some writing that has stuck
Twice Blessed – David Whyte: Short poem.
The Road to Self-Renewal – John W. Gardner: “There’s something I know about you that you may or may not know about yourself. You have within you more resources of energy than have ever been tapped, more talent than has ever been exploited, more strength than has ever been tested, more to give than you have ever given.”
The Deep Structure of Economic Growth – Paul Romer: “If we think of an idea as a recipe that shows how to create value by rearranging physical objects, it makes sense to define a meta-idea as a recipe for social interaction that encourages the production and transmission of ideas. Growth comes from ideas about objects. Meta-ideas are ideas about ideas.”
Climbing the Wrong Hill – Chris Dixon: “People tend to systematically overvalue near term over long term rewards. This effect seems to be even stronger in more ambitious people. Their ambition seems to make it hard for them to forgo the nearby upward step.”
Commoditize Your Complement – Gwern: “In general, a company’s strategic interest is going to be to get the price of their complements as low as possible. The lowest theoretically sustainable price would be the “commodity price”—the price that arises when you have a bunch of competitors offering indistinguishable goods. So: Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.”
The Trouble with Optionality – Mihir Desai: “Instead of enabling young people to take on risks and make choices, acquiring options becomes habitual. You can never create enough option value—and the longer you spend acquiring options, the harder it is to stop.”
The Parable of the Chinese Farmer – told by Alan Watts: “The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad   because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.”
Developmental Action Logics – Bill Torbert: “Most developmental psychologists agree that what differentiates leaders is not so much their philosophy of leadership, their personality, or their style of management. Rather, it’s their internal “action logic”—how they interpret their surroundings and react when their power or safety is challenged. Relatively few leaders, however, try to understand their own action logic, and fewer still have explored the possibility of changing it.”
Informed Simplicity – by Matthew Frederick via Farnam Street:
Demand-side > Supply-side Product Development: “The closer we get to identifying demand (what people want from our product), the better we feel. The trap is that in many cases, when we think we’ve identified demand, what we have really identified is just supply-side thinking (features to be built).”
Me from Myself – Emily Dickinson: Short poem.
Second Arrow of Suffering: The parable of the second arrow is a Buddhist parable about dealing with suffering more skillfully. The Buddhists say that any time we suffer misfortune, two arrows fly our way. Being struck by an arrow is painful. Being struck by a second arrow is even more painful. The Buddha explained: “In life, we can’t always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. The second arrow is optional.”
A Message to Garcia: “There is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college in the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this or that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies; do the thing – ‘carry a message to Garcia!’”
pdg 