Tech, Strategy, and other interesting things by Roberto Zoia
What seems like a difference in talent often comes down to a difference in focus.
Focus turns good performers into great performers.
Two keys to focus are saying no to distractions and working on the same problem for an uncommonly long time. Both are simple but not easy.
(From Farnam Street Blog Newsletter, May 16th.
Warren Buffet on why even smart people get bad results, quoted by Peter Bevelin in Seeking Wisdom. From Darwin to Munger (p.36):
It’s ego. It’s greed. It’s fead. It’s mindless imitation of other people. I mean, tehre are a variety of factors that cause that horsepower fo the mind to get diminished dramatically before the output turns out. And I would say if Charlie and I have any advantage it’s not because we’re so smart, it’s because we’re rational and we very seldom let extraenous factors interfere with our thoughts. We don’t let other people’s opinion interfere with it… we try to get fearful when others get greedy. We try to get greedy when others are fearful. We try to avoid any kind of imitation of other people’s behavior. And those are the factors that cause smart people to get bad results.
I always look at IQ and talent as representing the horsepower of the motor, but then in terms of the output, the efficiency with which the motor works, depends on rationality. That’s because a lot of people start out with 400-horsepower motors and get a hundred horsepower of output. It’s way better to have a 200-horsepower motor and get it all into output. So why do smart people do things that interfere with getting the output they’re entitled to? It gets into the habits, and character and temperament, and it really gets into behaving in a rational manner. Not getting in your own way.
Patagonia’s Dean Carter at i4cp 2020 Conference.
A quote from Brandon Sanderson’s novel Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds:
Psychology-as-superpower is a recurring theme in my works. I’ve always believed that the personality traits that make us each distinctive (the way we process information, the way we motivate ourselves, the way we shelter our psyche from the bad while learning to cherish the good) can be either our greatest strengths or our most dramatic limitations. How you see yourself, along with how you use what you have, often more important than talents, skills, or even supernatural abilities.”
Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder and CEO, interviews Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic. They talk mostly about online publishing, but around minute 26 Matt talks about Automattic and its distribuited force of 235 employees:
Just like today it seams crazy to discriminate on something like gender, not just morally but also mathematically –you are taking off half the qualified applicant pool–, just by selection bias you are going to have a less qualified people. And 99.999 percent of people in the world aren’t going to be in the Bay Area (San Francisco). There is a lot of smart people not here. Arguably, collectively more intelligent than the people who are here.
So, when you stop discriminating on the basis of location, what happens? It turns out that you can get incredibly talented and smart folks, who can almost live-style overcharge, in base of Bay-Area-salaries with non-Bay-Area-living [costs].
The whole interview is an hour long and is worth watching, but you can listen to just the fragment below.