and take off those PTTV blinders so you can choose from the entire universe of opportunity!
Your own company?, You can do it!
Without the moral support of my boss and my former boss I would have never believed that I could do it. So, I’m not your boss. But if you are in any way talented or dedicated and you have half a head for business, take if from me. You can do it. If a high school drop-out with nothing but a typing diploma could do it, so can you. Now go do it.