Ideas That Changed My Life
> 16. Russell Conjugation: Journalists often change the meaning of a sentence by replacing one word with a synonym that implies a different meaning. For example, the same person can support an estate tax but oppose a death tax — even though they are the same thing.
I found this one particularly interesting
"11. The Never-Ending Now: The structure of our social media feeds blinds us to history, as it causes us to live in an endless cycle of ephemeral content consumption. The structure of the Internet pulls people away from age-old wisdom. "
I frequently find myself in this mode. Whether it's the latest youtube video or tweet. There's something to be said about looking back at past events and investigating what you might have failed to learn or appreciate.
> 9. Competition is for Losers: Avoid competition. Stop copying what everybody else is doing. If you work at a for-profit company, work on problems that would not otherwise be solved. If you’re at a non-profit, fix unpopular problems. Life is easier when you don’t compete. (Hint: don’t start another bottled water company).
The problem here is making sure that you are solving a real problem at all.
There are many companies out there doing something unique, but that is because what they are doing has limited/no value. Juicero comes to mind.
Without competition, you also cannot get an honest assessment of where you stand.
I got to #15...
"15. Law of Shitty Click-Through Rates: Most marketing strategies have a short window of success, as click-through rates decrease as tactics mature. For example, the first banner-ad has a click-through rate of more than 70%. Now we avoid them with ad-blockers."
And I thought WOW, 70% and I was curious if that's true. At least according to The Atlantic that is not true, but the number is still pretty darn high.
"The banner ad that’s widely described as the first ever was a little rectangle purchased by AT&T on HotWired.com in 1994. About 44 percent of the people who saw it actually clicked on it."
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rH9hEb...
(Not trying to take away anything from this list, just sharing what I found)
> 8. Talent vs. Genius: Society is good at training talent but terrible at cultivating genius. Talented people are good at hitting targets others can’t hit, but geniuses find targets others can’t see. They are opposite modes of excellence. Talent is predictable, genius is unpredictable.
This, at least in US, I think the society is focusing too much energy on cultivating genius, and a lot of talents are left idle with literally meaningless work (for example, convincing people to click on ads).
This is a listicle of context-free ideas distilled into bon mots. Great for going viral, especially among the VC twitter crowd.
The problem with these lists is that they give the impression that you're learning something when you're really just consuming Content.
> 7. Mimetic Theory of Conflict: People who are similar are more likely to fight than people who are different. That’s why Civil Wars and family feuds create the worst conflicts. The closer two people are and the more equality between them, the greater the potential for conflict.
Wars between countries are certainly more common than civil wars, aren't they? And I'm not sure I understand the link between "worst conflicts" and "greater potential for conflict."
#20 - The Bike-Shed Affect seems to plague everyone. In fact, this article from Perrell is what inspired me to write about how to use collaborative meeting agendas to stop this from happening.
TL;DR: Force everyone to make the simple and easy decisions asynchronously before you get into a synchronous meeting. This forces you to talk about the big, hard problems when you are meeting live. It has saved our team hours of wasted meeting time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23445944