Johanna

Nobody wants to admit to themselves that they’re closed-minded. But the advantages of having that courage are massive. The ability to change your mind is a superpower.

Remote teams need 5x the process. When i say processes, i don’t necessarily mean heavy-handed workflows, piles of paper and someone using a giant stamp confirming every action. I mean “systemized communication and expectations made explicit”.This can be as simple as: “We do check-ins every morning…” “Please before you do X always do Y…” These... See more

A lot of extraordinary things in life are the result of things that are first-order negative, second order positive. So just because things look like they have no immediate payoff, doesn’t mean that’s the case. All it means is that you’ll have less competition if the second and third order consequences are positive because everyone who thinks at... See more

The difference between habits and goals is not semantic. Each requires different forms of action. For example:Let’s say you want to read more books. You could set the goal to read 50 books by the end of the year, or you could create a habit and decide to always carry a book with you.

The most impressive people I know care a lot about what people think, even people whose opinions they really shouldn’t value (a surprising numbers of them do something like keeping a folder of screenshots of tweets from haters). But what makes them unusual is that they generally care about other people’s opinions on a very long time horizon—as long... See more

Yang isn’t proposing a tax on automation (yet), but he needs to stop using fear of automation as a way to sell UBI. Besides the fact that the evidence is against it and it encourages bad policies, the “rise of the robots” narrative calls for a UBI that’s much bigger than anything Yang — or anyone — can possibly muster. If automation makes humans... See more

No small number of economists are hard at work studying how to bring the economy to full employment. But what these economists are forgetting is that full employment is not the same thing as full output. Ideally, we’d want to maximize what we’re getting out of the economy rather than what we’re putting into it. Full employment just means we’re... See more

What’s causing the productivity slowdown? The subject is controversial among economists, and many different answers have been proposed. Some have argued that it’s merely that existing productivity measures don’t do a good job measuring the impact of new technologies. Our argument here suggests a different explanation, that diminishing returns to... See more

Whenever possible (and it’s almost always possible), have someone do a day or two of work with you before you hire her; you can do this at night or on the weekends.