visakanv

52 ms·

481.
by visakanv 12y ago
I was just reading something that's related and yet totally different- about the US Army grappling with whether or not to use kill counts as a public metric. The answer tends to be "it depends". Interesting read that makes it
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by visakanv 12y ago
Sharing this to followup to the "screw motivation, you need discipline" post. Here's a quick summary: * The writer makes a distinction I wouldn't- that discipline is only discipline when it's applied to things you d
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Little Known Ways to Think about Discipline(7goldfish.com)
54 points by visakanv 12y ago|13 comments
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by visakanv 12y ago
> Expecting an ecosystem of junk to remaain consistently successful is purely utopian I'm curious to hear your opinions on the quality of Wikipedia, and its success and/or failure! Is it doing well, or poorly? Do you prefer say
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by visakanv 12y ago
Yup! Here's the interesting, counter-intuitive thing: 99.9% of blogs can be shit, but there are literally millions of blogs. So if you have 1,000,000 blogs, and 99.9% are shit, you still have 1,000 good blogs! If only 0.01% of blogs we
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by visakanv 12y ago
Right, allow me to refine my statement– tonnes of bloggers start with the intention of selling them, but few bloggers actually make it to that sort of scale. The same thing applies to webcomics, to musicians, etc. These are the exception, n
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by visakanv 12y ago
It drives me crazy when this doesn't happen– especially in news articles talking about some study here or there- why not link to the actual study?! I end up having to Google for it, click around a bunch of bad navigation... very painfu
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by visakanv 12y ago
You don't make a career from the blog itself- you get headhunted because of the attention and the awareness gets you, and you get hired or solicited for all sorts of interesting, lucrative projects.
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by visakanv 12y ago
> Having discipline and motivation together is easier than alone. It's why I don't think online education can replace institutional education (though I think it can make it much better) as the default mode. It's why even i
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by visakanv 12y ago
This is great: "If you’re a manager and care seriously about speed, you’ll need to tell your people you’re wiling to accept the tradeoffs. Reid did this with me. We agreed I was going to make judgment calls on a range of issues on his
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by visakanv 12y ago
Yes. My boss is one of them. Cal Newport writes quite a bit about doing deep work. [1] Tobias Lutke of Shopify seems to be another. [2] Most people are similar to how they were when they were in school, because most people don't delibe
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by visakanv 12y ago
Also good seems to be The Procrastination Equation [1]– the key insight is that there are (at least!) 4 variables involved in why we don't do things that we say we want to do: * Expectancy, which is your own estimation of how likely yo
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by visakanv 12y ago
I have been thinking, reading and writing about motivation / discipline / procrastination / akrasia for years now. I'm always looking for really good material on the subject. Unfortunately for some strange reason, most o
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by visakanv 12y ago
Love that somebody raised this. :-) Same applies to Disney.
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by visakanv 12y ago
I can talk about something completely different– I'm a writer, and I work with visual designers. They much, much prefer it when I can give them a terrible sketch of an idea rather than a lengthy diatribe about what I want. Because it&#
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by visakanv 12y ago
It's always strange to me (or sad, I guess) to me when people with ideas want to start businesses without being terrified by their own incompetence and ignorance. I think that's usually a sign that a person doesn't actually f
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by visakanv 12y ago
Yup, agreed completely on all counts. I think Drew's advice is a sort of last-ditch, "you shouldn't have to be asking this, but if you're asking... these are probably your best shots..." sorta POV. Cofounders should
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by visakanv 12y ago
Indeed, I am guessing this is most likely the case.
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by visakanv 12y ago
I can't seem to load the page... That said while we're on this topic, I've always enjoyed Drew Houston's take on it: http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-find-good-technical-co-founder... "Unfortunately th
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by visakanv 12y ago
Absolutely. There's seems to always be this interesting duality to achieving anything difficult. You have to have faith that you can do well, but you also have to acknowedge the hard facts of reality. You have to be kind, but you also
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by visakanv 12y ago
Oh, sorry I wasn't precise- yes, absolutely! I'm particularly curious about the nature of that 'expectation evolution', and how exactly that works- and how, for example, people not exposed to the earlier work might inter
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by visakanv 12y ago
Sounds like he had lived an amazing, rich, full life. May we all be half as fortunate (and hardworking!)
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by visakanv 12y ago
That's really interesting! I think this is the case whenever something gets simpler + more gratifying. We can remember the inconvenience of the old way of doing things, but we don't quite remember the experience- because the new e
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by visakanv 12y ago
Reminds me of my boss's favorite quote: > "Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise, and everything precise is so remote from everything that we normally think, that you cannot f
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by visakanv 12y ago
+1, I am also curious. All attempts to debug my wife so far have been frustratingly inconclusive.
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by visakanv 12y ago
I don't program, and I do all of those things! So it might not have been programming-induced. Or perhaps there are multiple paths to this tragic life we share. For the too-bright-monitor– I highly recommend http://justgetflu
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by visakanv 12y ago
+1! I'm guessing there's a sweet spot for (our sort of) life– you need the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen.
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by visakanv 12y ago
Agreed. I'm guessing there should be (in the realm of possible solutions) some sort of intermediate arrangement, or a whole spectrum of intermediate arrangements. These may previously have been too complex to manage, but might now be p
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by visakanv 12y ago
I relate to the dilemma. When I was playing Half Life as a kid, I remember being blown away by the "smart enemy AI." These days I find it odd when enemy AI does NOT react in a dynamic, networked way. Interesting how my expectation
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by visakanv 12y ago
Yep, you're right. As a writer, marketer, creator and consumer of content, I enjoy thinking about things like this. I've witnessed my work being plagiarized and edited before. I personally accept it as just the way reality is– som

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