code/lab

The vertical axis of this slide represents the total stock of information in the world. The horizontal axis represents time.

In the early days, life was simple. We did important things like make spears and arrowheads. The amount of knowledge needed to make these items, however, was small enough that a single person could master their production. There was no need for a large division of labor and new knowledge was extremely precious. If you got new knowledge, you did not want to share it. After all, in a world where most knowledge can fit in someone’s head, stealing ideas is easy, and appropriating the value of the ideas you generate is hard.

At some point, however, the amount of knowledge required to make things began to exceed the cognitive limit of a single human being. Things could only be done in teams, and sharing information among team members was required to build these complex items. Organizations were born as our social skills began to compensate for our limited cognitive skills. Society, however, kept on accruing more and more knowledge, and the cognitive limit of organizations, just like that of the spearmaker, was ultimately reached. (…)

Today, however, most products are combinations of knowledge and intellectual property that resides in different organizations. Our world is less and less about the single pieces of intellectual property and more and more about the networks that help connect these pieces. The total stock of information used in these ecosystems exceeds the capacity of single organizations because doubling the size of huge organizations does not double the capacity of that organization to hold knowledge and put it into productive use.

In a world in which implementing the next generation of ideas will increasingly require pulling resources from different organizations, barriers to collaboration will be a crucial constraint limiting the development of firms. Agility, context, and a strong network are becoming the survival traits where assets, control, and power used to rule. John Seely Brown refers to this as the “Power of Pull.”

The Cognitive Limit of Organizations, MIT Media Lab, Oct 7, 2011.

These are the only things you need to do to be successful^*. You can get away with just doing one of the two, but that’s rare, and usually someone else is doing the other part for you.

If you you don’t have any marketable skills, learn some. It’s the future. We have Khan Academy and Wikipedia and Codecademy and almost the entire world’s collective knowledge at your fingertips. Use it.

Then make something that you can talk about. Make something cool. Something interesting. Spend time on it. Go crazy. Even if it’s the least useful thing you’ve ever made, if you can talk about it, make it. This part is easy, because you’re doing something you think is cool, and interesting, and if it’s useless, great, because you won’t need to support it much either!

Next, find events where the people you want to work with are. Then get a drink into you (or don’t) and talk to them about it. Relax. It’s probably interesting to them too. Even if it’s not, because you’ve made it, you sound like you know what the hell you’re talking about. That’s the important part. This is easy, too, because you’re talking about something you’ve made that you think is cool and interesting. As an added bonus, many people go to these events just to talk about cool and interesting things, so you’ll fit right in.

You would not believe how much opportunity is out there for those who do things and tell people. It’s how you travel the entreprenurial landscape. You do something interesting and you tell everyone about it. Then you get contacts, business cards, email addresses. Then you get contracts, job offers, investors, whatever. You make friends who think what you do is cool. You make a name for yourself as “the person who did that cool thing.” Then, the next time someone wants to do something in any way related to that cool thing, they come to you first.

Carl Lange

We all know we spend way too much time in email: word-smithing defensively so as not to offend, taking extraordinary effort to ensure we are clear, ensuring each carefully crafted bit of our message cannot be misconstrued.

I thought the best solution is to simply limit the volume of email. Talk face to face when possible. Of course, this has its own drawbacks.

Here’s another:

If you’re tired of email sucking the life out of your day, I ask you to place the following text in your email signature. It will help explain why your responses have become more brief, and perhaps encourage others follow suit:

Join the Single Sentence Email Project: http://gu.nu/w3H

Then, concentrate on learning a new habit: brevity. Respond to emails with as few words as possible. Aim for a sentence, but if just a word will do, use it. It will take practice, and some might dislike it. I argue that this is a fair trade for getting more time to work (and live) productively.

Deliberatism

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. 

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.

…

Solitude has long been associated with creativity and transcendence. “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible,” Picasso said.

While in San Francisco, I paid a visit to the SFMOMA which had an exhibition on Dieter Ram. Beautiful products. Look closely and one can see his subtle, powerful, and timeless principles applied.

1. Good design is innovative - The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.
2. Good design makes a product useful - A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasises the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
3. Good design is aesthetic - The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
4. Good design makes a product understandable - It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.
5. Good design is unobtrusive - Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.
6. Good design is honest - It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
7. Good design is long-lasting - It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.
8. Good design is thorough, down to the last detail - Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.
9. Good design is environmentally-friendly - Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimises physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.
10. Good design is as little design as possible - Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

(Source: vitsoe.com)

To summarize these results:

• The average players are working just as many hours as the elite players (around 50 hours a week spent on music),
• but they’re not dedicating these hours to the right type of work (spending almost 3 times less hours than the elites on crucial deliberate practice),
• and furthermore, they spread this work haphazardly throughout the day. So even though they’re not doing more work than the elite players, they end up sleeping less and feeling more stressed. Not to mention that they remain worse at the violin.

I’ve seen this same phenomenon time and again in my study of high achievers. It came up so often in my study of top students, for example, that I even coined a name for it: the paradox of the relaxed Rhodes Scholar.

This study sheds some light on this paradox. It provides empirical evidence that there’s a difference between hard work and hard to do work:

• Hard work is deliberate practice. It’s not fun while you’re doing it, but you don’t have to do too much of it in any one day (the elite players spent, on average, 3.5 hours per day engaged in deliberate practice, broken into two sessions). It also provides you measurable progress in a skill, which generates a strong sense of contentment and motivation. Therefore, although hard work is hard, it’s not draining and it can fit nicely into a relaxed and enjoyable day.
• Hard to do work, by contrast, is draining. It has you running around all day in a state of false busyness that leaves you, like the average players from the Berlin study, feeling tired and stressed. It also, as we just learned, has very little to do with real accomplishment.

This analysis leads to an important conclusion. Whether you’re a student or well along in your career, if your goal is to build a remarkable life, then busyness and exhaustion should be your enemy. If you’re chronically stressed and up late working, you’re doing something wrong. You’re the average players from the Universität der Künste — not the elite. You’ve built a life around hard to do work, not hard work.

Study Hacks via Daniel Miessler

I think living healthier is the single biggest accelerator we could apply to improving society today. But here I am, falling prey to the same excuses – too much work, not enough time, too tired, too hard, tomorrow.

So I made a decision. I decided to re-prioritise.

For the last month, my number one priority every single day has been to exercise. I have done this to the exclusion of meetings, work tasks and leisure time.

In doing this, I realised how absurd it was to live any other way. Exercise:

• increases productivity and focus
• improves physical health
• balances your mental state
• makes you a better worker, boss, employee, brother, son, husband, lover, parent, mentor and friend.

An 8 hour work day with exercise is more valuable than an 10 hour work day without.

Justifying daily exercise as your number one priority is such an easy thing to do.

If exercise isn’t your number one priority, your priorities are wrong.

- Nick Crocker via Daniel Miessler

I’ve been thinking more about how I review a design… in no particular order, and I don’t ask all of them every time.

• What does it say?
• What does it mean?
• Is what it says and what it means the same thing?
• Do we want that?
• Why do we need to say that here?
• If you stopped reading here, what’s the message?
• What’s the take away after 8 seconds?
• How does this make you feel?
• What’s down below?
• How else can we say this?
• What’s memorable about this?
• What’s that for?
• Who needs to know that?
• Who needs to see that?
• How does that change behavior?
• What’s the payoff?
• What does someone know now that they didn’t know before?
• How does that work?
• Why is that worth a click?
• Is that worth scrolling?
• What’s the simpler version of this?
• Are we assuming too much?
• Why that order?
• Why would this make them choose that?
• What does a more polished version of this look like?
• Why would someone leave at this point?
• What’s missing?
• Why are we saying this twice?
• Is it worth pulling attention away from that?
• Does that make it clearer?
• What’s the obvious next step?
• How would someone know that?
• Would it matter if someone missed that?
• Does that make it easier or harder?
• Would this be better as a sentence or a picture?
• Where’s the verb?
• Why is that there?
• What matters here?
• What would happen if we got rid of that?
• Why isn’t that clear?
• Why is this better?
• How can we make this more obvious?
• What happens when this expands?
• If we got rid of this, does that still work?
• Is it obvious what happens next?
• What just happened?
• Where’s the idea?
• What problem is that solving?
• How does this change someone’s mind?
• What makes this a must have?

(Source: 37signals.com)

Inability to get things done may manifest itself in multiple ways including:

• Lack of urgency.  Used to a large company environment where its OK if things take a few weeks longer.
• Easily distracted.  Heavy procrastinator.
• Lazy / doesn’t work hard.  Some very smart people are basically lazy.  Don’t tolerate this.
• Starts but never finishes things.
• Lack of follow through – makes commitments but does not follow up.
• Argumentative. Arguing incessantly about how to do something rather then just doing it.
• Slow.  Taking a long time to code (or do) something simple.
• Perfectionist.  Tendency to overdesign something and to spend 4 weeks building the perfect implementation versus 1 week building the thing that “just works” for 95% of the time.  Sometimes the edge cases need to be covered, but in most raw startups this is not the case.  On the business side this manifests as someone heavy on analysis, low on “doing”.

- Elad Gil via Daniel Miessler