Jason Shen

GPT-4 prompt for making engineering decisions in unfamiliar territory

"We had field days in elementary school where in May you'd go out and have a 100-yard dash," he says. "Even then, Mike, he hated losing. Some of the memories I have on activity buses going to football, basketball, baseball games. There was many times we'd have a game of cards on the activity bus. And we'd get to the school we were playing, and Mike hadn't been winning the last few hands? He wouldn't let anybody get off the bus."

why optical illusions are rational for our brains to fall into

Even if you don’t work in corporate, it helps to understand how people advance to the top

Nothing worse than becoming famous / successful with something you don’t believe in

Via https://shop.live-inspired.com/catalog/product/gift-books/inspiration/go-forth/

Media mogul. Suppose you were really wealthy, or otherwise you maybe inherited your dream sort of media studio or production house. What would it be? A film studio? Record label? Magazine? If you were guaranteed of succeeding, what kind of media mogul would you be? Followup: what sort of movies, or books, or artists, etc would you be looking to make, showcase? (I have a lot of followup questions about what the whole operation would look and feel like.)

Bank Heist. What role would you play in a “bank heist”? Feel free to modify the heist so that it’s not a bank, maybe you’re retrieving a stolen diamond from an evil dictator and returning it to a museum or something. Safecracker? Getaway driver? Hacker? Mastermind? Brute? Conman? Fixer? Inside man? Wild card?

Theme park. You’ve been given a plot of land in a surprisingly accessible location and all the resources you need to build “some kind of theme park”. What would it be like? It doesn’t have to have rides, it can be literally any kind of festival or event you dream up.

Golden ticket. What would be the most incredible thing that could happen to your project/business/operation? Why? How could we make that more likely? What are some intermediate steps we could define?”

Microessay about how things take time by Justin Duke

https://x.com/jmduke/status/1788307295526338883

Things take time.

• Nintendo fairly famously was born in 1889, and the modern incarnation - Yamamuchi Nintendo & Co., LTD - was established nearly fifty years later, in 1933. They spent forty years selling playing cards, then another decade operating merely as a distributor of electronics before coming out with their first piece of electronic hardware.

• The Lego Group began in a Danish workshop in 1932; it took them 26 years until a confluence of technology, iteration, and luck led them to what we now refer to as a Lego. (Er, sorry - a Lego brick.)

• Nike spent eight years merely re-selling (literally, not figuratively) Onitsuka shoes to a U.S. audience.

• Gates and Allen ran Microsoft as what was essentially a freelance firm for eight years, too, before scoring a contract with IBM (and even that took an additional two years to be parlayed into MSDOS.)

(There are, of course, some companies that like Athena sprout fully-formed from the head of their creators - Amazon and TSMC come to mind.)

When we build hagiographies of the companies we love (or at least find most interesting), it can be tempting to draw clean, neat, satisfying arcs and fast forward through the boring eras that do not inform our modern understanding of those organizations.

But neither the Nike Cortez nor the Lego System 236 Garage with Automatic Door came from the first decade of either company's existence.

Part of success is staying alive long enough to have the right kinds of things happen to you all at once.