Agalia Tan

Great strategy isn’t about working forwards from backward-looking data in the form of numbers. It’s about working backwards from forward-looking data in the form of ideas.

a daisy chain

A good editor is someone who uses deliberate subtraction to actually add life to the ideas, setting, plot, and characters.

The Latin root of the word decision — cis or cid — literally means "to cut" or "to kill."

Becoming an essentialist means making cutting, condensing, and correcting a natural part of our daily routine — making editing a natural ca... See more

“I want everything we do to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or that the client thinks it’s worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.”

The software breaks down each route into multiple maneuvers, David Cronin, a senior director on the Google Maps design team, told me. Then it decides which and how many maneuvers a driver or pedestrian needs, how to describe those maneuvers, and what sort of visual and auditory information would best illustrate them. The goal, Cronin said, is to “p... See more

Lime (the scooter company)’s biggest challenge lies not in solving a transportation problem, but in solving a status problem. Lime is a case study in “Behavioral Market Failures.” The rational economic benefits of convenience and affordability are being completely upended by the far more powerful aversion to status loss, supporting once again that ... See more

The "culture" of a society isn't a blob of random human activity, but an orderly ecosystem arising from the interactions between particular subunits. To maintain ecosystem health, we must reject the cynical “poptimist” framing of culture as a mere vehicle for entertainment and commerce and instead promote the benefits of constant cultural refresh.