- Mads Mikkelsen, In Conversation
Quote: "Is there a life philosophy that you feel has carried you through your career? My approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important."
(categories: life philosophy work focus ) - Embrace the Grind – Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Quote: "Sometimes, programming feels like magic: you chant some arcane incantation and a fleet of robots do your bidding. But sometimes, magic is mundane. If you’re willing to embrace the grind, you can pull off the impossible."
(categories: work programming career focus )
Links: 4-5-2021
- The Fun Scale: Understanding Types of "Fun" | REI Co-op Journal
I think the measures are probably different for everyone, but the metaphor is useful.
(categories: funny adventure exercise fun language ) - The Shortness of Time
(categories: time productivity philosophy )
- effort – bookbear express
Quote: "We are all Frankenstein monsters—patchwork quilts of past experiences—trying to pass ourselves off as whole and cohesive things."
(categories: time discomfort effort work )
Links: 2-3-2021
- What complexity science says about what makes a winning team | Aeon Essays
Quote: "These issues – the importance of synergistic interactions, how strategies and individual attributes combine to produce team performance, how individuals coordinate in space and time to become mesmerising as a whole, and what role the leadership and larger organisational and cultural environment play in bringing out our best – are not just questions for basketball analysts and sociologists studying the Manhattan Project. They are in fact key questions for all biological systems, as all biological systems – whether groups of neurons or animal societies – are composed of interacting parts that collectively discover solutions to environmental or internal challenges. And complexity science, replete with nuanced concepts and rigorous methods, offers a quantitative lens through which to study them." That quote and the McNamara fallacy and the reference to Jerry Muller’s book.
(categories: performance metrics productivity team management culture )
Links: 2-2-2021
- How Data (and Some Breathtaking Soccer) Brought Liverpool to the Cusp of Glory – The New York Times
Math, analytics, data, datascience, soccer.
(categories: analytics datascience data )
Links: 2-1-2021
- Tim Cook May Have Just Ended Facebook | Inc.com
Quote: "We believe that ethical technology is technology that works for you," said Cook. "It’s technology that helps you sleep, not keeps you up. It tells you when you’ve had enough. It gives you space to create or draw or write or learn, not refresh just one more time."
(categories: apple facebook ethics culture privacy )
Links: 1-27-2021
- The Discipline of No – How product managers can learn to gently push back – Ken Norton
One quote of many from a great blog post: "Ultimately, what a product manager has to constantly fight is ambiguity. There’s no room for being unclear. Goals have to be set and measurable."
(categories: productmanagement goals saying-no discipline discomfort )
Links: 1-25-2021
- How to get promoted – Zero Credibility
Depressing read… do the opposite: "… an opportunist’s career advice is: ignore OKRs, switch projects well before the consequences of your decisions can be measured, act happy and easy-going, package bad news as appeals for slow systemic adjustments, don’t make anyone look bad, perform rituals with enthusiasm, grow headcount faster than baseline, let work invent itself, follow management fashions, avoid acute failures, believe this sincerely."
(categories: career management ) - The Mike Speiser Incubation Playbook – kwokchain
Quote: "Principles are only principles if you’d hold them even when they are costly."
(categories: principles leadership entrepreneurship saas enterprise ) - Learning Curve: Learning to Suffer – Backpacking Light
Suffering, discomfort, goals.
(categories: discipline hiking outdoors comfort discomfort )
Links: 12-31-2020
- How to Set All Mac Apps to Prefer Tabs with New Document and Windows
Just saved myself at least 20 seconds per day.
(categories: mac tips )
Links: 12-20-2020
- Marc Andreessen On Productivity, Scheduling, Reading Habits, Work, and More – Andreessen Horowitz
Great blog post / interview. One quote: "One, they just never have any time to actually think. And that turns out to be a fairly important thing."
(categories: habits productivity betting strategy management time focus reading ) - Poisoned Just Enough: Why I’m so Optimistic About 2021
Some positive / optimistic things in this blog post but this quote: "The Future of Work has suddenly accelerated: working from home has been greatly expanded, with almost universal approval. In the future, we will still be able to hang out with our coworkers in person, but we can do it on our own terms instead of 9-to-5 every day just because the boss says so." and the following paragraphs likely only apply to a small part of the working population. It’s better for some… but for many, it’s much much worse.
(categories: working covid remote-first 2020 )
Links: 12-16-2020
- Slack Is the Right Tool for the Wrong Way to Work | The New Yorker
Quote: "… employees who use Slack check communications tools more frequently than non-users, accessing them once every five minutes on average—an absurdly high rate of interruption." That’s insane.
(categories: work focus gtd attention )