Posts

Feedback is important. Most people will agree on this. But how often do we ask for feedback? My guess is that not very often. More frequently, we ask for advice. But asking for advice is a whole different story. It’s not the same to ask someone what she thinks about an investment option we are considering, than to ask her what she thinks about our work evaluating the same investment option. Read more...

Casi todo el mundo estará de acuerdo en que el feedback es importante. Pero, ¿con qué frecuencia pedimos feedback? Probablemente no con mucha frecuencia. Sí, por supuesto, pedimos consejo. Pero pedir consejo y pedir feedback son cosas bien distintas. No es lo mismo preguntarle a alguien qué piensa sobre una inversión que estamos considerando, que preguntarle qué piensa de nuestro trabajo evaluando esa misma inversión. Pedir feedback nos expone, nos hace vulnerables. Read more...

I found (again) this quote by Ira Glass of This American Life thanks to Tom Chandler of The Writer Underground. Ira talks about taking creative work from good enough to great. (You can watch the video of the segment after the quote, taken from a series on Storytelling.) What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. Read more...

Lifehacker has an interesting article about Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), the Serbian-American inventor. This description of his visual thinking process caught my attention: My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. Read more...

Nassim N. Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility, has this concept of silent evidence. That is, we tend to make decisions mistakenly taking a limited subset of the information as the whole dataset. It is not that we don’t acknowledge the existence of silent data. We do. The thing is that, in practice, we unconsciously ignore it again and again. Silent evidence is what events use to conceal their own randomness, particularly the Black Swan type of randomness. Read more...