Sixian

I think it's easy, especially when we're talking about technology, to imagine that the solutions are all technical. Most of running your own social networking is social. It's like, how do you get people together in a way where they're feeling something? So to the firepit question, to me, it points to play, it points to art, it points to other... See more

...if you dig a little deeper, the reason indie labels and direct distribution have gained a bit of share is related to the fact that as we spoke about earlier, we've seen the barrier to creating and distributing music collapse.

• The Industry/Reality Gap

Looking at successful examples of 20% beef we see that there’s a common theme of analyzing the gap between theory and industry. The unique vantage point that the consultant has is the vantage point across multiple clients - sometimes across multiple industries too.

The assumption that my desires are all my own—this story that I tell myself—is what the French social scientist René Girard calls “The Romantic Lie.” The Lie is that I want things independently, or that I choose all of the objects of my desire out of some secret desire chamber in my heart. I know a good thing when I see it; I know what’s desirable... See more

The problem is that good specialization is exceptionally hard. And mediocre specialization has two core problems:

1. It attracts less senior, more tightly defined work that traps you in a mode of repeatable execution work


2. It puts you in a well defined box that grinds against your identity

The sweet spot is probably some sort of middle-class position, with relatively secure and easy kind of work. Like say being a government employee in a sleepy department, or a tenured professor. You’re not so far ahead that you have to work harder than average to generate the collective slipstream potential, but you’re not so far back that all the... See more

Morality might pose the question of “what should we do?” but ethics is about “what comes to matter?” And what comes to be excluded in a mattering of what comes to matter.