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(Most) Everyone Is A Loser

Competitive shooting is an interesting sport because on any given weekend, 60-100 people show up, divided among 6-8 gear divisions. So, out of those 100, 5 or 6 might win their division. Roughly 95% of the people who show up will not win. And yet they show up anyway. You might think that the rational thing to do would be to only show up to matches you have a good shot at winning. But that's not what people do. I regularly win local matches that I show up to, but I'm planning my year around Nat … (Continued)

Seth Godin on Placebos

This is an interesting short piece from Seth about placebos: Ignoring the placebo effect won’t make it go away. Embracing it will help you do much better work, work that quite possibly is based on those skills and practices you’ve worked so hard to be good at. If it’s worth doing your work, it’s worth doing it in a way where placebos will help you do it better. Reading this, I realized that I tend look at the placebo effect at work the way a scientist might look at it in an experiment: trying … (Continued)

Kassie

"So, what do we do?" "We keep her going as long as she'll eat. And when she stops eating, we'll know it's time." There's no easy way to have a conversation about cancer, even when it's about a cat. But having the conversation over the phone doesn't make it any easier. And so, there I was, sitting there on the couch, talking to Steph on the phone. Telling her the ultrasound at the vet showed some kind of cancer, lymphoma or stomach or something, … (Continued)

Being on the Inside

One of the advantages of being early in your career is that you're on the outside of things. People talk to you and tell you the truth because you don't have any power. When you have power, people would tell you what they think you want to hear. Sometimes you'll get someone who will tell you just the right things to try to manipulate you into exercising your power to further their goals. Neither is particularly helpful. But early on, you don't have to worry about that. One of the perverse rea … (Continued)

Being sick and reading

The last few days have been strange. I've never caught a sore throat in the middle of summer before, so yesterday afternoon when I noticed my throat was scratchy, I figured I hadn't been drinking enough water. Working at home, I got up from my desk to get some, but drinking it didn't help. A few hours later, a package arrived from Amazon. Becoming Superman, the autobiography of J. Michael Straczynski. Growing up, we weren't a religious family in the traditional sense, but we watched 90s Sci-fi … (Continued)

Taking A Risk

Pushing someone to do better requires wagering some or all of your relationship capital with them. If you're wrong, you could lose your whole stake. If you're right, you could double your bet. But this requires that you built up the relationship capital before deciding to use it.

Jocko Willink on Putting Others First

Jocko on Episode 135 of the podcast talks about not trying to hog credit and: So, the reason [extreme ownership] works, is because I'm not out there doing it for me. That's the big difference. So if you're out there, thinking "Ah, cool, I'm gonna learn these tactics so I can get further in my life and I can get things out of the world." It's like, no, it's not gonna work out well for you. On the surface, because I'm gonna tell you … (Continued)

Troy Hunt on Scratching Your Own Itch

Troy Hunt is the creator of about Have I Been Pwned, his website that can tell you when your email or password is included in a data breach when a company gets hacked. It has become the biggest player in the market. Now, it's grown so large that he's having trouble managing as a one-man project and he's started looking for a company or non-profit to help take over managing it. On his weekly update podcast this week, he took a little time to recap the history of the project, starting at about 3: … (Continued)

Goodhart's Law

Goodhart's law is an adage named after economist Charles Goodhart, which has been phrased by Marilyn Strathern as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." If you know the rubric you will be graded on, in a sufficiently competitive landscape, it becomes adaptive to spend less energy seeming to comply with the rubric than actually doing the work the rubric measures.

Inkdrop on Customer Service

Inkdrop is a service that's a bit like Evernote for programmers. All the notes are in markdown instead of a WYSIWYG editor and it magically syncs them all to their cloud. But what really caught my eye was this section on the pricing page: Particularly this part: If lowered the pricing[sic], you would get more customers. We would like to provide good, quick and warm user support. If we got a lot of users we won't be able to support them all. Turns out the app is the full-time job of o … (Continued)

Seneca on Living Nobly

Seneca, Letter 22: Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long.

NC State Justifying Rebuilding The Gym

I graduated from NC State University in 2011, so I still see news about it come across my feed, like this item talking about leveling and rebuilding the main gym on campus, right across the street from the student center that was also just leveled and rebuilt. What surprised me was the way that the renovation was being spun. “Yes, we do need new fitness space, but it’s more than that. Our design has been very purposeful. New meeting spaces will allow us to invite more campus partners who su … (Continued)

Moving In The Right Direction

Satisfaction and happiness comes from moving in the right direction, not being in the right place. No matter where you are, if you try to linger there, you will eventually stop being happy. You have to keep moving in the right direction to keep being happy and satisfied. Likewise, no matter how far you feel you are from a good place, you will feel better as soon as you start heading the right way, even if it feels very far away. Learning to notice that feeling of moving in the right direction … (Continued)

Clifford Stoll on Keeping Good Notes

From The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll: Someone at NSA had leaked word my research to the Department of Energy. In turn, they were pissed that they hadn't heard earlier--and more directly. Roy Kerth stopped me in the hallway. "DOE is going to reprimand us for not telling them about this incident." "But we did tell them," I objected. "More than two months ago." "Prove it." "Sure. It's in my logbook." Roy wanted to see it, so we walked over to my Macintosh and … (Continued)

Running a Ghost Blog, Part 2

I mentioned in the previous post in this series that I was looking forward to working on this blog like it was a car, and that has turned out truer than even I expected. This website is barely two weeks old as I write this, and I'm already modifying the source of the blogging platform to fix tiny details that are just... bugging me. I'll admit it was a slippery slope to live-editing the source of the CMS, but it didn't start there. The first step down the slippery slope was uploading a custom … (Continued)