Johanna

For starters, we can stop viewing our work as our lives and learn to distinguish the two or intertwine them. We can plan specific pursuits for our spare time, rather than flitting it away. We can take stock of how much free time we actually have and where it is going. Then, we can structure those hours and minutes to ensure they are used for... See more

Anything meaningful takes five years to do, whether that’s getting a company off the ground or mastering a skill.If we start working at 20, that’s 60 productive years — or 12 five-year blocks to do new things, then move on.Instead of living one life or career, why not live a dozen instead?This ebb and flow of interest and desire feels natural to... See more

For centuries, progress was stalled because inventors were all trying to create multi-person four-wheeled carriages, rather than single-person two-wheeled vehicles. It’s unclear why this was; certainly inventors were copying an existing mode of transportation, but why would they draw inspiration only from the horse-and-carriage, and not from the... See more

I call this the deluge of crappy papers. A recent article in Nautilus comes up with a more visually-arresting term - “zombie science”. This is apt, because zombies eat brains. Zombie science also consumes brains, or specifically, brain’s attention. Scientist’s time is one of the most precious resources we have and more and more is being wasted... See more

Crop harvesting, in essence, is a statistical process. It’s powered by the lack of overlap in the probability distributions of the physical traits of different parts of a plant.Crops that can’t be harvested in this way remain extremely labor intensive.

Speaking of spending time, you should spend the time to learn a role before you hire for it. If you don’t understand it, it’s very hard to get the right person.

There’s often an initial apprehension that comes from welcoming a lot of new hires into the fold. But there’s also something deeper. What these comments get at is the sense that there’s a certain “unscalable” spirit from a team’s earlier, scrappier days — and that each new addition represents a slow chipping away at the je ne sais quoi that forged... See more