Johanna

Research publications are some of the world’s most important repositories for content and information ever created. They tie ideas and findings together across time and disciplines, and are forever preserved by a network of libraries. They are supported by evidence, analysis, expert insight, and statistical relationships. They are extremely... See more

At Stripe, I believe they call this the Sunday test—would you be likely to come into the office on a Sunday because you want to hang out with this person?

Somewhat counterintuitively, also try looking at communities that are passionately dissatisfied with the status quo in your field or industry. It might be harder to state your case, but if you reach out to the right people, you can explain that your product is the one they have been waiting for in the market. They will be immediately and urgently... See more

Knowledge is a non-rival good. You don't loose anything if more people have it. In fact, I would even argue the opposite. Knowledge compounds. The more people have it, the more progress we'll make. If you are publishing a paper and only a handful people understand it, the impact of your findings will be limited to what these, highly specialized... See more

This is true for literally everyone, regardless of whether you want to be a writer or not, whether you want to publish or not. Just have a Google Doc in which you add a page a day of whatever’s on your mind. This has a million benefits, but a simple one is just clearing your cache: if you don’t do this, your brain sort of gets clogged by all the

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One other thing about meetings in remote companies: working remotely has made me realize how unimportant and ritualized so many meetings are. Often times, I will get 90% of the way through scheduling a meeting in Google Calendar only to ask myself “can’t we just update each other on this project throughout the week via Slack?” Even staff meetings... See more

Mechanization doesn’t require replicating a human’s movement exactly. The greatest gains from mechanization occur when a complex human movement can be replaced with a simple mechanical movement. A ship’s propeller doesn’t move the same way a fish’s tail fin does - it replaces the back and forth movement of the tail with a simple rotation that... See more

I think another important factor in determining happiness is how hard of a line you want between work and home life. One benefit of traditional office environments is that when you physically leave the office, it’s not too hard to flip the switch and go into “home mode”. Sure you may have to deal with the odd email every now and then, but it’s... See more