The people who light you up, who cause you to dig deeper and work harder on the right stuff… the people who boost the room and you are glad you worked with even when it fails… Keep those people around. Go to great lengths to keep those people around. It’s a gift. And it’s rare.…
As you consider marketing yourself for your next gig, consider the difference between process and content, between having great IQ and EQ. Content is domain knowledge. People you know or skills you have developed. Playing the piano or writing copy about book sales. Contacts and connections to movers in a given industry, or your ability…
Our expectations about the quality of products have increased exponentially with our ability to perfect the things we produce. If we are going to use machines to process things, then mistakes should be minimal. I mean machines don't go on strike. Machines don't rock up at work late and babalased [with hangover] and machines don't…
For centuries, we rewarded prowess of the human physique. Our notion of “work” involved hard physical labor. If you want to succeed, you had to work hard, and by hard it referred to hard physical manual labour. Then, we began rewarding the sort of intelligence that we came to represent as “IQ.” This was left…
Do not listen to what people say, watch what they do.
There is a great story in the late Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People book that I think is an important illustration of emotional intelligence. A man attending his seminar complained to Covey that his wife kept calling him every hour to check on him. He just could not seem to get her to…
In class this past weekend, we were discussing Artificial Intelligence and how it will be beneficial to startups. As always when discussing the efficiencies brought by AI, there is always the question: What about jobs? The booming growth of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), like most transformational technologies, is both exciting and scary. It…
AmaZulu say "Ingoma emnandi iyaphindwa" and this is to mean when something is good, you got to have some more. When you shuffle your music on your phone so that you can listen to your songs randomly, and then you get to your favorite song, and then you press repeat on that song and forget…
You are doing a good job. Not because I just told you, but because I have a suspicion that recently someone dropped you an email, sent you a DM, found you at the merch table, responded to a tweet, etc, etc and told you that you were doing a good job. One of your people…
Life is full of choices and decisions to be made. Decisions to be made are dependent on information available. Better information leads to better decisions. But this is more difficult than it sounds. To some people, it means admitting you your initial decisions were wrong. But of course, you were not wrong. You made a…
It is worth picking a philosophy that’s self correcting. The antidote to junk science is more science, good science. Science is a self-correcting process, where transparency leads to improvement. The antidote to bad engineering is more engineering. Engines and bridges run better today than they did a hundred years ago. The antidote to dysfunctional coding…
The people who get you. The ones who have been through it with you. Who see you. Our life is a series of cohorts, and the special ones connect with us deeply. Cohorts [group of people with a shared characteristic] raise the bar and they provide a foundation for what’s next. The smartest person in…
