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
I don't play zero-sum games.
I noticed that whenever I was faced with a competitive, zero-sum game – a situation in which someone else had to lose in order for me to win, or vice versa I chose to opt out of that game completely.
- Tiago Forte on X
So many business leaders and entrepreneurs started with the dictum: "bigger and better"
I want to have a company with 200 people, 300 people. I want to be growing my company and scaling it and then selling it and exiting.
And that's right for some people, but the number of individuals I've worked with who along the way have realized, actually,
Yes.
Writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. Writing *is* thinking.
Students, academics, and anyone else who outsources their writing to LLMs will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.... See more
Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
I often find myself reading with interest about a topic I never thought would interest me... What holds me is the enthusiasm of the writer for his field.
How was he drawn into it? What emotional baggage did he bring along? How did it
“Everything is about sex, except sex: sex is about power”
apocryphal wrongly attributed to Oscar Wilde.
May have been said by Psychologist Robert Michels
On Luck
"'Give yourself a lot of shots to get lucky' is even better advice than it appears on the surface. Luck isn’t an independent variable but increases super-linearly with more surface area—you meet more people, make more connections between new ideas, learn patterns, etc."
-- Sam Altman
"'Give yourself a lot of shots to get lucky' is even better advice than it appears on the surface. Luck isn’t an independent variable but increases super-linearly with more surface area—you meet more people, make more connections between new ideas, learn patterns, etc."
-- Sam Altman
"We see these examples time and again, that the setting in which you try to do your most smart, creative, cognitive work really matters. And if that setting is the same place that you do shallow work (where you do your taxes and your emails and your zooms) your mind is going to have a hard time getting into the deep work mode. The answer is to have
... See moreWe always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.
Bill Gates, The Road Ahead
Bill Gates, The Road Ahead
