Britt Gage

From James Clear’s 3-2-1: Time assets vs. Time debts, slow change, and the importance of failure

Time assets vs. Time debts.

Time assets are choices that save you time in the future. Think: saying no to a meeting, automating a task, working on something that persists and compounds.

Time debts are choices that must be repaid and cost you time in the

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My goal is to structure teams around minimizing “coordination headwind,” as described by Alex Komoroske in this deck on seeing organizations as slime mold. The rough idea is that coordination costs (caused by uncertainty and disagreements) increase with scale, and adding managers doesn’t improve things. People’s incentives become misaligned. People... See more

How do you become a 100-year company?

Taste is a double-edged sword. Because it is ephemeral, you’re untouchable if you have it. Competitors won’t be able to copy it—what is there to copy?

I was particularly compelled by Kusserow’s argument that so many of the characteristics we often consider “personality traits” — things like shyness, creativity, confidence, organization, and shyness — are actually “class-learned attributes.”

Takeaways:

1. Engineers continued to be the predominant function across the first three hires. Not shown in the chart, but 100% of companies hired at least one engineer among their first three hires .


2. Interestingly, customer success/support continues to be a popular role for the first three hires. Of the non-engineer hires, almost a quarter of them are

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The borders of being ‘technical’ are expanding by the day

There used to be a well-defined line between who could build things and who couldn’t. Building was reserved for people who could code—people who were “technical.”

Sure, there’ve been waves of milquetoast no-code tools that purported to turn you into a developer for the past decade. But those... See more

We could do something, we might do something, but we don’t. And so the work doesn’t ship, or it doesn’t meet its potential.

I’m not alone in facing Resistance. It happens everywhere we look.

Some of the symptoms of Resistance seem contradictory, but if we go back to the definition, that makes sense. Here are a few:

• Procrastinating


• Ignoring or avoiding

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There’s lots of well-intentioned advice out there about the risks if a business takes off and there isn’t a solid foundation to stand on. But at the same time, it's no surprise that startup leaders see words like "optimizing headcount through capacity planning models" and file it away as unnecessary bureaucracy that’s more befitting of the “BigCo”... See more

By casting a wide net, I learned that I have very little ability to predict how useful a call will be in advance. There is relevance, when work is closely related to something you’re working on, and usefulness, when work advances something you’re working on. Relevance is easier to predict, but it’s not a very good proxy for usefulness, which is a... See more