jdilla.xyz

Good tokens 2025-02-07

2025-02-07

Worth your time

A deep dive on how a clothing brand prices their clothes.

Ethan Mollick on Deep Research. I’ve been working with it quite a bit this week and generally speaking been impressed with it.

Musings

“All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen” — Sidney Lumet, via The Browser

An underrated truth about the modern world is that everyone reads their @mentions and sees who likes their posts

The Luka trade is a reminder that even at the highest levels, mistakes genuinely do happen. You would think that evaluating the market for one of the 5 best basketball players in the world would be an efficient market… but it appears that it wasn’t!

Reflecting on the ROI of marketing efforts I’ve done recently

  • Print isn’t that useful unless it’s with a writer with a voice (e.g., a substack)

  • Audio and video really make an impact. You want to be inside someone’s EarPods.

  • Speaking at trade shows is helpful in expanding your network

Asking good questions is more important than ever

On the modern internet, one should never be self congratulatory. It’s totally okay to accept compliments from your audience, but the moment you start saying or implying you’re great at something or have it figured out, you begin to sew the seeds of your downfall.

Remembering Frances Hesselbein

2022-12-31

When I saw that David Epstein (who’s writing I love) was writing about Frances Hesselbein again, I sort of rolled my eyes. She is at the center of his book Range (which I love — probably the book that impacted me most in the past 5 years).

But his remembrance of her is too good not to share. My favorite nuggets:

  • Her life philosophy as: “doing what’s needed at the time.”

  • She repeatedly declines offers to move up through the ranks of the Girl Scouts, ultimately becoming the CEO and turning the organization around; reading between the lines, it seems like in some ways declining advancement gives her more space to maneuver as she isn’t invested in protecting her reputation.

  • The ending quote: “Leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do.”