Johanna

Howes says that “innovation is not in human nature, but is instead received. … when people do not innovate, it is often simply because it never occurs to them to do so.” Joel Mokyr says, similarly, that “progress isn’t natural” (and his book on this topic, A Culture of Growth, helped inspire this blog). I agree with both.

Working part-time could let developers give their best to a project without the burden of emotional blackmail in the form of “9 to 5”. They could be required to be available for meetings and firefighting outside of their 4 hours, and still have way more free time. With a good developer and a well managed project, you wouldn’t even notice a... See more

Research publications are some of the world’s most important repositories for content and information ever created. They tie ideas and findings together across time and disciplines, and are forever preserved by a network of libraries. They are supported by evidence, analysis, expert insight, and statistical relationships. They are extremely... See more

Instead of having a dozen semi-close friends, get to know hundreds of people casually through meetups and via the internet, and make a small group of really close friends you see many times a week.

So if past ideas seem obvious and future ideas seem obscure, it’s tempting to conclude we live at the inflection point where ideas suddenly get harder to find. And maybe we do. But we’d feel that way even if ideas weren’t getting harder to find, and that should make us a little skeptical.

Now I think that what we really need is more experimentation in markets, because our markets are failing to promote new ideas that drive progress and growth. In art, science, and technology, our outcomes are lagging indicators of our markets. For better results, build better markets.

Most people do whatever most people they hang out with do. This mimetic behavior is usually a mistake—if you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you will not be hard to compete with.