Sixian

The curators asked if ‘a sharp object could be an erotic object – or a square object or something that is not round, or that does not have a smooth texture?’ It seemed that the answer was generally no: curves were essential.

In practice, most of the valuable insights you will glean from a scaled-up dataset in a particular domain will come early on. More data just confirms those insights. Further, the number of insights that will matter enough for customers to pay you or choose you over other providers is typically small. So data scale can give you these early 1-3 key... See more

Instead, especially in the early days of consulting, you’re chasing the greatest possible surface area of distinct clients in an attempt to better understand the interplay of what you’re good at, what people will pay for and who you want to be.

It’s by keeping our work legible that we keep the door open to the next generation of our co-workers. What works for them also works for us, because whether you are just out of school or have twenty years of experience, you’ll eventually end up in the same spot: your first year of making websites.

“People are good at learning by imitation,” Housel notes. “But the hidden nature of wealth makes it hard to imitate others and learn from their ways.” We can’t imitate many of the actions that lead to wealth because the most important action that leads to wealth—not spending every dollar we make—is an anti-action. Wealth comes, in part, from the... See more

But at the grand narrative level, everybody is getting off the big turnpike, and there is not going to be a grand narrative slipstream for a while. But smaller scale narrative slipstreams — from family to city-scale — may still be viable.

You bought an album, it was a bundled product. Back in the days, singles weren't even a big part of the business. So, you had to buy 12, 15 songs from an artist in an album format. You had to pay upfront for the perpetual use of that and every incremental piece of music you bought cost you money. You had to have this high threshold for wanting to... See more

The “publish or perish” model that nudges people to rack up more followers is not the pinnacle of creative freedom; it’s indentured spiritual servitude.