Johanna

You can get to about the 90th percentile in your field by working either smart or hard, which is still a great accomplishment. But getting to the 99th percentile requires both—you will be competing with other very talented people who will have great ideas and be willing to work a lot.

Economic growth is not objectively good by itself. But part of the question here is, “what happened to economic growth around 1970?” When the companies in the global #1 and #2 positions were both founded by people who used LSD, it makes you want to pay attention. It makes you wonder what Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin might have tried... See more

But even with project managers, cascading failures remain a risk due to the nature of construction. Construction has the unfortunate combination of building mostly unique things each time (even similar projects will be built on different sites, in different weather conditions, and likely with different site crews) and consisting of tasks that are... See more

I’m able to cope with having predominantly digital relationships during the day because I have a healthy social life outside of work, but if I didn’t, it might be rough. A lot of people look to office life for a good percentage of their real human interaction every day, and if you’re one of those people, I could see remote life being not fun at... See more

The control of the thinking machine is perfectly possible. And since nothing whatsoever happens to us outside our brains, since nothing hurts us or give us pleasure except within our brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on inside the mysterious brain is patent… people complain of the lack of the power to concentrate, not... See more

There are four key steps to the Feynman Technique:1. Choose a concept you want to learn about2. Explain it to a 12 year old3. Reflect, Refine, and Simplify4. Organize and Review

Any time you conduct what you would consider to be a “meeting” with someone else, take minutes! That is, write down what happened in bullet-point form, so those remote team members who couldn’t be there can benefit from — or at least hear about — whatever happened in sequence.

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?