1/ One lesson I learned from sports is that the best way to be good at a thing is to do a lot of that specific thing.
This seems very obvious but often people don't do it.
2/ In the case of sports, lifting weights and being in good shape can help you be good at basketball, but the person who is less in shape but plays a lot of basketball will be better.
3/ I went to high school with a few people that went on to play D1 sports (one went pro) and none of them really spent a lot of time in the weight room, but they practiced their sport a ton.
4/ Doing both is obviously ideal but time is limited and you're almost certainly better off spending 80% of your time doing the specific thing you want to be good at.
Then spend 20% of the time doing peripheral things.
5/ In a professional context, people often spend most of their time working on all the ancillary things they think will be helpful, but would almost certainly be better off just doing the thing they ultimately want to be doing.
6/ Of course, it would be helpful to know advanced math if you want to works as a software engineer, but you'll probably get better faster if you just write a bunch of code.
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I had a friend in college that I used to get in big debates with about all sorts of topics, mostly religion, economics, and evolution.
He was religious, had studied Austrian economics, and doubtful of natual selection.
I was on the opposite side of nearly all those issues.
We had very different view points but it was really rewarding to talk with him because, though I disagreed with him, his opinions were well thought out.
If anything, it was frustrating because I wanted to “prove” I was right and never could.
We are still friends and it’s been interesting that over time, our views have somewhat converged or at least grown more nuanced and moderate.
I appreciate the role of religion more and have a deeper appreciation for the Austrian school.
1/ Perhaps the most important factor in deciding whether to build custom software or use a 3rd party provider is the cost of the "tech debt" on your company's balance sheet.
2/ Most people don't think about it this way, but when you build custom software, you are effectively buying a rapidly depreciating asset that's going to have to constantly be repaired.
3/ At the margin, it's almost always better to use a 3rd party software that's not quite as customized as you like b/c what you lose in personalization is more than compensated for by moving the tech debt onto someone else's balance sheet.
one of the best lines to ever appear in print IMHO
Also, the Margin Call speech is perfect
"There are 3 ways to make a living in this business: be first; be smarter; or cheat. Now, I don't cheat. And although I like to think we have some pretty smart people in this building, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be first"
1/ I remember going to an unconference/hackathon in Vietnam and there was this moment where I realized all these 18-22-year-old Vietnamese students were smarter, hungrier, and harder working than almost anyone I knew in college.
2/ I like to think I was never particularly entitled, but to the extent that I was, meeting those people really woke me up.
It also showed me how many advantages I had to build on.
3/ It's really hard to overstate how important the "ovarian lottery" is and the extent to which that "luck" impacts your life trajectory.
Been going back through the Boyd/Guerilla/Blitzkrieg stuff lately and it's so obvious to me that the way in which companies function is going to be completely remodeled in that vein.
So obviously the future.
FEW UNDERSTAND THIS
I think the shift will happen as companies go more distributed, naturally lends itself to a guerilla structure with "multiple unsupported centers of gravity" as Boyd called them.
I think all of the hard tech is there, it's just a matter of re-engineering what is leftover of Taylorism.
The Toyota Production System/Theory of Constraints probably the most promising angle right now