Sterling Proffer

To understand your adjacent users, it is helpful to understand the attributes of who is successful today and why they are successful. The reason this is helpful is that your adjacent user is different on one or more of these attributes (but not all). These attributes create vectors of expansion.

The “good computer” which Graphcore, a British chip designer, intends to build over the next few years might seem to be suffering from a ludicrous case of nominal understatement. Its design calls for it to carry out 1019 calculations per second. If your laptop can do 100bn calculations a second—which is fair for an average laptop—then the Good... See more

If you were to study some of the most admired creative thinkers, writers, and artists to have ever lived, you would find that all shared a passion for their work, an intense desire to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet, when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize... See more

“A writer,” said Thomas Mann, “is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” More difficult, because there is more for you to do, more that you know how to do, and because you hold yourself to higher standards.