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.

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When I go into a situation, I try to keep a mindset of baseline optimism.

When starting the day: It’s going to be a good day.

When meeting someone new: I’m going to like them.

When trying something challenging: It’s going to work out.

Problems will inevitably arise and I’ll deal with them as the situation demands, but my preference is to assume I’m... See more

James Clear • 3-2-1: On hats, haircuts, and tattoos

Quotes

you haven’t really experienced AI until you have had three sleepless nights of existential anxiety, after which you can start to be productive again

Ethan Mollick • Which AI should I use? Superpowers and the State of Play

Generative AI and Quotes

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”.

Quotes

Writers must therefore constantly ask: what am I trying to say?

Surprisingly often they don’t know.

Then they must look at what they have written and ask: have I said it?
Is it clear to someone encountering the subject for the first time?

On Writing Well, William Zinsser

business writing and Writing

A lot of very smart people work in strange ways / with a lot of quirks (e.g. contemplating for hours and appearing to do nothing, while then suddenly having 100x output burst). This usually makes them not a great fit for traditional corporate world, where you often have to fake…

Laura Wendel x.com

Slow Productivity and Inspo

Writing is a critical skill — perhaps the most important — of all the skills required to analyze data. The only way to get better at writing is to write, ideally every day.

Rohan Alexander, Telling Stories with Data

data science and

The older I get the more I realize how much progress can be made by just never quitting. Seems obvious, but think about how often we start, stop, restart, repeat. So much time spent recovering from “stops”. Sure, slow down once in a while, but for the love of God, don’t quit.

Blake Burge x.com

Motivation

Underestimating the Future

In 1903, the New York Times predicted it would take 1–10 million years to invent a working airplane.

The Wright brothers made their first powered flight just 9 weeks later.

When people are naturally good at something, they tend to be puzzled by how bad other people are at it. So that's one way to figure out what you're naturally good at. What do other people seem puzzlingly bad at? (Being right doesn't count. Everyone thinks they're right.)

Paul Graham x.com