Johanna
@johannaeinsiedler
Notoriously Curious, Data Science Nerd & Entrepreneurship Advocate
Author of CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter with hand picked recommendations for your information diet
Johanna
The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. A problem is grand in science if it lies before us unsolved and we see some way for us to make some headway into it. I would advise you to take even simpler, or as you say, humbler, problems until you find some you can really... See more
Richard Feynman • Richard Feynman's Letter on What Problems to Solve
To do science, you don’t need to start with the dawn of all human knowledge and then work forward. You start with the current state of knowledge and go from there. Learning the history of science is helpful for shaping your intuitions and giving you perspective, but you don’t actually have to read Darwin, for example, to do evolutionary biology.
Adam Mastroianni • Ideas aren’t getting harder to find and anyone who tells you otherwise is a coward and I will fight them
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.
Sam Altman • Projects and Companies
You want to be very selective about the people you choose to engage with further along in your hiring process. “For every person making it all the way through the interview loop, that can be 20 person-hours,” says Gupta. “If you multiply that by your hire ratio, you’ll see that this is just not scalable. You also have to consider the candidate... See more
First Round Capital • Mechanize Your Hiring Process to Make Better Decisions
But consider this: Do you know anyone who doesn’t have any blind spots? I strongly doubt it. Then why would you be any different? As Dalio makes clear, you must be active in the process of open-mindedness: It won’t happen by accident.
Farnam Street • The Difference Between Open-Minded and Closed-Minded People
No matter what, as the organization grows, people get disconnected — they have no idea what other people are working on, or what their job entails.Getting a very brief, high-level summary of what each team did last week solves these problems.
First Round Capital • Here’s Why You’re Not Hiring the Best and the Brightest
Only the best researchers in a field actually make progress, and the best researchers are already in a field, and probably couldn’t be kept out of the field with barbed wire and attack dogs. If you expand a field, you will get a bunch of merely competent careerists who treat it as a 9-to-5 job. A field of 5 truly inspired geniuses and 5 competent... See more