I don’t want to optimize for work, and I don’t want to optimize for family time. I want to optimize for life. I get one life and I don’t want to look back at 90 yelling I regret doing or not doing something. I always try to keep that end in mind. So I try to live life backwards in the sense of, where do I really want to go and how do I get there?
— Shane Parish, AMA on Farnam Street Learning Community (January 2020)
Curiosity, Courage, and Persistence
It’s never been a better time for self-motivated people.
Anyone connected to the internet has the education power of a university and the distribution power of a media company at their fingertips.
Curiosity, courage, and persistence are the new gatekeepers.
La Pirámide Invertida de la Invención
Todo el mundo tiene ideas. Pocos las ponen en práctica. Kevin Kelly, en su libro What Technology Wants, citando a Jay Walker:
“Puede haber decenas de miles de personas que conciben la posibilidad de la misma invención al mismo tiempo. Pero menos de uno de cada diez se imagina cómo se podría implementar. De estos, solo uno de cada diez llega a pensar los detalles prácticos y soluciones específicas. De este último grupo, solo uno de cada diez logrará un diseño funcional. Y finalmente, solo uno de todos esos milles que tuvieron la idea lograrán que la idea arraige en la cultura. En nuestro laboratorio nos involucramos en todas esas etapas, en las proporciones esperadas.”
En otras palabras, a nivel conceptual la simultaneidad de una idea es generalizada e inevitable; tu brillante idea la tendrán muchos. Pero conforme bajamos, habrá menos personas en cada etapa. Y en el momento en que estés tratando de llevar tu idea al mercado, probablemente seas el único porque estás en la cúspide de la pirámide de personas que tuvieron inicialmente la misma idea.
Cualquier persona razonable que vea esta pirámide entenderá que la probabilidad de que alguien logre la adopción de la lámpara eléctrica es 100%, mientras que la probabilidad de que fuera Edison el que la inventara es uno en 10,000.
The Inverted Pyramid of Invention
Everybody has ideas, few put them into action.
“There might be tens of thousands of people who conceive the possibility of the same invention at the same time. But less than one in ten of them imagines how it might be done. Of these who see how to do it, only one in ten will actually think through the practical details and specific solutions. Of these only one in ten will actually get the design to work for very long. And finally, usually only one of all those many thousands with the idea will get the invention to stick in the culture. At our lab we engage in all these levels of discovery, in the expected proportions.” In other words, in the conceptual stage, simultaneity is ubiquitous and inevitable; your brilliant ideas will have lots of coparents. But there’s less coparentage at each reducing stage. When you are trying to bring an idea to market, you may be alone, but by then you are a mere pinnacle of a large pyramid of others who all had the same idea.
Any reasonable person would look at that pyramid and say the likelihood of someone getting a lightbulb to stick is 100 percent, although the likelihood of Edison’s being the inventor is, well, one in 10,000.
— Kevin Kelly quoting Jay Walker in What Technology Wants.
Ryan Holiday on the Timeless Art of Journaling
This article by Ryan Holiday offers a comprehensive and at the same time practical take on journaling: The Timeless Art of Journaling: How To Start Journaling, Benefits of Journaling, and More