Sixian

Great positioning, if you can pull it off, can lead to ambiguous work.

The moment when the fiction changes the reality, when the story you are telling has real effects. You might not have begun with yourself in mind, but at this moment you come into sudden, astonishing contact with your “I.”I wanted to provide points of realization akin to what I experienced in the roleplay, and which I also experienced while writing:... See more

One is it was trying to solve a consumer problem with the industry and then two, is technology was enabling this digital consumption of music and the industry just was not forward on that. iTunes was a reaction, if you will, to the ripping services, whereas you could have argued actually it should have been what drove the consumer to the digital... 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

Data network effects can be built and data can be used to create defensibility. So how do you actually do it? There are at least three broad approaches to using data to give your product an advantage.1. Data network effects2. Data scale3. Data embedding

What happens online often shows up in the headlines weeks, months, or even years later. The internet has become the petri dish of culture — the soil in which new movements and novel conversations find root.

Critically the world has ended many times to make room for whiteness – the world-performing imperative that enlists bodies of all kinds to perpetuate secure arrivals and safety. Even more critically, there isn’t one world – one dominant already-made world. The world has never been coherent or okay for many of us. And endings are plentiful – often... See more

In the stream metaphor you don’t experience the Stream by walking around it and looking at it, or following it to its end. You jump in and let it flow past. You feel the force of it hit you as things float by. It’s not that you are passive in the Stream. You can be active. But your actions in there — your blog posts, @ mentions, forum comments —... See more

The biggest fear of independent consultants when specializing is not just that it will narrow your options - but that will take you down a path you already know.