Mike's notes.
How do you fit the triangle in the circle? One way to think about Alchemy, said Rory Sutherland, is to think of a Sudoku puzzle. In Sudoku each column, row, and 3×3 box must have one through nine once and only once. Sutherland’s suggestion is to shift back and forth between the rows, columns, and … Continue reading Triangle problems
The success equation notes that results are combinations of skill and luck. Some parts of life have a larger luck outcome than others. So, to improve, we look at the skill slice. Poker’s appeal is this idea. Play more hands with positive expected value. But not every sport is as clean as poker. Football, for … Continue reading Three star recruits
“A question that stymied me for years and years, a question I got almost anywhere I went, it seemed like every organization asked, ‘How do you manage to hire so many awesome people?’. “I said to look for fifty-one percenters, people who are emotionally wired to be happier themselves when they delivery happiness to you.” … Continue reading Danny Meyer is an Alchemist (and you can be too)
One of the challenges of running a business is seeing a business from the customer’s perspective. Internally your worldview is all website updates and payment processing, employees and benefits, and hiring and HR. Externally the customer wonders: does this do what I want? Enter jobs-to-be-done. Job-father Bob Moesta joined Customer Camp to conduct a mock-interview … Continue reading ‘Peloton doesn’t offer discounts’
One way to change an experience, and all experience is subjective, is to change the framing of it. Our food takes longer because we make it fresh. Via a16z: “There has been some interesting work in the linguistics community asking if we should be using war as a metaphor for the virus. There’s a lot … Continue reading Framing as a Fire or as a Fight
One of the themes to Early Retirement Extreme is the homeotelic process (two birds, one stone). Consider health and wealth, waste and waist, and live intentionally. FIRE really just has a branding problem. Via Early Retirement Extreme. With kids doing distance learning we are living this out as I take Khan Academy classes to stay … Continue reading Homeotelic Responses
From An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: “On April 1, 2002 Us Weekly first published it’s Star, They’re Just Like Us weekly series featuring pictures of celebrities doing mundane tasks like getting coffee or pumping gas. Before this, everyday pictures weren’t worth much but Us Weekly humanized celebrities by showing them looking less glamorous and … Continue reading Framing Celebrity Photos
We made this for the Fourth of July. There were delicious. They were also tedious. We microwaved a block of white chocolate and used kabob sticks to carefully dip each pretzel into the creamy confection. It required careful speed. Go too quickly and the ratio of chocolate to pretzels was off. Go too slowly and … Continue reading Drizzle as marketing
We’re not really sure on the origin of Hanlon’s Razor, but the speculation (via Wikipedia) is Robert Heinlein’s (Heinlein ->Hanlon) story, Logic of Empire, “The character ‘Doc’ in Heinlein’s story described the ‘devil theory’ fallacy, explaining, ‘You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.’” I’d remember it more and confuse it less … Continue reading The college admissions admission
Beyond basic math, maybe units of ten, we don’t have a good handle on numbers. We are a story-telling species who likes to see cause and effect. The example of randomness demonstrates this as Maria Konnikova told Adi Wyner: “I had a fascinating conversation with Frank Lantz at the Game Center at NYU who used … Continue reading Our problem with randomness
The Waiter's Pad 