Beverley
@beverley
I am a Technology Entrepreneur quietly building humble but handy Internet businesses.
Beverley
As a marketing executive, I view business as one of the greatest adventures of the human enterprise—if not the greatest. But I am not just a businessman: I am also an unapologetic romantic.
Tim Leberecht • The Business Romantic
The more reliant a task is on a large and private dataset, the more likely it is that a workflow application will be dominant instead of a model. The best software companies function as a system of record, a repository for the most important data (customer IDs, product analytics, or credit card numbers), and they’ll be able to offer superior produc
... See more“The TL;DR is there’s a huge ship with a broken engine, but none of the engineers know how to fix it. That is, until they bring in an older, more experienced engineer, who figures out the problem immediately. But when this more experienced engineer bills them for $10,000, the other engineers think they’re being ripped off - after all, he only
... See moreAd legend Bill Bernbach letter on creativity, written in 1947:
Dear ________:
Our agency is getting big. That’s something to be happy about. But it’s something to worry about, too, and I don’t mind telling you I’m damned worried. I’m worried that we’re going to fall into the trap of bigness, that we’re going to worship techniques instead of substance
... See moreI find explaining any actually interesting idea usually requires explaining like 5 subsidiary ideas. If you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky it’s like 25 and either they’re ready for a three hour lecture or you’re not going to succeed.
Emmett Shear • Tweet
Music — with all the mysterious power by which it “enters one’s ears and dives straight into one’s soul, one’s emotional center” — is made not of notes of sound but of atoms of time. And if music is made of time, and if time is the substance we ourselves are made of, then in some profound sense, we are made of music.
Maria Popova • We Are Made of Music, We Are Made of Time: Violinist Natalie Hodges on the Poetic Science of Sound and Feeling
Can we patiently and reasonably put our disappointments into words that, more or less, enable others to see our point? Or do we internalize pain, act it out symbolically or discharge it with counterproductive rage? When other people upset us, do we feel we have the right to communicate or must we slam doors and fall silent? When the desired respons... See more
Alain de Botton • The School of Life: An Emotional Education: An Emotional Education
“I think income is a lot more important than wealth. It’s also because from a policy perspective, dealing with income is a lot easier than dealing with wealth. But the biggest reason is that I think that wealth is a lot harder for regular people to understand than income.
In general, regular people’s intuitive “folk” understanding of income is pretty close to the way economists think about it. Every month you get a certain number of dollars, and you can spend those dollars on stuff you want — pizza, haircuts, medical care, rent, treats for your pet rabbit, etc. The number of dollars you get represents the value of the stuff you can buy.
That’s pretty much exactly how GDP works at the level of the whole economy — GDP is the total value of the stuff that gets produced in the economy, and it’s theoretically exactly equal to the total income that everyone earns for producing that stuff. So income for a whole economy works pretty much the same as it works for an individual.
Wealth is different, for a number of reasons. For one thing, unlike income, wealth can be negative. This means that a lot of personal wealth isn’t actually the world’s wealth.”
Constraints are parameters within which one operates, guiding actions toward optimal outcomes, while restraints imply limitations that hinder progress. Embracing constraints should foster creativity and efficiency and should help transform potential obstacles into catalysts for innovation.