Slowpreneur

Jim Simons: "I’m not an extremely fast thinker myself; I just work hard."

That was all I needed to do—work hard, not fast. A paper I published in '68 took me five years. But it has had 1,850 citations. For a math paper, that’s an awful lot.

There’s too much emphasis on a person’s being able to answer questions quickly."

To me, the ideal life is to take the 20 percent of my time that make me feel most alive and see if I can cut everything else out until that fills everything. Then do that again, cutting the “worst” 80 percent of the best. This is the inverse of how many companies operate. There the ideal is often “growth,” which they take to mean “say yes to all op

Ad 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

Working in technology means one thing above all else: chasing scale. There is a reason why much of the tech world is obsessed with growth. Free from physical constraints, digital systems can scale to an incomprehensible size. The appeal of conquering the engineering, design and business challenges of mega-scale is strong, the rewards immense. But u