Total efficiency constrains us. We become super invested in maintaining the status quo because that is where we excel. Innovation is a threat. Change is terrifying. Being perfect at something is dangerous if it’s the only thing you can do.
When your goal is to be the most efficient machine possible, your work never ends. We never reach the point of being done, no matter how many daily widgets you churn out. Productivity, without barriers, is a race to the bottom, a race where no matter how fast we go -- we never truly arrive.
If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.
Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise... See more
Identify the set of things that you love to do and that you do well. You don’t need to be the best in the world at something. People often succeed because they have a set of various skills that don’t normally go together.
Entrepreneurship is gonna look a lot more like art than business because the only moat left will be taste, not technicality. The role of art has always been to detect the signs of cultural change—artists find creative arbitrages, saying what people think before they realize it themselves. So the future of consumer products depends on how well you... See more