Sparse Thoughts by Justin

What I've Learned About Smart People.

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:43:00 -0800

I can of course make no authoritative claims here, but I have noticed one overarching theme among smart people: they ask questions. When someone explains something new to me, I’ll usually just nod my head like I know what they’re talking about. If I don’t understand something, I’ll just Google it later. After all, I don’t want this person to think I’m a moron. Smart people are different. If they don’t understand something, or even if they think they understand something, they’ll ask questions. I distinctly remember, as an immature and perhaps arrogant freshman, a guest lecture in one of my classes. After explaining what I thought was a straightforward concept, the guest lecturer asked if anyone had any questions. Looking around the room, every student simply nodded, indicating everything was clear. A question, however, came from a tenured professor who had undoubtedly been exposed to the material before. At the time, I thought nothing of it, and perhaps even thought that I was smarter than the professor because I understood a concept he/she didn’t. Now, I am confident that this professor did not ask the question just to make the guest lecturer feel better, to start a discussion, or anything else. The intonation of the question and the intensity with which the professor listened to the response definitively suggested that the professor’s question was genuine, and that the answer was of great importance.

Based on the research and findings of so many of the students and professors here, it’s clear that this trend is no accident. Not only do smart people ask questions when they don’t understand something, but they also ask questions when the world thinks it understands something. Smart people challenge the very limit of human understanding, and push the envelope of what’s possible farther than many people would argue it’s meant to be pushed. Smart people don’t take claims at face value, and smart people don’t rest until they find an explanation they’re comfortable accepting and understanding.

Smart people challenge everything. (You know who taught me that? A smart person.)

Maybe someday, people will call me a smart person. For now, I’m going to keep asking them questions.

via tmac721.tumblr.com

Ask questions.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Top five regrets of the dying

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:19:00 -0800

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
"This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it."
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
"This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence."
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
"Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result."
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
"Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying."
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
"This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again."

via guardian.co.uk

Keep it all in perspective.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

What One Owner Takes Out of His Business - NYTimes.com

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:42:00 -0800

Then, in March 2011, I read “Profits Aren’t Everything, They’re the Only Thing” by George Cloutier. There’s some questionable advice in the book, but one thing he said rang true to me: pay yourself first. By that he meant, figure out how much profit you want to take from the business, take it out regularly, and cut costs to make the numbers work. Be brutal if you have to: cut wages, fire people, but learn to run a profitable company.

via boss.blogs.nytimes.com

Permalink | Leave a comment »

How to Live Better on 24 Hours a Day

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 22:43:43 -0800

http://www.menshealth.com/best-life/live-better-every-day

A good motivational kick in the butt.

Justin

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Manvotional: The Thousandth Man

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 09:46:39 -0800

Manvotional: The Thousandth Man

The Art of Manliness

The Thousandth Man
By Rudyard Kipling

One man in a thousand, Solomon says,
Will stick more close than a brother.
And it’s worth while seeking him half your days
If you find him before the other.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine depend
On what the world sees in you,
But the Thousandth Man will stand your friend
With the whole round world agin you.

‘Tis neither promise nor prayer nor show
Will settle the finding for ‘ee.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine of ‘em go
By your looks or your acts or your glory.
But if he finds you and you find him,
The rest of the world don’t matter;
For the Thousandth Man will sink or swim
With you in any water.

You can use his purse with no more talk
Than he uses yours for his spendings,
And laugh and meet in your daily walk
As though there had been no lendings.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine of ‘em call
For silver and gold in their dealings;
But the Thousandth Man he’s worth ‘em all,
Because you can show him your feelings.

His wrong’s your wrong, and his right’s your right,
In season or out of season.
Stand up and back it in all men’s sight—
With that for your only reason!
Nine hundred and ninety-nine can’t bide
The shame or mocking or laughter,
But the Thousandth Man will stand by your side
To the gallows-foot—and after!

Hat tip to Gilberto C. for this Manvotional

Justin

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Why do we pay sales commissions? « Fog Creek Blog

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 07:50:16 -0800

http://blog.fogcreek.com/why-do-we-pay-sales-commissions/

Interesting take on sales commission. Definitely makes me reconsider
the model for future use.

Justin

Permalink | Leave a comment »

How to make failure sustainable (and career entrepreneurship possible)

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 09:04:35 -0800

http://thestartuptoolkit.com/blog/2011/12/how-to-make-failure-sustainable-and-career-entrepreneurship-possible/

Justin

Permalink | Leave a comment »

How to Live Better on 24 Hours a Day

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:54:57 -0800

How to Live Better on 24 Hours a Day
http://www.menshealth.com/best-life/live-better-every-day

Justin

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Kauffman Sketchbook on Entreprenership

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 09:10:00 -0800

via kauffman.org

Permalink | Leave a comment »

9 Ways to Decrease Your Chance of Bootstrapping a Successful Company

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 12:39:56 -0800

http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2011/11/02/9-ways-to-decrease-your-chance-of-boo...

Good list.

Justin

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Slow cooked eggs

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:44:28 -0800

I've been reading "Cooking for Geeks" lately (which is awesome btw) and I read about 30 minute eggs so I wanted to give it a try. Cooking it slow is supposed to result in a custard-like consistency but my pan was too hot so it cooked in less than 10 min... Still good scrambled eggs though. Real soft and fluffy. I'm gonna cook eggs slow from now on.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

The Hustler's Manifesto - Niroka

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 11:30:00 -0800

Process is the nemesis of a startup and the correct dosage of chaos is its nurturing mother. With all of that in mind, I’d like to propose some principles for startup hackers who find themselves too constrained by Agile practices:

Rule #1: Don’t Test (All) Your Code

Certainly don’t ever test drive it (it’s ok, no one does anything more than pay TDD lip service anyway).

Here’s the thing: tests require maintenance just as much as production code. Here’s an example: We recently restructured our data model at Niroka to allow multiple “sessions” for a course. This involved adding an abstraction between “courses” and “enrollments”, where if I had written unit tests I would have found myself essentially rewriting all of them to respect the new abstraction layer. It probably would have taken longer than implementing the damn feature.

Here’s what you do instead: write integration tests for the critical parts of your application. For Rails, this means a high-level cucumber test for things like, in our case, “signing up”, “creating a class”, and “enrolling in a class”. It’s still maintenance, but it’s a tradeoff we like because it’s tedious to manually test those and we really, really care if they break.

The point is, code evolves. It’s never “done”, so don’t write tests that presume it will be static and your interfaces won’t change.

Rule #2: Stop Being Such a Nerd

“Do you prefer git rebase or git merge?”

“Should my spec names be declarative?”

“Is this method supposed to be private or protected?”

Ask yourself: Do the answers to these questions provide any value to myself or my customers, or am I just dorking out hardcore? I don’t mean to be derisive, this is the rule I break most often and so I am guilty of dorking out hardcore.

I don’t know why this over-analyzation happens, There’s something about the programmer’s brain that wants to make everything more efficient, and then that brain gets tunnel vision and finds more and more minute ways to be efficient and loses the forest for the trees. We also work in an industry that is obsessed with methodologies and best practices, so it’s easy to get caught up in trivialities. Just build things, motherfucka.

Rule #3: Take Ownership of Your Features

Don’t worship the codebase. I had the tendency to treat code like a sacred scroll that should never be tarnished, and it gets in the way of me creating value to our users. A related effect is that coders tend to push off non-programming work in favor of the next feature to implement. We’re good at coding, so we try to find reasons to always have something to code. I think a lot of developers do this, but remember:

Finish Pivotal Tracker Queue

???

Profit

doesn’t work.

Here’s how to get around this gotta-code-the-next-feature mentality: take ownership of the features you implement. Instead of spending time developing Feature B, figure out a way to track and quantify the success metrics for Feature A. Use A/B tests, funnels, or solicit user feedback and actually figure out what value Feature A brought to your app. You may be surprised how much work it is to answer a question as simple as “Did this feature bring any value?” The upside is: you own your feature, it’s like a little feature-baby that is all your own and all you want is to see your feature’s metrics go up and to the right. Through this process, you’ll become a more valuable developer by understanding your business and also gain an appreciation for the idea that “software is just a tool”.

Noteworthy: Facebook has a really interesting system for allowing developers to take ownership of their features even with as many devs as they have. From my understanding, it involves letting dev teams take ownership and implement whatever they want as long as they roll it out slowly and have the metrics to validate the feature.

Two notes to end on:

A healthy dosage of chaos can go far for your team. It may not optimize your productivity, but we’re not machines — we need some disruption in our environment to stay creative and excited.

Finally, software is a means to an end. Try not to lose sight of that end, or you’ll end up just treading water and never moving forward.

via blog.niroka.com

Pragmatic software entrepreneurship.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Why you shouldn't take funding

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:20:00 -0700

Last night on the season finale of Bloomberg's Techstars show, one of the founders said he spent the summer generating revenue rather than raising a round of financing.

No one in the audience applauded. But they did when Onswipe announced a $5 million round and Crowdtwist announced a $6 million round.

Techstars mentor and successful entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk took notice and made a good point.

"I'm concerned a little bit with the culture of celebrating the fundraise," he said. "My dad taught me that when you borrow money it's the worst day of your life. We didn't clap for Red Rover because they didn't raise $6 trillion, but I was sitting here like, 'Good stuff!'"

Instead, Vaynerchuk looks for other entrepreneurs who know how to make money. "What I'm looking for are people who are not caught up in the excitement. Even though I'm a hype man myself, I like the practicality of it all. People who understand how to turn a profit. At the end of the day, this is still business so I'm looking for real practical knowledge of how to actually make money, not necessarily raise it."

via businessinsider.com

Cheers to that.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Some inspirational quotes

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 07:39:00 -0700

1. Walt Whitman on living
If you manage to do these things, you’ll live a very great life.

This is what you should do:
Love the earth and sun and animals,
despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants,
argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people…
reexamine all you have been told in school or church or in any book,
dismiss what insults your very soul,
and your flesh shall become a great poem.
- Walt Whitman, excerpt from the preface to Leaves of Grass

The thing I find fascinating is that many of the tenets of a better life are consistent no matter what your philosophy or religion is. They’re constantly repeated because they’re so true.

3. Thomas Jefferson on attitude
I often write that you can’t make someone adopt better behaviors if they don’t want to. On the other hand, people who want something can often go to amazing lengths to achieve it.

Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude. – Thomas Jefferson

The right attitude can lead to almost anything. The wrong attitude can lead to almost nothing.

via thesimpledollar.com

Permalink | Leave a comment »

The coffeeshop fallacy

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:41:00 -0700

Max Levchin (paypal, slide) said something to the effect of:

You you can't be in love with a particular idea or business. You have to be in love with the idea of running a business.

It's one of those quotes that has haunted me, in no small part because Max has been so successful in such a wide range of pursuits and because I both understand his reasoning and [somewhat] disagree with his conclusion. I still think that matching your business model to your values is a competitive advantage and that doing otherwise is, for most people, a shortcut to disasterville.

Here's a working definition of the coffeeshop fallacy:

The coffeeshop fallacy is a mismatch between the work one imagines to be involved in a pursuit and the actual day-to-day labour.

It is most common in industries with a strong survival bias which create a fun or desirable product.

via thestartuptoolkit.com

Great point about entrepreneurship.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

One economic bright spot: Entrepreneurs working together in shared space | 89.3 KPCC

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:16:00 -0700

via scpr.org

I'm kinda famous! :)

Permalink | Leave a comment »

How to Ski Powder – 15 Tips for Learning in 24 Hours

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 08:36:00 -0700

Positional tips and posture:

- Read a big newspaper. Keep your hands in front of you and downhill, as is reading a big open newspaper. Never read newspapers? Aim for about 6″ outside of shoulder width. Look at the picture sequence at the top of this post and notice the arm positioning throughout.

Keep your hands further ahead than you think makes sense.

- From this newspaper position, plant wide with your poles before your turn, and only move your wrists. Keep your arms from moving and flying backward, which throws you off balance — maintain newspaper position.

- Narrow your stance a bit, but not so close that your skis are touching. This will help with the “one ski, one turn” turning mantra discussed below.

- It’s fine to squat down a bit, but don’t let your knees end up behind your ankles. If your weight is this far back, you will suffer. “Sit back more!” is common powder-skiing advice, but all it did was burn out my legs and unweight the front of the skis, which led to the tips crossing more easily. Crossing = face plant. If your hands are forward, your weight is forward; if you hands are back, you’re weight is back. Once again: keep them more forward than you think makes sense.

- Scrunch your toes occasionally to test excess back-lean. If you can’t scrunch your toes, you’re leaning too far back.

Turning:

- Imagine your turns as rounded zig-zags down a hill. Squat at the mid-point of the straight lines, then — without a pause at the bottom — stand up to near-straight legs, which will unweight you. This is when you turn. Don’t time turns for when you are moving slowest; time turns with when you’re naturally unweighted.

- [This was big for me] Don’t avoid bump-like contours in the snow — aim for them! Rather than navigate around these bumps, run up them to unweight. It actually makes turning easier. Be sure to speak with a guide or snow patroller who can teach you the different between safe snow bumps (all snow) and dangerous bumps covering submerged rocks.

- Make turns with your femur (thigh bone) instead off the edge of the ski. In other words, envision your thighs rotating in your pelvis, in the same direction, to turn the skis.

Don’t ski as you would on harder snow. If you catch your lower edge to turn (fine on groomed runs), the lower ski will just shoot under the snow, cross under your floating top ski, and you will then eat snow.

- “One ski, one turn” — a mantra for the preceding point. Make all of your turns as if you have one big ski, and rotate your thighs instead of catching edges. Try and maintain equal pressure on each ski for the entire run.

- Don’t rush it. Imagine taking nice, rounded turns — again, using your femur to slowly rotate the skis — as opposed to the hopping into ice-scaper-on-windshield zig-zag.

Notice the “S”-like curves after the straight-away traverses.

Gear:

- USE FAT SKIS. Once you go fat, you will never go back. Additionally, a little bit of rocker (reverse camber) goes a long way. This approach was originally tested by the renegade skiers who rigged waterskiing skis on snow.

- Drop some cash for boots if you can. I don’t ski often, so I wanted to rent skis, but damn: I was punished for renting boots. Particularly if you’ll be spending several days out-of-bounds or in the backcountry (“off piste” or fuera de pista in Spanish), particularly if you might be spending thousands on a trip, spend a few hundred on boots that will custom fit and last. Having foot pain while far away from ski lodges for 10-15 hours at a time sucks.

Find a good bootfitter at the resort, get a pair the first morning of a multi-day trip, and have the bootfitter adjust hot spots and customize to your foot that afternoon for pick up the following morning.

Falling and Yardsale Insurance:

It’s not a matter of if, but rather when, so learn how to get up the right way when you flip.

- X-factor: If you fall, don’t put your hands down to push yourself up, as you’ll simply fall through and get a snow sandwich. Cross your poles into an “X,” hold onto the intersection with one hand, place it uphill from you, and then push yourself up.

- The Sweeper: If you are a fall-prone novice, as I was, ask or hire someone to play “sweeper” and ski behind you, so that they can help you find skis if you eject out of them or “yard sale” (when you fall spectacularly and your gear shoots in all directions). Experienced skiers can still have fun while doing this for you, as they don’t need to ski slowly, but rather start their descent well after you.

- If you eat sh*t 10 times in a row, do two things. First, pause after each turn, or pause after getting up, and catch your breath for 20 seconds. No rush, brah. Second, when you’re ready to punch yourself in the face, or when your legs are totally shot, put your big girl pants on, head down to the ski lodge, and grab a hot chocolate or Hot Toddy by the fire. That will calm your inner animal, make you smile, and get you psyched to tackle it again in the morning.

via fourhourworkweek.com

Great tips from Tim Ferris. Gotta remember these next time I hit the slopes.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Steve Jobs’ Philosophy of Life

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 18:18:00 -0700

Everyone knows that Steve Jobs was a superlative businessman who created fabulous products that substantially changed the world. But he was much more than that. He was a businessman-philosopher, and the philosophy he embraced was the fundamental cause of his remarkable productivity, success, and happiness.

What was important to Jobs was not making money per se, but the process of creation. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me,” he said. “Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful . . . that’s what matters to me.”

Doing something wonderful, in Jobs’ view, doesn’t mean doing something that others regard as worthy; it means doing what you love and pursuing a career that makes you happy. As he put it:

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. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

To succeed in your chosen career, said Jobs, you must not accept ideas without truly understanding them. “To [do] something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.”

Jobs eschewed what Ayn Rand called second-handedness: unthinking acceptance of the views of others. He embraced first-handedness or independent thinking: a primary orientation not toward others’ opinions, but toward reality as you see it. “Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice,” he advised.

Jobs’ views were not arbitrary or floating; they were grounded in and arose from his recognition of the absolutism of reality, the preciousness of life, and the inevitability of death. As he explained: “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent.” He elaborated:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like, “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

In sum, Jobs’ philosophy holds that what matters most is figuring out what you love to do, passionately pursuing a career in that area, committing yourself to thoroughly understanding it, always going by your own judgment, monitoring how you spend your time, and continually adjusting your activities in order to achieve the greatest happiness possible.

We’ve seen the fruits of these ideas in Jobs’ life. Imagine what we’d see if his philosophy became as widely embraced as his other products.

via theobjectivestandard.com

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Startup vs. Lifestyle Business (a Short Comparison)

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 08:58:51 -0700

http://www.corbettbarr.com/startup-vs-lifestyle-business

Great article.

Justin

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Building a company is really, really hard

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 13:02:00 -0700

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
- Theodore Roosevelt

It’s 11:12pm and I just got an email from one of my startup CEO clients:

“It’s been a shitty week. The candidate said no. Not much positive news for our upcoming board meeting.”

I’m reminded of just how hard it is to build a company. In Silicon Valley and throughout the world, we’re bombarded by startup success stories – this company went IPO at this many billion dollar valuation, this company raised $50 million, this other one grew to $5mm/day in transactions seemingly overnight. The reality is that, for most people, building a company is not just a constant stream of success and excitement. More commonly, it’s a series of failures, setbacks and disappointments sprinkled with occasional wins. It’s an emotional roller coaster. It’s filled with sacrifice, tension, and tireless effort. It’s really, really hard.

So I just want to take a moment to honor all the entrepreneurs out there who, in the face of disappointment, setbacks and repeated failure, press on. Who choose to take that leap, away from the shores of safe, stable, predictable jobs, into the realm of uncertainty, doubt and fear. Because they believe they’re meant for something bigger. They see a vision for a different world and feel called toward it. They’re simply unwilling or unable to settle for anything less than a life fully lived.

In the end, what matters is not the level of outward success you achieve, but who you know yourself to be. So, when times get tough, I invite you to keep your head held high and press on. Ask yourself: “What story will I tell when all is said and done?” May your tale be one of perseverance, courage and heart.

via awesomeculture.com

Cheers to that.

Permalink | Leave a comment »