If managers or bosses know this, then they should be acutely aware of the impact they have when they fail to recognize the importance to workers of making progress on meaningful work, criticize, take credit for their employees’ work, pass on negative information from on top without filtering and don’t listen when employees try to express grievances.

At first we hug our boundaries in chains. We think “if we tell the girl we like her, she might not like me back”. We think, “If I say I like this candidate, my friends might hate me.” If I say X, everyone else might say Y. And so on. But more and more we start to feel where those boundaries are and we push them out. We push them further and further away from ourselves. Until finally they are so far away it’s as if they don’t exist at all. You don’t need money for that. Or a big house. Or a fancy degree or car. Every day, just push out those boundaries a little further.

We reach for that freedom. We never truly get there. We’re always striving to see how far they can go, just like a little child with her parents. But eventually, the boundaries are so far away we begin to feel the pleasures of true freedom.

And it feels good.

It was drummed into him as a human-sexuality master’s student, Vernacchio said, to never be explicit merely for the sake of being explicit: have a rationale for every last thing you say.

Start doing cool shit, have some of it work out, update me periodically and ask for feedback, take my feedback and use it to do more cool shit.

Actually, I think that’s the formula for getting in touch with basically anyone.

Whatever it is, if the New Yorker asks you to profile a person, or you're simply trying to deepen your understanding of a friend or colleague, you want to figure out what is really keeping him up at night.

Apple always seems to have some way of both putting information out there to get buzz going, but also holding back a key and buzzworthy set of details.

Here's a few ways to establish the strategy of preeminence:

You are not just selling information, you are selling qualitative leadership.

You have to develop empathy for where your prospective clients are.

You have to adopt a different mentality to be preemptive.

Being preemptive means that you are the only viable solution to a problem, that you are the only one who understands.

You have to want to help people and connect the dots for them. Make a commitment to start practicing this strategy in your business today and watch your results soar.

What these resourceful students kept discovering, year after year, was a better way to think about conditional probability. Their way comports with human intuition instead of confounding it. The trick is to think in terms of “natural frequencies” — simple counts of events — rather than the more abstract notions of percentages, odds, or probabilities. As soon as you make this mental shift, the fog lifts.

The more painful the initiation, the more likely we are to want to stick with the program. The more inspiring and metaphoric we make our stories, the less they seem to resemble the dull and comfortably literal world that the rest of us live in. We start to think that we’re different, that the laws don’t apply to us – that all we have to do is let manifest destiny take its course. This denies the fundamental role of hard work and sacrifice and luck in everything. Narration conveniently ignores the day we laid around and watched tv and the week where we were sure we were going to quit but didn’t. It’s just not honest.


Still, that is not easy either. We are wired to think a certain way – linearly, towards purpose, in terms of justification. Ambivalence, in the jungle, was death. The mind strives for congruency and lashes out violently when there isn’t any. It’s also why people wake up one day and have no idea how the world works anymore. That’s why people say things like “Do you have any idea who I am?” with a straight face.

Fear is the enemy of honesty. Not lack of wealth. Fear of losing clients. Fear of pissing off family. Fear of going to hell. Fear people won’t like you. Fear of being alone. I very much have these fears. But fear never made anyone money or anyone happier or healthier.

B) When you’re done listening, listen to the silence. Trust me, people never finish talking. Once you’ve learned something from someone and they are done talking, then skip your turn to talk and let them talk again. They’ll do it. Not because of arrogance. It’s because they have more to teach you. So listen some more.

military information / communication

At a basic level, metrics are incentives. By measuring quality, features, and schedule and discussing them every staff meeting, my people intensely focused on those metrics to the exclusion of other goals. The metrics did not describe the real goals and I distracted the team as a result.

Excellent guide on how to strike partnerships w/big companies, down to the emails

What it really is about is systematically reducing your dependence on luck by building for the audience, and doing absolutely everything you can to improve your app’s chances.

Coaching isn’t Telling<br />
<br />
Coaching techniques ease the pain of tough conversations. Coaching is different than supervision. It is not about telling someone what to do. It is about two people working together toward a positive outcome in performance, behavior or relationships.<br />
<br />
Connect, Learn, Act. Follow these three simple steps every time you engage in a tough conversation. It creates an environment of trust, reminds you to listen more than tell, and creates a proactive action plan.

Wiki on answers to home made whiteboard questions

And narratives matter. Nothing is more central to journalistic practice than the telling of stories. Stories are how we capture, comprehend, explain and deliver the news. Without stories, we would be wandering lost across the landscape of events and sensations. We need a narrative, or we have no organizing idea.

And once we have established such a narrative, everything is under control. Everything, that is, except whatever fails to fit the narrative.

Seth Godin on selling ideas on an office

Getting Buyin