Johanna

Pretty soon, it becomes surprisingly easy to fill a full work day simply responding to whatever pops up instead of intentionally working on the highest priority things. We can easily fall into the trap that I described in the intro where we outsource our prioritization with whatever comes up.Without a trusted way of saying to ourselves and our... See more

The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one. A hard startup requires a lot more money, time, coordination, or technological development than most startups. A good hard startup is one that will be valuable if it works (not all hard problems are worth solving!).

Picking a single, lifelong career feels like an impossible task for me.As soon as I’ve gone deep into one domain, I feel compelled to explore another. Stability spawns a desire for novelty. Novelty spawns a desire for stability. The cycle goes on ad infinitum.

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.

It’s become easier to be busy, but harder to be productive. To work on the right things at the right time. 

I call this the deluge of crappy papers. A recent article in Nautilus comes up with a more visually-arresting term - “zombie science”. This is apt, because zombies eat brains. Zombie science also consumes brains, or specifically, brain’s attention. Scientist’s time is one of the most precious resources we have and more and more is being wasted... See more

Here are a few things I am hearing that are working for some: More frequent short checkins with the entire team One on ones with people you don’t normally do one on ones with (skip one or two or three levels) Leaning harder on the leadership team to help lead the company Giving more time off to the team (shorter days, shorter weeks) Celebrating... See more

In 2012, the University of Maryland sociologist John P. Robinson reviewed more than 40 years of happiness and time-use surveys that asked Americans how often they felt they either were “rushed” or had “excess time.” Perhaps predictably, he concluded that the happiest people were the “never-never” group—those who said they very rarely felt hurried... See more