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
If having a sense of purpose can improve your chances of success, it’s vital to imagine how what you’re working on creates change and to articulate your reasons for wanting to do it. Why you? Why this? Why now? Why for them? Why there? Why that way and not this? What’s your story and how will you stay true to it?
Bernadette Jiwa • Story Driven: You don't need to compete when you know who you are
“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
A business, by definition, exists to make a profit and the world’s best corporate storytellers acknowledge as much. What sets them apart is what they do next. They wrap their product, service, company, or cause with a vision and a purpose that goes well beyond making money.
Carmine Gallo • The Storyteller's Secret: From TED Speakers to Business Legends, Why Some Ideas Catch On and Others Don't
Everything you want, is on the other side of doing things you don't want to do.
Hard conversations
Work that is "boring"
Taking chances on things that might fail
Do the things you don't want to do.
Don’t aim to impress. Aim to educate.
As a presenter, if my intention is to impress, perform, or entertain, I’m going to be nervous because my focus is on me.
If, however, my intention is to educate my audience on a vision, idea, or insight that will bring real value to their lives and/or their business, my focus is on them. As a result, I relax and
Patterns when telling stories with data: - What is the dataset? Who generated the dataset and why? - What is the process that underpins the dataset? Given that process, what is missing from the dataset or has been poorly measured? Could other datasets have been generated, and if so, how different could they have been to the one that we have? - What
... See more“We don’t know what capabilities GPT-5 will have until we train it and test it. It might be a medium-size problem right now, but it will become a really big problem in the future as models become more powerful.”
Quotes and
Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident.
Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time.
Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.