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Steve Jobs’s commencement Speech at Standford on 2005 is famous for promoting the idea that working on what you love is a condition for doing great work. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. Read more...

Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, has released the alpha version of Hyperloop, a proposal for a high-speed train connecting Los Angeles-San Francisco. The Hyperloop would cover the proposed 570 km route in around 35 minutes, at an average speed of 962 km/h. The Hyperloop document can be downloaded here. Technical details aside, the first pages of the document offer a good insight on how Musk frames a problem and compares alternatives. Read more...

Asymco’s Horace Dediu, quoting Apple’s CEO Tim Cook from three years ago: We can put all of our products on the table you’re sitting at. Those products together sell $40 billion per year. No other company can make that claim except perhaps an oil company. Revenues quadrupled since to a total of $170 billion for the last four quarters. The table, however, has not gotten bigger. Read more...

Cal Newport writing about Woody Allen and Value Productivity. (In contrast to task productivity.) There’s a lot written about task productivity (the ability to organize and execute non-skilled obligations), but much less written about value productivity (the ability to consistently produce highly-skilled, highly-valued output). Worth reading. Read more...

Just finished reading Inside An Amazon Warehouse about Amazon’s warehousing systems, an 2012 article by Dave Smith. (Via Cory Doctorow.) Also worth reading is Amazon - leading the way through chaos by Torsten Reichardt. Having Amazon so many products (probably millions), and high product rotation, organizing items by category or trying to store different lots of the same items together would need a lot of time and probably waste space. Instead, Amazon uses a ‘chaotic’ storage system. Read more...