Space to think
“Thing is, not only is the news all the bloody same, all about the same country and the same handful of main characters, and every news service reports all the incremental updates to the same bloody stories every sixty seconds: but that constant battering tide of zone-flooding shit compresses time and shrinks space to think.“
-Warren Ellis
#Quotes
I quote my father to people almost every day.
“I quote my father to people almost every day. Part of that is because if you dispense your own wisdom, others often dismiss it; if you offer wisdom from a third party, it seems less arrogant and more acceptable. Of course, when you have someone like my dad in your back pocket, you can’t help yourself. You quote him every chance you get.”
-Randy Pausch
#Quotes
“Some men have shrunk so far into dark corners that objects in bright daylight seem quite blurred to them.”
-Pomponius
#Quotes
“The moment you rigidly follow a plan set in your youth, you lock yourself into a position, and the times will ruthlessly pass you by.”
-Robert Greene
#Quotes
The young king from Gilgamesh is in my thoughts this morning:
“He will face a battle he knows not, he will ride a road he knows not.”
“I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen but as the years wasted on nothing ever did unless I caused it.”
-Charles Bukowski
#Quotes
“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.”
-Steve Jobs
#Quotes
“If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?”
-Seymour Cray
#Quotes
“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”
-Albert Schweitzer
#Quotes
Good hybrid meetings are such a balancing act.
You need to maximize the humans who are in immediate proximity to each other - without accidentally alienating everyone else.
And that means ensuring that most everything that happens gracefully degrades to the lowest common denominator connection.
“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
-Oscar Wilde
#Quotes
“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
#Quotes
“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”
-General George S. Patton
#Quotes
”Humanity always reenacts the same bildungsroman. All the principles you learn through your struggles today had been written down by the ancients thousands of years ago.”
-Ken Liu
#Quotes
Top 10 Books that made me a better Product Manager in 2024
If you can only read one book from this list, make it this one:
- Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra
It should be required reading for anyone even tangentially responsible for building tools or services that human beings are expected to use.
Everything by Charles Duhigg
- The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
- Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business
- Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection
Since I’m generally skeptical of books that focus on min-maxing your life like an CRPG, I’ve studiously avoided Duhigg up until 2024 - when I voraciously read everything he’s written in reverse-order.
Possible Futures:
- The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly
- Artificial Intelligence Revolution: How AI Will Change our Society, Economy, and Culture by Robin Li | Goodreads by Robin Li
Robin Li’s (CEO of Baidu) take on the impact and future of AI was particularly insightful. We don’t hear nearly enough about what Baidu, Tencent, Xiaomi, and Alibaba are working on.
The History of Microcomputers & the Rise and (Rise?) of Apple
- Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date Robert X Cringely
- Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made by Andy Hertzfeld
- After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle
Leading humans during chaotic times
- Lincoln on Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times by Donald T. Phillips
See also:
#ProductManagement
Things I Learned in 2024
- The composer Vangelis can’t read or write music.
- Frank Lloyd Wright was not a licensed, certified architect.
- HP Lovecraft didn’t graduate from high school or ever attend college.
- M&Ms were invented for and initially exclusively sold to the military as rations for soldiers. They were originally packaged in cardboard tubes.
- Three Musketeer candy bars originally came in 3 different flavors - strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate.
- Vorarephilia (often shortened to “vore”) is a paraphilia characterized by the erotic desire to be consumed by, or to personally consume, another person or creature.
- The name for the Pandas Python library derived from “panel data” - and not the black and white bears.
- When some US soldiers returned home from overseas at the end of WWII, they had never driven on the righthand side of a road (having learned how to drive only in other countries). Some states issued driver’s licenses to these returning veterans without given them any examination.
- At four and a half years, Graneledone pacifica (the deep sea octopus) holds the record for the longest incubation period of any animal on Earth. The mother slowly starves to death while protecting her eggs. All alone in total darkness, her brain withers away until there is nothing left but a tiny part that is just focused on protecting the eggs. She lives until they all hatch.
- The ancient Sumerian choice to use 10 and 6 as number bases - creating a sexagesimal system (one based on the number of 60, which can be subdivided many ways) - explains why years, days, hours, and minutes are still divided into 12, 24, and 60 throughout the world today.
- Early gramophone equipment could only make recordings that were no more than four and a half minutes long. Musicians began abbreviated their compositions to fit to the limitations of the phonograph. And today, the standard duration of a pop song is four and a half minutes.
- In the samurai film “Sanjuro” a prop failure caused fake blood to dramatically spray rather than trickle. Akira Kurosawa kept the shot and the resulting effect became a staple of subsequent films and anime.
- Emperor Hirohito of Japan was buried wearing a Mickey Mouse watch that he was gifted during a visit to DisneyLand.
- Hurrian Hymn Number 6 is the oldest known piece of human music. It originates in Mesopotamia around 1400 BCE and is a hymn to the goddess Nikkal. Thanks to the detailed notes that were discovered, the hymn has been rerecorded and can be found on Apple Music, Spotify, Youtube, etc.
- Archaeological evidence suggests that humans have been eating popcorn for at least the last 20,000 years. We know that ancient Incans ate it.
- (and speaking of which) colonial housewives in the United States served popcorn with milk and sugar and made the first breakfast cereal.
- Epictetus’ Discourses and Enchiridion have remained continuously in print since 1535.
- Arbutus unede was burned by ancient Greeks and Romans to ward off evil and protect children. This is called a madrone tree in the United States.
- During the Blitz, London’s Natural History Museum was hit by bombs. After water from firemen’s hoses extinguished the fire, it also caused seeds within one of the collections to germinate. Among these was the Albizia julibrissin, the ancient Person silk tree, whose seeds were more than 147 years old at the time.
“If there are no words for certain concepts, we tend to not think of them.”
-Robert Greene
#Quotes
“The business should always be outrunning the processes, so chaos is right where you want to be.”
-Eric Schmidt
(I’m not 100% in agreement but do like the sentiment about embracing creative reinvention)
#Quotes
The dearth of any meaningful innovation (or competition) in the ebook market generally makes me sad.
For example: how about offering the option of excluding any end-matter (appendices, indices, etc) from our Percentage Read calculations?