Cam Jones

Narrative distance is the perceived separation between the reader and the unfolding story.

That distance is controlled by the narrator, whoever they are.

A close narrative distance is one where the audience sees what the characters see, senses what they sense, understands their emotions, and can read their thoughts. There tends to be vibrant... See more

I'm not sure which of you need to hear this, but:

If you push yourself to your limits and burn out for a company, you are trading years of your future productivity for minor gains in the present.

Burning out will fuck you up , it's like brain fog or depression, and it takes years to recover

Friendly reminder: most people do burn out if they work... See more

We're navigating the early stages of an AI revolution that's rewriting the rules faster than we can learn them. The business landscape I thought I understood twelve months ago is unrecognizable now. The strategies that worked, the assumptions that held, the paths that seemed obvious, are all scrambled.

In this environment, my usual laser focus is a... See more

In other words, if you can tell a convincing growth story, it's much easier to grow. The corollary, though, is that when a growth company stops growing, when it becomes "mature," it experiences a massive sell-off of its stock, as its share price plummets to a tenth or less of the old "growth" valuation. That's why the biggest tech companies in the... See more

Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of the Ogilvy advertising agency, famously told a story about an office building where people complained that an elevator took too long to arrive. Instead of spending $1 million to make the elevators 5 percent faster, they solved the problem by spending around $100 to add mirrors so people could look at themselves... See more

The group had hit a snag.

It was a familiar sticking point. One they’d run into before. Same disagreement, different day. Competing priorities, different theories about how their business actually runs. It felt like there was a fracture in the room. Subtle but familiar.

There were heads shaking; mutterings to their neighbour; talking past each... See more

Learning is downstream of doing. The order should rarely be reversed. Most real knowledge, knowledge worth attaining, lives in the hands . It must be cultivated gradually, like a garden. Really, it must be grown. Most real knowledge is the result of doing something deliberately for a long time and steadily making small improvements. It requires a... See more

Spotify’s current incentives indicate that they’ll continue moving away from promoting human-made (and thus independently owned) music and toward anonymous first-party (and, inevitably, AI-generated) background music. As the most widely used music streaming platform gradually transforms into an AI white noise company, where does that leave recorded... See more