Sometimes when I read a biography of a thinker, I get a new appreciation for their ideas. Situating them in the actual life and time they were born in gives them a vitality you can’t get from Wikipedia.
That did not happen with these two. I’m not sure how much of that is the author, who doesn’t seem particularly interested in the theological minutiae of the early reformation, and how much is the sources, who mostly kick in when the men have already developed their ideas rather than as they were forming them, but I didn’t come away with an appreciation for why they felt so strongly about the theological issues that seem so remote to us now. Imagine having a fight over how much art is in a church!
What I did take away from the books is an understanding for why Switzerland and the US feel so culturally similar.
Here is Gordon describing Zwingli:
His calls for religious freedom were coupled with demands for liberty from tyranny, both religious and political.
This then gets exported to England through Jean Calvin and Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor in Zurich. The English and Scottish reformed communities become very influential in the culture of the thirteen colonies. In a very real way, the cultural DNA of the US comes from the Swiss Alps.
One other thing that stood out: there was clearly a warmth and a charisma to the two men at the time that doesn’t translate. Both had large followings and deep relationships that inspired people to follow them through hardship. Calvin, as an example, taught lectures that were well attended and created many acolytes. They aren’t the austere caricatures that are passed down to us.
Risks are tackled up front, rather than at the end. In modern teams, we tackle these risks prior to deciding to build anything. These risks include value risk (whether people will buy it), usability risk (whether people can figure out how to use it), feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills and technology we have), and business risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business).
A great article on creative discontent from Celine Nguyen. One of my favorite David Halberstam quotes is “Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don’t feel like it.” He wrote one of my favorite books, Breaks of the Game, which is so good because it’s insanely well sourced. I imagine him getting up, he’s got a cold and it’s rainy. He would rather sleep in, but he pours a cup of coffee, gets in his car, and goes to have one more conversation with one more soruce. This one reminded me of him. Plus it lead me to the Ogilvy company principles:
Dogged determination is often the only trait that separates a moderately creative person from a highly creative one. Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. Before them, obstacles vanish into thin air and mountains crumble into atoms.
And:
Conclusion: We are what we repeatedly do. Being very good is no good. You have to be very, very, very, very, very good.
How to build an LLM judge by Hamel Husain. Notice the role of the taste maker?
Musings
When I was a PM on the YouTube Creator team, a super common interaction I had with top creators when something like this:
- Me: How did your channel get started
- Creator: I just started one day and it blew up almost from the first video
- Me: Really?
- Creator: Yeah.
- Me: Wow, that’s crazy.
- Creator: Well, it’s actually my third YouTube channel. I’ve had a couple of others that never really went anywhere.
I must've had this exact conversation at least 5 times. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
One thing I notice is that super early stage companies have to do impossible things to make it to the next day… which sometimes leads to them being bad at assessing which super impossible things they can do and which ones they can’t. I think political progressives can be the same way. They have to by nature believe that wholesale change is possible but this blinds them to the things that can’t be changed.
With apologies to the boffins around the world who know more about this than I do, I think AGI arrived with GPT-4. Everything else is just a continuation on that theme.
The thing that’s great about Duolingo is that they’ve figure out how to turn aggressive gamification strategies towards a neutral to positive end
“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” — Frederik Pohl
When starting out, it’s easy to spend time on your strengths and ignore your weaknesses until much later. In fact the startup world often fetishizes a founder's particular strength. That is to say, if you know a particular founder is design-oriented, you expect to see some of the most beautifully designed things from them. Despite this, if you know you are capable of doing something, it can be beneficial to focus on the other things. Simply put: start with the stuff you don’t know you can do.
[Ed.: I remember a startup in which we, foolishly, passed on investing that had made such fast progress. When I asked them how they'd advanced so quickly they explained that they'd exclusively focused on things they were unsure would work.]
Creativity is not magic! Good ideas don't just come from thinking really hard! Good ideas come from arbitrage: knowing about areas and ideas and facts that your classmates don't know about. By definition, this is not going to be on your class syllabus
The Barnum effect is individuals give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically to them, yet which are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. Hat tip to Simon Wilson who brought this to me.
Worth your time
“Meanwhile, those who study, pray, and commit acts of loving-kindness keep the world going.” Cluny Journal
Internet of Bugs, a software developer + YouTube Creator reviews o1 and sees it as a step change for AI.
Engelsberg Ideas on the missing quality of judgement. I’ve noticed that product management orgs in particular are often embarrassed by the degree to which the job depends on judgement; instead, I think they should embrace it.
When I’m in execution mode, I find myself searching for slack in my schedule to eek out just a little bit more productivity. When I look at my to do list this way, I start to see the little things I can do here and there regardless of priority. But eventually what happens is that I begin reordering my to do list away from what’s important and towards what I can do quickly. The urgent overwhelms the important.
I suspect that the Creator Economy is coming for software development. In the same way that the iphone made it so that anyone can make a video, LLMs are making it so anyone can make software. This makes it even more important to be focused on who the software is for and how it integrates into the life of the user. Nicheness is even more important.
Meaning comes from cost. If it’s free to do, you won’t feel ownership of it.
One of the things that I’ve noticed about AI tools is that they’ve changed the way that I think about the role of intelligence in success.
In 2018, if you had sat me down and pressed me on the top qualities required to be successful, I probably would’ve had intelligence first. The ability to figure out the answer, it seemed to me, was probably the most important single quality to have if you could only have one.
In a post GPT-4 world, though, I’m no longer sure this is true. When I think about my kids and the qualities they need to develop, yes, I want a minimum level of intelligence, but I’m more interested in curiosity, initiative, earnestness, industriousness, judgement / taste, courage, and playfulness.
I’m struck by how many of these qualities are sitting in John Wooden’s pyramid of success.
Perhaps I was overrating the role of intelligence all along. Now with this frame, when I think about the most successful people that I’ve observed up close, alongside intelligence and the ability to process information is a whole lot of earnestness and industriousness.
Looking ahead, it seems to me that what is increasingly scarce and valuable isn’t the ability to breakdown what needs to be done, but the ability to get up off the couch and go do it. To consider the result that you get, and then go try again. To create trust with others so they help or at least don't hinder your progress. When I think about preparing for the world of the future, I think about thing a design studio, a Montessori classroom, or a basketball team.
