Johanna

The best ideas are fragile; most people don’t even start talking about them at all because they sound silly. Perhaps most of all, you want to be around people who don’t make you feel stupid for mentioning a bad idea, and who certainly never feel stupid for doing so themselves.

There is a limit to what most people are willing to work on for something called a company that does not exist if it’s just a project. The risk of seeming stupid when something is just a project is almost zero, and no one cares if you fail. So you’re much more likely to work on something good, instead of derivative but plausible-sounding crap.

What they want younger people to know is this: life is short. The older the respondent, the more likely to say that life passes by in what seems like an instant. They say this not to depress younger people, but to get them to be more aware and selective about how they use their time. Older people practice what psychologists call ‘socioemotional... See more

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.

It doesn’t matter how fast you move if it’s in a worthless direction. Picking the right thing to work on is the most important element of productivity and usually almost ignored. So think about it more!

You should trade being short-term low-status for being long-term high-status, which most people seem unwilling to do.

These plans fail even though they cheat and give themselves dictatorial power. “End corporate welfare, then redirect the money to UBI!” But if it was that easy to end corporate welfare, wouldn’t people have done it already, for non-UBI related reasons? “We’ll get a UBI by ending corporate welfare” is an outrageous claim. And even the plans that let... 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

It’s worth emphasizing that basic income does not have to be an amount of money that meets people’s basic needs. Such an amount may be both desirable and achievable, but it is not part of the definition. Basic income is “basic” only in the sense that everyone gets it. The income itself is basic — not what it buys.