Johanna

But there’s a different point of view, a point of view in which science is an endless frontier, where there are always new phenomena to be discovered, and major new questions to be answered. The possibility of an endless frontier is a consequence of an idea known as emergence.(...) The mere fact of emergent levels of behavior doesn’t necessarily... See more

What we can learn from reading about the schedules of people we admire is not what time to set our alarms or how many cups of coffee to drink, but that different types of work require different types of schedules.

I think that the perception of stagnation in science – and in biology specifically – is basically fake news, driven by technological hedonic treadmill and nostalgia. We rapidly adapt to technological advances – however big they are – and we always idealize the past – however terrible it was.

Old age is much better than we think it will be. For a lot of people who read the book, I think they will wind up being a lot less fearful about the last third of life, and much more optimistic. As one person told me: “My advice about growing old? I’d tell them to find the magic.” 

Throughout my career I’ve noticed that when I work about 4-5 hours on something, I’m done. Regardless of whether I’ve allocated 6 or 8 or 10 hours to it, I either finish my tasks, or I run out of runway to finish them. Most of the time spent after that is just obsessive tweaking.

Let yourself become more ambitious—figure out the most interesting version of where what you’re working on could go. Then talk about that big vision and work relentlessly towards it, but always have a reasonable next step. You don’t want step one to be incorporating the company and step two to be going to Mars.

It’s crucial for us to understand as many mental models as possible. As the adage goes, a little knowledge can be dangerous and creates more problems than total ignorance. No single model is universally applicable – we find exceptions for nearly everything. Even hardcore physics has not been totally solved.

Reflexivity is at work in talent markets as well. (...) No prospect is more attractive to a 10x engineer than working with other 10x engineers, and no opportunity is more irresistible to an investor than funding a team of 10x engineers.