“Add things until it starts sucking, take things away until it stops getting better.”

It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past. This list is me talking to a previous version of myself.

Now, you’ve probably figured out I’m not actually talking about mining or farming: this is a metaphor for running a software company. You can either see founding a company as something you’re doing because you want to produce good software, or you can see it as something you do so you can sell your stock and make a killing and move on.

Now here's what puzzles me about this formulation. It seems like, generally speaking, that our understandings of loving and liking are informed, to a certain extent, by the quantitative model. That is, liking seems to be the lower bar when compared to love. Love seems to be the harder and deeper of the two.

Is this soup aspirational enough? Does it represent people as they are, or people as they want to be? “How are we measuring our soup analytics?” they ask.

The obvious answer was to look at planes that returned from missions, count up all the bullet holes in various places, and then put extra armor in the areas that attracted the most fire.

Obvious but wrong.

So, it really was a decision that I had to make for myself, and the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called — which only a nerd would call — a “regret minimization framework.”

Your keyboard will have different things in it than mine does, of course. But, it’s impossible to know what’s in there until you’ve made the clackity noise for a few minutes. You think you know what’s in there. But you don’t. It’s not your brain that makes the clackity noise, it’s your fingers.

After all, who is likely to be the more productive contributor to the company, and to the world — the person who is healthy, rested, well-balanced, full of energy, and clear of mind, or the sleep-deprived, overweight, heart-attack-waiting-to-happen, psychologically unexamined, self-critical maniac? Who is more likely to be present enough to see the next breakthrough? Who is more likely to analyze problems clearly, for what they really are, instead of what they are assumed to be?

I don't think that many businesspeople start their business with the idea that they can make a lot of money. Most people feel that they can create something that is going to make a difference to other people's lives – that is how they start their businesses.

96% of cancer patients in a hospital claim to be in better health than the average cancer patient.

93% of motorists consider themselves to be safer-than-average drivers.

90% students see themselves as more intelligent than the average student.

94% of college professors said they are better-than-average teachers.

Ironically, 92% said they are less biased than average, too.

For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.