March 2010
31 posts
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What do I KNOW?
What do I WANT to know?
What did I LEARN?
Whenever you’re thinking about a big problem, write down all your questions and background knowledge in advance. Don’t just write down your main question, write down every question whose answer could conceivably be insightful or useful to your intended audience. Then write down all your background knowledge. Not just a...
How to blog insightful
From Alex Krupp’s essay:
Define a phenomenon
Create a hypothesis
Split one schema into two
Combine two schema into one
Think on a higher order
Think on a lower order
X and Y are both instances of Z
Simplify a more complicated model
X is not mutually exclusive with Y
“The problem with assumptions is that they’re usually correct. For certain...”
– Alex Krupp
A Trainer Shares What He Learned About Health and... →
Personal highlights:
Pushups are the best upper body workout designed.
It’s never too late to build muscle and is more important as we grow older.
If I had to pick one sport for a child to start with it would be gymnastics, the strength/speed/balance/body control they will learn can be applied to any sport down the road.
To build muscle, throw away your Whey protein and eat more steak ...
“You’ve seen what happens when an energetic person enters a room. It raises...”
– Scott Adams Blog: Leadership Energy
“By thinking of ourselves as a child, we end up thinking in more child-like ways....”
– Jonah Lehrer on Childish Creativity
Ask yourself the right questions
Most questions contain presuppositions. A presupposition is a “fact” that’s embedded in the question, which you will have to accept as true in order to answer the question. For example, if you ask “Why is John always mean to me?”, it assumes John is always mean to you.
Instead of asking “Why do I always screw up?”, how about you ask “How can I most...
Three Steps to Make Your Next Speech Your Best -... →
First, step out from behind the podium and choreograph your relationship to the audience.
Four feet to a foot and a half is personal space, and now we’re paying close attention. In fact, we want to keep our eyes on anyone in that space all the time. Again, it’s a safety issue. That person is close enough to us to do us harm, so we’re going to stay focused. So one of...
WatchQuestions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can — and should — be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life.
Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions (TED Talk)
Anthony Volodkin: Why Steep Learning Curves Are... →
In 2005, back when music blogs were still a relatively new phenomenon, Hype Machine creator Anthony Volodkin imagined a website that would aggregate those diverse critical voices to answer an age-old question: “What should I listen to?” A 19-year-old college student with an IT side job, Volodkin had little time, little money, and little experience working on the web. But rather than getting ...
A heuristic for evaluating any process or infrastructure change in the context of a startup:
Always choose the option that minimizes the total time through the feedback loop.
In other words, any change that accelerates learning is a win, and everything else is waste. This is very different from the trade-offs that need to be made in [corporate] situations where the goal is to optimize for...
Notes on Leadership from Ben Horowitz
So, are great leaders born or made? Let’s look at this one attribute at a time:
Articulation of the vision—There is no question that some people are much better story tellers than others. However, it is also true that anybody can greatly improve in this area through focus and hard work. All CEOs should work on the vision component of leadership.
Alignment of interests—I am not sure if the...
“The woman who was apparently selectively hard to get (i.e. easy for you but hard...”
– Does Playing Hard to Get Work? | PsyBlog
“We’re in for some hard times. We need to pull in our belts, pay more...”
– Roger Ebert - The gathering storm
“My worry is that our online social platforms both magnify our hierarchies (by...”
– Jonah Lehrer : Online Status Anxiety : The Frontal Cortex
“Income is the best medicine.”
– Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank
“In our refusal [to say thank you], we are attempting to flee a sense of...”
– Alain de Botton on gratitude
“We’re nothing but kids with grown-up faces, enjoying the time of our life,...”
– Mo’Nique, when asked how she felt about the buzz behind her Precious performance
“Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression ‘it turns out’ to...”
– Ben Casnocha’s Blog: The Power of the Phrase “It Turns Out…”
“One group needs to be there for the other to come. That’s a big problem. Without...”
– Mastering Chicken And The Egg Communities - FeverBee
“The moral is that emotions influence how we process and pay attention to...”
– Jonah Lehrer, The Frontal Cortex
“I refuse to burden another person with the obligation of completing me. That...”
– Elizabeth Gilbert, paraphrased (source: Wehr in the World: Squibs)
Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs.... →
“Experiencing selves” vs “remembering selves”
Wash Your Bowl
A monk told Joshu, “I have just entered the monastery. Please teach me.”
Joshu asked, “Have you eaten your rice porridge?
The monk replied, “I have eaten.”
Joshu said, “Then you had better wash your bowl.”
At that moment the monk was enlightened.
Wash your bowl