Johanna

People naturally remember musical language, and I would encourage writers to inject their prose with a bit of music. When you’re writing, think about repetition and variety. Crescendos and rests. Pace and punctuation. Read your work out loud, and feel the rhythm of the words in your voice.

After you figure out your vision and get product-market fit, you should probably be spending between a third and a half of your time hiring.

In Wang’s most recent analysis, he found that artists and scientists tend to experiment with diverse styles or topics before their hot streak begins. This period of exploration is followed by a period of creatively productive focus. “Our data shows that people ought to explore a bunch of things at work, deliberate about the best fit for their... See more

Say you’re a car manufacturer. Every year, you must decide between investing in future innovations, such as self-driving software, and finding ways to squeeze new revenue out of existing technologies and materials. Too much fanciful R&D spending, and this year’s profit plummets. Too much emphasis on tweaking existing product lines, and you get... See more

I'm talking about hiring people who are serious about constant learning. These people don't spend their time trying to convince you of how much they know. They don't focus on their past very much. They are always focused on their future. As you interview them, they are interviewing you, trying to figure out how much they can learn from you.

Companies become highly leveraged when they hire lots of superstar talent. They can reduce the risk this creates by hedging against their business model. Basically, this involves asking, “In a world where our main product fails, what other products or services are likely to be successful?” and then building those themselves.

What a fascinating little paragraph on nightmares, dreams, and the nature of consciousness. I could read 10k words on every sentence. So interesting to think about nightmares as our consciousness engine running amok without the braking system of sense data.