Knowing what I want to offer is more important than knowing what another person expects.
I don’t want to reward myself with things that undermine my efforts.
My empathy extends beyond my capacity; therefore, my boundaries should not exist at the edges of my empathy.
When I feel self-righteous and sure of myself: tone it down about 25%. When I feel uncertain and hesitant: crank it up about 25%.
The Hero as Flexible Bureaucrat
[Bureaucrats that are incorruptible become like machines (until they're replaced by machines), and this inflexibility counterintuitively makes them anti-human.]
“I’d bend the rules too, if I knew it would save millions of lives”. Yes sure of course so would I, but would you bend the rules to save someone an hour of unnecessary paperwork? Knowing that if your boss found out he might use it as a pretext to fire you? That’s the kind of subtle, small-scale heroism that, repeated millions of times, creates a more humane society.
Corporations and governments are already rushing to replace many customer-facing jobs with language models. This makes a lot of sense if you take the State-eye view and see human bureaucrats as faulty robots. But if you see the work of a flexible bureaucrat as noble, sometimes even heroic - these are precisely the jobs we should protect.
[Sellers sell their businesses because of death, divorce, disease, distress, dullness, departure, disagreement.]
[Features of good seller opportunities are: 1. founded 10+ years ago; 2. profit under 1 million per year; 3. little competition to buy the business; 4. brick and mortar, or highly-commoditized online; 5. owner in charge for 5+ years; 6. lacking a successor; 7. owner near retirement age; 8. not applicable for bank loans; 9. overpriced for its balance sheet; 10. financials not clean; 11. no leadership team; 12. distressed business; 13. asset sale; 14. established relationship with seller; 15. owner prefers larger exit over long-term or cash flow instead of immediate lumpsum; 16. other sources of income besides the business.]
[Be a walking billboard by: 1. telling everyone you meet that you buy businesses, and 2. asking businesses who the owner is.]
The Most Valuable Bit of Information You Wish You'd Known Sooner
[Forms of leverage to gain more output from your input: labour (from employed, to self-employed, to employing), media (made once, licensed infinitely), capital (no need to sacrifice time), technology (build once, many people use it); stack different forms together.]
Does this need to be said? Right now? By me? If I can't yes all three, I don't say it.
Put a big book on your stomach, then watch it go up and down; you might feel calmer.
If your video game character dies in the first 30 seconds, do you switch off your machine and walk away?
A farmer can't work so hard on Monday that he's sore on Tuesday, and neither can your computer.
mocking your opposition without reducing their power is not a flex.
[Bring some cookies to your neighbour for no reason other than they might need to smile today.]
[I didn't give her a tip or make her famous, just told her I loved her voice.]
[The point of leaving the flock to go after the lost sheep isn't to bring them back, but to let them know they're loved.]
Erin Kissane leaving the internet
[Pretender technologies may only appear to be the next thing, without eventually changing anything, but they can function as a playspace to try possible futures.]
[If we want better networks, we must concretely understand what happened to us, and then use that knowledge to try new things deliberately, with painstaking attention to the human cost.]
Relating is like being ready to be wrong about everything you assume about them.
