THIS WEEK IN HIGHLIGHTS

out of context // 21–08–06

Some stuff I read:

• Entrepreneurial success is almost always harder than you think and almost always takes longer than you expect….Here is the key: If you can survive long enough, and you are constantly iterating, experimenting, and improving your business, then eventually the timing will be right!
• Yes, it’s harder than it looks, but what isn’t?
• It’s not just that we want to dice up billionaires and feed them to the masses — billionaires will be fine, they don’t need anyone defending them, they pay people for that — it’s that we seemingly want to kill aspiration. No one would say that, of course. But that’s the end result of all this clutching of pearls.
• Digital advertising isn’t just competing for dollars with other forms of media advertising (TV, etc), but can compete for other areas of budget as well (rent, shelf-space, trade spend, local ads, etc)
• Writing is only interesting to other people if it is deeply revealing.
• The marginal advantage embodies the notion that one cannot, and should not, try to “win big.” In a competitive setting, the strong player knows that his best opponents are unlikely to make many exploitable mistakes.
• [The Hot-Swap Startup] Enjoys advantages that would be impossible without technology, but where technology alone is insufficient to deliver the advantage — these startups have to refactor the entire way an incumbent in that industry would operate.
• Socrates wants us to remember our limitations. We misunderstand ourselves and our motives all the time.
• Protect the Vibe, by any means necessary.
• Jane Jacobs, perhaps this city’s greatest noticer, wrote of the necessity to “understand, and understand thoroughly specific places.” She spoke of the 1959 urban planner’s inability to see the a city’s small details, of their “helpless” dependency on bundling the particular up into the general. Blocks into census tracts, real places into administrative generalizations.
• As my beloved novel editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden told me long, long ago, “Publishing is the process of identifying a work and its audience, and then taking whatever steps are necessary to connect the two.” That may include cover design or marketing copy or copy-editing, but it also includes the huge, ill-defined, and nebulous world of marketing, sales, and publicity.
• Something tells me they want to be with me even if I’m not wowing them with mighty feats. Though I don’t understand how this is possible, I’ll try my best to live as if I do.
• There are just two rules for harvesting. Never take more than you need. And never take more than half. If you stick to those two rules, nature will do the rest and give you abundance like never before.
• At many clubs, insurance is included in members’ dues, almost as a preemptive debt payment. Viewed through the lens of celebration, all of this is rather depressing; the financialization of celebration, by rendering accomplishment synonymous with debt, has turned it into a chore.
• Most people haven’t considered the extensive use of sound in our products, but if you think about it, there is some type of sound component in almost everything we make these days.
• The reason bureaucracies become more complex is that it’s easier to get consensus on adding something new than removing something old.