Twitter Roundup

Posted on June 14, 2010 by max

I don’t know about you, but as activity on social media sites has surged the last year, I’ve found a lot more noise in my feeds and as result of my projects getting more serious I’ve had less time to sift. I know I’m missing a lot of interesting things people have to say and always find aggregation and curation helpful.

At my friend Tyler Willis‘ urging I signed up for the daily venture hacks email digest and they’ve been doing a terrific job of synthesizing important articles being written within the startup community.

In that spirit, here is an aggregation of my enduring tweets from the last few weeks:

The more you know the more you realize you dont know. But the more you know the more you can do. The goal is ability not absolute knowledge

Two consec 20 hr weeks != one 40 hour week of productivity. Off/on ramps to a project are long. Sustained focus super important. Batch.

The hedonic treadmill is so real. It’s great for accomplishment and progress but lame for happiness. Reflection of your path charted is key.

The right plan is critical. It’s not sufficient because the hard work is in the execution but executing well on the wrong thing is worthless

Time expectations: 3-5 hours are minimal if you’re coming from an empty schedule but fitting it in is a huge challenge if already maxed out

Good plans have agility & unpredictability built in. Bad plans steer you away from possibility of making bigger realizations.

A lot of smart is continuously eliminating false beliefs & building a repertoire of building blocks that construct increasing truthfulness

Authors of Made to Stick argue that mental simulation of the past is more effective then simulating the future. Counterintuitive. Pg 211-213

The music genome project aimed to “Capture the essence of music at the fundamental level”. The human genome captures humanity at a fund lvl?

Finished the checklist manifesto, excited by its potential. Its simplicity appears vapid but the way it interacts w cognition is profound

Noticed at the airport people are much happier at arrivals than departures. True with most things in life? Ppl seek comfort not uncertainty.

“Narcissists don’t care how you feel, whether you like them or not, they just want you to be in their movie. Apathy is your only weapon.”

“At times stories are ink-blot tests of what’s going on in the life of the reader.” – Steve Blank

“Many designers don’t measure real world impact. Many design orgs & schools give out awards for designing products that never get built” – Eric Ries

Great learning tool: ability to chat live w people reading the same blog post/article. Or easily see friends who have read the post. Exist?

One of my big irritations is when people make a mistake and I fix it, but they are unwilling to learn what went wrong so it doesn’t reoccur.

Customer Discovery provides a good way to inch into a startup idea partime before quitting your job and going full throttle.

Sean Ellis & Steve Blank measure PMF dif bc theyre talking about B2C vs B2B (& respectively Gratification vs. ROI are the important metrics)

The all things D interview with Steve Jobs makes me think a lot of the portrayals of Jobs as a dictator has some truth but is mostly wrong.

We all have tons of assumptions in our mental model of the world. Surrounding urself with smart ppl makes you more likely to adopt good ones

When Advice Contradicts It Usually Doesn’t

Posted on June 5, 2010 by max

A pheonemna that really interests me is when advice from smart people clashes and there appears to be a contradiction.

However I don’t think there is actually a contradiction. Usually the contradiction can be resolved in one of 3 ways:

1) One or both people are wrong

2) They are actually both right, but they are describing different circumstances. For example the advice for a B2B business is different than that of B2C. Or what is useful advice for 5 year old may not be useful for a 25 year old. Overgeneralizing causes these different circumstances to be conflated and creates an apparent contradiction.

Note that most advice comes from people abstracting patterns from their experiences and since they likely had very different circumstances most of their advice doesn’t apply to you.

3) They are describing the same circumstance, and what they’re really describing are two different schools of thought, each viable. There is often more than one correct way to solve a problem.

Advice is not universal. It can only apply to finite number of circumstances and remain correct. But not all advice is created equal. Some statements apply to more situations than others, such as the golden rule: “Do to others as you want them to do to you.”

But even the golden rule as it’s limitations. People have come up with the platinum rule that describes even more circumstances than the golden rule. The platinum rule says: “treat others as they would like to be treated”.

What I am describing is partial truth. Things can be true but some things are more true than others.

I just wrote this post, attempting to resolve the contradictory advice given by Sean Ellis and Ash Maurya on pricing.

Asking The Right Questions

Posted on May 21, 2009 by max

Good writing and good conversation seem to have many parallels. In order to continue to write you’re basically having a conversation with yourself and you need to intuitively, or perhaps, sliently whisper the right questions to yourself to prompt an interesting recall or synthesis of information. Asking myself better questions is definitely something I want to improve on. I think this ability, whether conscious or not, underlies the development of long trains of thought. Personally, I don’t feel like I know what the best questions to focus on are. In conversations I can feel there’s a next level that I don’t know how to reach; a way to draw more interesting comments out of someone, if only I knew what to ask. I have the same experience with writing. I will generate a ideas but not be able to take it as far as I want to. I can feel there is a next level to go to, if only someone asked me the right question. Or better yet, if I knew how to ask myself the right question, a flurry of insights would ensue.

But is focusing on asking the right questions the right model? Perhaps this idea is breaking down train of thought too finely to render focusing on the right question paralyzing rather than catalyzing. Yesterday on Twitter I asked “When is the advice not to take it one step at a time? Or are those words of wisdom universally applicable?” I think the answer is that, yes focusing on the next step is always the right thing to do, but the size of the step varies. The extremities run from focusing on only the desired end outcome, while ignoring the process, to focusing on an infinitum of smaller and smaller minutiae like in Zeno’s Paradoxes. In this case, I’m trying to discover what the right level of conscious focus is, to extend the complexity and length of trains of thought.

In reading, for example, first we focus on reading individual letters. Then we graduate to reading individual words. Then a few people move on to reading sentences. And even a smaller select few claim to be able to read paragraphs the same way most people read words. This is essence of what most speed reading programs teach. Those levels are the “what” of faster reading but what’s more interesting is the “how”, because that allows us to know not just what’s possible but achieve it ourselves. I’ve been experimenting with some of these techniques and have been able to get up to the level of reading sentences and thus paragraphs in a few eye movements in situations with few distractions (though those are hard to come by lately). Reading with a purpose is one such technique, but more on specific reading techniques another time.

In writing there is a similar process. We start out with very simple ideas and then string them together to form longer, complex thoughts. What is the technique, the “how” that unlocks the potential to begin connecting multiples of complex thoughts together. I think focusing on the right questions might be one successful approach.

Ultimately, what I’m talking about here is consciously understanding and modeling what many elite figures do intuitively and unconsciously, so if you asked them there’s a good chance they couldn’t articulate how they do what they do. What I hope to talk more about is the tremendous power and flexibility in understanding consciously many of the processes that skilled naturals understand only intuitively.

A Short Story

Posted on February 14, 2009 by max

Here’s a short story I wrote up a few months ago. I was experimenting with ideas of randomness, networking and success in life in the form of a short story. I could have done a lot more with it and I have a lot of thoughts about how to improve it. This is my first crack at it. Not sure if I’ll end up taking a second…Enjoy

“Just look into the scanner right here and you’ll be good to go,” The clerk on the screen flashed a forced smile.

“Believable enough,” Isaac thought to himself. These automated personalities had been in circulation for just a few months, although the prototype was created a few years ago in the lab. Currently they are expensive and fairly uncommon but it is fitting that a research lab like this one would be using one.

“Your identity has been confirmed,” the clerk croaked in a robotic voice.

“Aren’t you supposed to be able to say that like a normal human being now.”

“Yes, you didn’t find that funny? I guess my understanding of irony is lacking. I could have spoken with inflection but honestly can you really say ‘identity confirmed’ and not sound like a robotic tool. HAhah—“

Isaac not amused stood staring blankly back at the screen.

“…Ok,” the clerk mumbled, “I guess humor isn’t as easy as it looks. I’ve been told it is the last thing I will acquire, as it is the pinnacle of the human condition.”

“…So what’s next?” Isaac asked, hoping not to engage in a philosophical conversation about the nature of humor.

“Well your LiveRecord™ is downloading from the cloud and is about 60% complete. The initial conditions for your SimulTest™ should be ready soon.”

Isaac knew that much of his life had been captured and stored but he’d never been aware that anything could be done with it other than to replay moments of his life. “Can you explain to me again what exactly what you are going to do with all my information?”

Continue reading →

Boarding the Train of Self Discovery – Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche

Posted on January 21, 2009 by max

The Full Nietzche Quote I used as inspiration for this post is attached at the bottom.

I find many of Nietzche’s thoughts hard to relate to due my unfamiliarity with the time period he is writing in, but I found this paragraph rich with enduring ideas.

Nietzsche’s basic argument here is that men are fearful and lazy. They hide behind tradition to disguise their lack of individuality. They look to blend in it to hide their laziness for in a sea of laziness they can’t be picked out. Men know they only have this one life to live, yet they are scared to make the most of it. They are afraid of taking an honest look at themselves for fear of what they might discover. The philosopher despises man for opting for this life of convention rather than a life of individuality. Only the artist seeks to reveal man as he truly is. It is not hard for man to break this cycle. All he must do is find dissatisfaction in conformity and dare to be different, dare to be himself.

The scary thing is that this rings almost as true as when Nietzsche wrote these words over a century ago. There are signs we may be on the verge of a creative awakening. But currently a very small population attacks life with a fervent passion, seeking self-discovery, self-improvement and a life of creative contribution.

What fear could be so strong that it represses our individuality?

This fear must cut deep to deprive us of the only thing we’ll ever have. Everyone knows we have only this one life, yet most choose to live as if this wasn’t the case Nietzsche is confounded that so many are persuaded by a little discomfort to abandon the pursuit of individuality. Failing to individuate is failing to live. You’d be living a life that has already been lived. We are all given our own unique genetics and our own experiences. We all have the capability to dare to be different and carve out our own unique identity in the world. Why do so few make the most of this truly once in a lifetime opportunity?

Our paralysis comes from our fear of rejection. Many of our biological instincts evolved when the sole goal of life was to survive. In tribal culture, where humanity existed for so long, the best way to ensure survival was to stick with the tribe. If you were ostracized your chance of surviving went down drastically. Naturally, we evolved an aversion to putting ourselves in situations where others might reject us and kick us out of the tribe. But times have changed. Few would argue today the sole purpose of life is reproduction. Organized human society affords us something new. A life that transcends basic survival. A life where meaning is created by what we do with our minds. A mind with boundless potential if only given the chance to explore. And this what causes Nietzsche to have so much disdain for man. Everyone is given this gift, redeemable only once, yet so few embark on this journey.

Short Term Pain For Long Term Gain

It is a journey not without hardship and not without sacrifice. Nobody is claiming finding the resolve to grow is easy, but it is the only choice we have. Almost anything worthwhile is worth fighting for. The alternative is a life of boredom and regret. When you look at life as a journey of improvement and exploration, struggle isn’t something to fear it is something to embrace. Failing after we’ve given our all is when we learn the most because we are given timely feedback about what we did wrong. If you learn from failure it really isn’t failure at all. What is perceived as risky really isn’t that risky. If this journey is accepted and risks are taken, success and failure are both wins. It is with this knowledge that you realize the ultimate risk is to do nothing at all.

It is not just fear that arrests our individuality but universal forces that resist halfhearted momentary courage. The good news is that if you break the inertial forces that compel stillness, it becomes easier and easier to keep going. Nature is full of examples that support this. The energy required to lift a spaceship out of the atmosphere is greater than in the thousands of miles it travels to the moon their after. Static friction is greater than kinetic friction. Newton’s first law of motion says an object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion. These forces form the protective shield that keeps the sphere of the extraordinary smaller than the ordinary. But these forces are far from insurmountable and all Nietzsche is asking for is a little determination and little perseverance to pursue a life of uniqueness.

Perhaps this is a good thing that nature restricts the extraordinary. A meritocracy is built right in. But my frustration with humanity is that the circle of the extraordinary doesn’t need to be so small. The barrier to entry is far from insurmountable and the reward is more than worth the pain of admission. The first step is recognition that the only way to truly live is to board the train of self-discovery. The only way to fail is to do nothing. If you accept this, the willpower to take the first step is just around the bend.

Out With The Old In With The New

The resolve to be different does not get us out of the woods yet. There is one other very important condition for sustainable growth. Painting your unique picture requires more than blithe commitment. Self-discovery entails the bravery to take an honest look at ourselves; and this usually not without considerable pain. Men are afraid of becoming completely honest with themselves because a look in the mirror might reveal a ghastly sight. This will be true for everybody. Self-improvement never ends but if you’ve never started then invariably there will be resistance to admitting change is necessary. But getting stronger almost always involves some short-term pain. The athlete slightly tears his muscles everyday and comes back stronger the next. But why are there so many more athletes than self-discoverers? Both involve in short term pain for long term gain. Perhaps it is because there is a greater risk in engaging in battle with your core identity than with your body, but there is also greater reward.

In order to grow, we must uncover the things we buried long ago in order to avoid dealing with them. Admitting our flaws is unquestionably uncomfortable. And will undoubtedly be avoided unless it is recognized that our only option is to board the train of self-discovery. If there is not this burning desire to change and a palpable sense that improvement is possible then our recognition of our flaws would merely cause us to wallow in self-pity. Absent of this desire to change we cover up and rationalize our troubles, letting them fester, eroding our effectiveness and happiness.

The Journey Forward

Resolving to change is unbelievably gratifying and opens up new dimensions of life over the long term. Nietzsche finds contemptible the man who prefers comfort in rationalizations to the man who finds the resolve to endure short-term pain for a chance at creative contribution and perhaps enlightenment.

Nietzsche says only the artist seeks to expose man as he really is. Artists have a penchant for creations that are able to identify our pain, inadequacies, and frustrations in concise visceral way that reeks of truth. But I find contemptible the artist who illuminates flaws with no move towards resolution. What Nietzsche does not say is that true artist is the man who accepts this pain and takes action to change. For these actions are the brushstrokes of a life that is a true work of art.

In conclusion, personal growth invariably involves a temporary but necessary pain. This should not cripple but inspire change. What irks Nietzsche and so many other philosophers is that so many are deterred by a small dose of pain from pursuing a lifelong journey of understanding of self, of pursuit of knowledge, of self improvement, and maybe some day enlightenment.

The most sustainable way to grow seems to be first have a solid grasp of ideas intellectually. Ideas are cheap. And then focus a majority of your efforts on making these ideas a reality. This is blog is my quest to understand ideas intellectually. But the implementation is a much more turbulent journey.

–

A traveller who had seen many countries and peoples and several continents was asked what human traits he had found everywhere; and he answered: men are inclined to laziness. Some will feel that he might have said with greater justice: they are all timorous. They hide behind customs and opinions. At bottom, every human being knows very well that he is in this world just once, as something unique, and that no accident, however strange, will throw together a second time into a unity such a curious and diffuse plurality: he knows it, but hides it like a bad conscience why? From fear of his neighbour who insists on convention and veils himself with it. But what is it that compels the individual human being to fear his neighbour, to think and act herd-fashion, and not to be glad of himself? A sense of shame, perhaps, in a few rare cases. In the vast majority it is the desire for comfort, inertia – in short, that inclination to laziness of which the traveller spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are timorous, and what they fear most is the troubles with which any unconditional honesty and nudity would burden them. Only artists hate this slovenly life in borrowed manners and loosely fitting opinions and unveil the secret, everybody’s bad conscience, the principle that every human being is a unique wonder; they dare to show us the human being as he is, down to the last muscle, himself and himself alone even more, that in this rigorous consistency of his uniqueness he is beautiful and worth contemplating, as novel and incredible as every work of nature, and by no means dull. When a great thinker despises men, it is their laziness that he despises: for it is un account of this that they have the appearance of factory products and seem indifferent and unworthy of companionship or instruction. The human being who does not wish to belong to the mass must merely cease being comfortable with himself; let him follow his conscience which shouts at him: “Be yourself! What you are at present doing, opining, and desiring, that is not really you.”…

The Future of Writing Here

Posted on December 26, 2008 by max

The last few days I’ve been working hard to compile and organize my thoughts on all the things I might want to write about. It is a lot of work to gather all the thoughts I’ve been working on the last few years. But I think it’s really important to capture them in concise written form, creating in effect a foundation I can build off of. Once I have the foundation, it gives me the freedom to pursue new ideas in full without the need to describe tangential but contingent ideas. Instead, I can just reference them. So I’ve got about a hundred ideas I’m working on now, some with many paragraphs and some just with titles.

The nice thing about at least titling everything I might want to write about is that it lets me build on the ideas incrementally. Anytime I stumble on an idea that is similar to a topic I’ve outlined it’s likely to provoke more substantial thought since I’ve already given my mind permission to actively seek out content on that topic. Most of the sensory input that reaches the mind is filtered out or forgotten, so it’s important to remind the mind to focus on salient topics. Writing an idea down is one of the best ways to signal importance to the mind.

Continue reading →

Separating Writer and Editor

Posted on December 21, 2008 by max

As I said earlier, it’s a bit overwhelming approaching this blog as blank slate. It feels similar to what it must be like standing at the base Mount Everest, confronting an almost insurmountable challenge.

Internally my mind is like a well-developed spider web consisting of many intertwined, interdependent thoughts. How do I begin to approach such a thorny, convoluted structure when the end product must be clear, pithy posts? I realized the serial approach wouldn’t work. I can’t just pick one topic after another and bang through them one by one. It’s too hard to stay focused. Too many thoughts depend on other thoughts, which lead to tangents and thus an unfocused post. But letting the voice in your head filter for only relevant thoughts is not the answer. But this is what most people do. Most people sit there and wait for the next sentence to come while there mind runs through a tree of combinations, making a countless number of false starts before they finally stumble on something that kind of fits. This leads to writer’s block and overall stifles the creative process. Instead, separate the writer and the editor. They are two distinctly different functions of the mind, and for productivity’s sake, are mutually exclusive.

But it’s important to focus first on the ideas. Whenever you write you will invariably have to generate ideas and then edit them to get a finished product.

I don’t know why most of us developed the bad habit of alternating between idea generation and editing after every single sentence. I don’t know exactly how I broke out of it either, but I am sure glad I did. The central problem with this approach is it continually prevents your mind from getting in a state of flow, where ideas pour out in bunches. Flow states require sustained concentration in a particular frame of mind. Think of it like climbing an icy mountain where reaching the peak symbolizes reaching flow. When you’re switching from writer to editor every few seconds you’re constantly beginning to climb the mountain and sliding back down, never reaching peak creativity.

What I do now is just think of good writing as good thinking. And then I just let my mind run wild and free associate. I empty my mind of any ideas I have on a topic. The beginning of this process usually starts out slow but once I give my mind time to warm up I start making connections with breadth and depth I’m proud of. You know that feeling when you know you have a great idea but you just don’t have access to it? It’s like it is covered by a thinly veiled sheet that lets you roughly discern the shape of the idea, but it is so incredibly strong that the idea can’t break through and reveal itself. The solution is often just to let your mind climb a little bit higher up the icy mountain.

I hit writer’s block trying to write the second post of this blog. I want my posts to minimize tangents yet every time I went to write I was overwhelmed by the volume of different thoughts that came to mind. My mind in attempt to stay focused was constantly trying to edit these miscellaneous thoughts, but it stopped my creative mind dead in its tracks. The paradox was that by preventing my mind from thinking about ideas not pertinent to my topic, I wasn’t able to write anything down at all. There was this large cloud looming over my head every time I thought about the blog, because I couldn’t see how to untangle my large, haphazard web of thoughts through short focused snapshots. Fortunately, I realized what I was doing wrong. So yesterday for about two hours I just went on a massive brainstorm and wrote out initial ideas for 35 blog posts. Sometimes I wrote a few paragraphs sometimes I wrote just a sentence. It didn’t matter; I just let my mind wander from topic to topic. You may not see many posts from me for a while because I am brainstorming and gathering thoughts for a wide array of posts. Eventually I’ll reach a point where I have enough material and momentum on a particular topic and it will be easy to flesh out the idea in a concentrated way.

My brainstorms are almost always longer than the finished product. It’s easier much easier to achieve quality by paring down an idea than by expanding on it.

In conclusion, both have a central role in creating a finished product. Write all your thoughts down then edit them. And for creativity’s sake please file a restraining order.

Max Marmer

Student Of Life, Twenty One Years In The Making

Category Archives: Writing