Johann Van Tonder
@jvt
20 years in ecommerce, now CEO of a CRO agency. Probably doing analysis in R or building stuff with AI. Or walking on the beach. Yeah, probably that.
Johann Van Tonder
A busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to do great things in this world. If you want to do great things—whether you’re a musician or entrepreneur or investor—you need free time and a free mind.
Naval Ravikant • Be Too Busy to ‘Do Coffee’
A great way to get out of your head and into your world is to do a task you can actually finish.
Jon Acuff • Soundtracks
An unfortunate fact of corporate life is that a subset of your colleagues who claim to have “strong opinions, weakly held” in reality demonstrate “strong opinions, aggressively defended, rarely reconsidered, but happily changed if that’s what the bosses want”.
Choices like these cause migraine headaches. Tip to aspiring entrepreneurs: If you don’t like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don’t become CEO.
Ben Horowitz • The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Motivation and Quotes
I want it to be totally okay and acceptable and normal to say “I don’t entirely understand what I just read, but I loved it.
Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other.
It’s impossible for a muddy thinker to write good English. He may get away with it for a paragraph or two, but soon the reader will be lost, and there’s no sin so grave…
On Writing Well, William Zinsser
“A more practical answer is that it’s a file. This right here is a large language model, called Vicuna 7B. It’s a 4.2 gigabyte file on my computer. If you open the file, it’s just numbers. These things are giant binary blobs of numbers…”
Simon Willison, attempting to explain LLM
AI skepticism and
The most common disguises of procrastination Learning, researching, organizing, and building systems are the most tempting forms of procrastination. You can tell yourself that you're "making progress" only to avoid the point where you need to make a decision on what to do next. Even having to get feedback on every action you take is ultimately a
... See moreI can give it a video of my screen as I use my computer, and it accurately understands what I am doing and what I could do better. This allows the AI to work, for better or worse, as a manager or advisor based on observing the real world.
Ethan Mollick • Which AI should I use? Superpowers and the State of Play
Ethan Mollick explains how Gemini brings us a step closer to the idea of your “AI Chief of Staff” (Cal Newport)