Freedom of Assembly
There is a lot of debate about our first amendment rights, but they focus mainly on freedom of speech and of the press. However, we take freedom of assembly for granted. Meanwhile in Hong Kong, “The activists are accused of organising and participating in an unofficial primary poll last July aimed at selecting the strongest candidates for a legislative council election…”
Good? Governance
The debate about what services should be provided by the government and what services should be provided by the market is an interesting and important debate. Unfortunately, it’s too often a debate about ideology with little commitment to competence…
QR Codes and Innovation
When restaurants first begin reopening for outdoor dining last spring, many began using QR codes as a way to access the menu. Since then, I’ve had many casual conversations with people about whether this puts QR codes into the mainstream.
Fred Wilson has a blog post this week along those lines. He used the example of the Nest smoke alarm, which uses a QR code for product set-up.
I think this is a great example of how innovation works in general. Innovation begins with engineering, but realizes its potential with human adoption, which is not an engineering problem. …
Hiring is Difficult.
Ben Horowitz made used an excellent analogy for hiring. I’m going to butcher the quote and the context because it came in the middle of a three-hour podcast, and I didn’t timestamp when it happened. (Funny enough, I can see exactly where I was when I heard this idea, though).
What stuck with me was that one of the most challenging but crucial skills to learn is how to hire talent that isn’t like you. Most people know what they are good at and so look for that in someone else. They look for a copy of…
Built Environment Progress and Ambition
Dan Wang made a fascinating point on the Sinica podcast with Kaiser Kuo. He says:
For a lot of [people in] the U.S. the built environment around them hasn’t changed a great deal…folks are, I think, somewhat limited in what they can imagine can be improved around them. I think this idea that the built environment cannot change but digital technologies can always get better pushes people in a dystopian direction.
In contrast, people in China have seen tremendous progress in their built environment. He then goes on to argue that this shows up in…
SpaceX, the FAA, and safety regulation.
We’ll start off with the dust-up between SpaceX and the FAA regarding the SN8 test on December 9th. Long story short, SpaceX went ahead with the test even though they didn’t receive a launch authority waiver. The two sides of this debate are summed up well by this thread from Jared Zambrano-Stout, a former advisor to the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation and this op-ed from Steve Blank.
Ultimately, both are correct. Regulations are worse than useless if they’re not enforced and enforced consistently. …
On New Year’s Resolutions
I don’t understand the anti-resolution crowd. The arguments against making resolutions seem to fall into one of three categories. First, people will say, “What is special about January 1st? If you want to make a change, make it any time of the year.” This is valid, but the new year invites reflection about self-improvement. Second, people argue resolutions are vague and no one keeps them. This is also valid but is an argument against poorly constructed resolutions not against resolutions. Finally, people say we stress too much about self-improvement and should be content with ourselves. …
I love endurance sport, but it wasn’t a straightforward road into it. I’ve started having people ask me about how to start running or biking so lately during my workouts I’ve begun thinking about the things I’ve learned. As usual, to better my thinking, I’ve decided to write down and publish the basics of each sport for someone brand new. I’m starting today with distance running.
I began running cross country during my sophomore year of high school to get in shape for soccer. Running on sidewalks in the afternoon heat and post-rain humidity of South Florida was not fun…
In Part One, I laid out how careers aren’t tightly scripted plays that we must plan in advance and follow to a T, they’re closer to random. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t plan.
In Part Two, I laid out how to begin evaluating what to do by looking inward.
I then discussed tying this inward view with an outward view in Part Three.
Today, I’m summarizing this all with my personal career vision and how I got here.
The best way to approach a career is to first look back on our life and identify what we’re interested in…
If you haven’t read parts one or two to this series, you may want to start there.
In part one I wrote about how we can’t really strategically plan our whole career, but we still need to think about it. In part two I wrote about how to think about it by looking inward first. Now that we’ve looked inward, it’s time to look outward.
When thinking from the external perspective, it’s easy to get overwhelmed about all the possibilities out in the world. However, I think a way to simplify and wrap our minds around it all is to…
If you haven’t read the introduction to this series, you may want to start here.
I believe there are two ways people can get into trouble when evaluating career options, either too thinking too narrowly or too broadly. The narrow view often sounds like this: “I’ll continue doing what I’m doing now because I can’t do anything else” or this “I’ll do what someone else tells me because I feel like I don’t have a clue and they must know more than me.” On the other hand, the broad view often sounds like this: “I could do a lot of…
