teshknowledgenotes

[teshknowledgenotes]

DR K DREAMS

Generally speaking, we don't think about chasing something or having a dream as actively harmful, we generally think about it as everyone has dreams, and that's how we have direction. But we don't realize for every dream that we have can create a cognitive strain on us, and prevent us from accomplishing things. The more dreams we have, the more stuck we will be. Your brain has something called a cognitive load, your brain can only handle so much stuff at the same time. To lower cognitive load, you would have to make amends for not being able to do everything dream that you have and closing off certain dreams or goals. For every desire that you have, there is a part of you that still wants that desire. All of these tasks that we have will weigh down our minds, and our ability to complete tasks decreases. With a bunch of crap in your mind, your ability to realize a dream is sabotaged. The first thing we need to do to clear our cognitive mind is to check off or strike off things on our list that we can't do. We are taught to chase dreams and not give up on them, but we don't realize that chasing too many dreams can cause issues. You have so many dreams that you don't even know where to get started. Even if you try to get started, your mind tells you what about all those other things and that can be incredibly paralyzing. Each of these is emotionally painful which is why we haven't done it.

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DR K CHASE YOUR DREAMS

It's the fear of not making a mistake that causes regret in your life, we try not to make a mistake because we don't want to live with regrets, it's our avoidance of making mistakes, that causes us to live with regrets.

  You can't see the future, if you can't see the future, you can't make the right choice.

  Wasted time is the price of figuring it out, how are you supposed to know at the beginning of life, what's going to make you happy? You can't know that. People can tell you, your parents can tell you, do this, do that, study architecture, go to medical school. But how would they know, you don't even know. Figuring out what you want in life, takes experimentation.

The first thing you have to do is realize that you could be making a mistake, it is to not blame you for making a mistake.

Everyone wants to find their passion, but don't want to make mistakes to figure things out.  

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RICK RUBIN ANDREW HUBERMAN

Ideas are like dreams, if you think about your dreams they don't necessarily make sense, when you start writing them down, they might come back to you, they will be a series of abstract images, and maybe someday in the future, you'll be able to look back and understand what they mean, maybe not. That's sort of how art-making processing works, we are making things and looking for feelings in ourselves. It could be a feeling of excitement, enthusiasm, a feeling of interest, a feeling of curiosity, a feeling leaning forward, we are following that energy in our body.

I think the English language is inefficient to drill down on creativity, creativity is closer to magic than science.

I had the advantage early in my career, starting to make music without experience, which was helpful because I didn't know which rules I was breaking. It wasn't an intentional breaking of rules I just did what seemed right to me, but I didn't realize that I was doing things that other people wouldn't do.

We can decide to make a painting but we are going to only choose to use green and red, the only color we are allowed to use, how do we solve the problem, knowing all we have is green and red. Because otherwise if there are an infinite number of choices, anything can be anything, sometimes more choices are not better, and limiting your palette to something manageable forces you to solve problems differently, now in our digital age music-wise, you can make anything digitally. There was a time when if you didn't have a guitar in the studio you couldn't record guitar, now you can call anything up, there are infinite choices.

Infinite choices don't necessarily work up to better compositions or better final works, understanding how you feel in the face of other voices, without second guessing yourself, is probably the single most important thing to practice as an artist, or skillset to develop as an artist, know how you feel and own your feelings.

[teshknowledgenotes]

DR K IMPOSTER SYNDROME

Imposter syndrome is an adaptive response, it's something that's a painful adaptation, and it's an adaptation that leads to suffering.

A normal person works hard and then accomplishes something, when they succeed at something they feel good about themselves, and they go out and they celebrate. On the other side, someone with imposter syndrome works hard, and they achieve something they feel terrified of, they feel like they got so lucky like they barely scraped by. After they get an A they double their efforts they work twice as hard, they don't relax at all, they work harder. In your mind your maintaining this elaborate facade, that could come crumbling down on you at any time, you can't relax at all. If you make a single mistake everything comes tumbling down, you have no sense of reserve, no resilience, you can't rely on things not working out for you, and you are on the verge of screwing up. There is no room for relaxation. Now we come to see that someone with imposter syndrome, actually leads to more success which is why you have more and more imposters in successful places. I've never seen imposter syndrome in the homeless shelter where I worked. You can't be diagnosed with imposter syndrome, because it's not officially recognized by psychologists.

Imposter syndrome is reinforced through particular cognitive patterns. Pattern 1: Not attributing success to effort. People with imposter syndrome, devalue efforts that lead to success. Anytime you are successful pay attention to the first thing that your mind says, which is I'm lucky, change that to what did I do to deserve this?

Pattern 2: Attribute other people's success to hard work.

Pattern 3: An emphasis on pleasing others. People with imposter syndrome are very concerned with external opinions and external validation. Develop a sense of price in our accomplishments.

Imposter syndrome is harmful, it's also adaptive. For someone with imposter syndrome instead of celebrating when they do a good job, they do is panic and work twice as hard.

When people take pride in themselves instead of relying other people's validation that's when they see imposter syndrome go away.

[teshknowledgenotes]

CAL NEWPORT YOUTUBE NOTES

Deep work is when you're focusing without distractions, on cognitively demanding tasks, which is something we've all done, but we have never really given it a name.

WHY DEEP WORK IS RELEVANT TO KNOWLEDGE WORKERS? The more comfortable you are with deep work, the more comfortable you are falling into a state of intense concentration, and the easier time you will have to master complicated things. In an increasingly competitive knowledge economy, the ability to keep up with rapidly changing systems and ideas is crucial, or you'll be left behind. It helps you produce more things and higher quality things in the same amount of time.

HOW TO SCHEDULE DEEP WORK? Time blocking is very important, if you're facing your workday, don't let your inbox or to-do list drive you. Don't just come into your day and think, what do I want to do next? Here's the time available let me make a plan for it. I have a meeting here, I have an appointment here, here's what's left what do I want to do with it? This half-hour I'm going to work on this, this 90 minutes I'm going to do this. Blocking out in advance is very effective, you're going to get a lot more done than going through your day saying, what's next?

BOREDOM IS ESSENTIAL FOR PRODUCTIVITY You have to have some boredom in your regular schedule or your mind is going to form a Pavlovian connection as soon as I form boredom I get stimuli. Once it forms that connection it's not going to tolerate deep work. Your mind should get used to the idea that you don't get stimuli otherwise you can't write for 3 hours. Boredom drives us towards action. Embrace boredom regularly. What has happened in the era of the smartphone is we can eliminate boredom from our life. The smartphone can allow you to go through an entire day without that feeling of I'm bored, I want some novel stimuli. You can always deliver that to yourself with a smartphone. The reason this is a problem for deep workers is that over time it builds a very strong association. Boredom leads to phone stimuli. A key foundation to succeeding with deep work is to break the Pavlovian connection. The best way to break this basis is just to experience boredom where you just remain bored. Your brain then breaks that connection and rewrites the script. Another way to train yourself to do deep work is to take a professional problem and go for a walk. Walking works better than sitting and running. While you're walking you try to make progress on this problem, just in your head. Another way to train yourself to do deep work is to get a timer and say "I'm gonna work on this particular task deeply. I'm going to start my timer and I'm not gonna do any distraction, no glances, no just checks, no inboxes, no phones, no conversations, til the timer gets down to zero."

DO LESS, DO BETTER, AND KNOW WHY Have a couple of bets placed on a couple of things on a roulette table, but not too many things. Try to do those things very well, and see how it goes. A small number of things try to do them very well. Knowing why means having some sort of connection to value. In general, say this is worth doing and see where it leads.

FOCUS IS ESSENTIAL & CONTEXT SWITCHING IS BAD A key aspect of focus is not that you're concentrating hard on something, it's that you do it without distraction. Context switching kills the human capacity to think. If I change what I'm paying attention to, to something different, even if it's brief, and bring it back to the main thing I'm doing, that causes a huge cognitive pile up that makes it very hard to think clearly. Even if you think, I'm writing code and all my tabs are closed, I'm not multitasking, and I have no notifications. But every 5 minutes you quickly check, your inbox or your phone, which initiates a context shift in your brain. You rip yourself halfway through what you're focused on and go back to what you're doing, you trying to switch back to the original thing, but your brain is in the process of switching to these emails and understanding the context. Your result for doing anything goes down. Your fatiguing too, by the time you get to midday, you can't think anymore. You've exhausted yourself.

OVERLOAD The thing that is burning people out, the thing that is causing a lot of dissatisfaction, or one of the many factors of knowledge work is having more on your plate than you can easily imagine accomplishing and having an incoming stream of more piling on top of that. You enter this state of having an overwhelming amount of obligations and three different things happen. There is mental short-circuiting that happens, and that's in charge of making long-term plans for our goals. That thing short circuits when you give it seventy-five different obligations and seven hundred different e-mails. If the brain cannot figure out a plan to deal with these certain things, then you feel anxious and overwhelmed. The short-circuiting effect directly makes us feel bad. When you have more than you can handle, when you're in a stage of chronic overload, each of those things can take up most of your schedule. If all your time is spent servicing the small things, you make very little progress on the things that remain, more things pile up, then you get farther behind and it becomes miserable. All the stuff that makes an impact, you're very rarely doing. This is why we feel bad because we are dealing with an overhaul of work. The work should stop at a central system from which you can pull when you have free time. When you are done working on what you have, you can pull something else. When you burst and throw it on your plate with no constriction. Flexibility is critical. During industrial hours, if you work on an assembly line, the main thing that matters is how much time you have to work on that assembly line. The union would fight for fewer hours, that's where the 40-hour workweek came from. It's not the number of hours, it's the number of things you have on your plate, you will be miserable until you solve that problem. You need to figure out how to re-engineer your work system so that you don't have too much on your plate and cause a lot of misery. Pull-based systems, are when you have a small number of things on your plate, but you work on them intensely. Then pull on the next one when you're finished. From a company's perspective, more things will get done at a higher quality, employees will be happier, and it's a bit of a win-win situation.

[teshknowledgenotes]

Andrew Huberman Notes

When it comes to wanting to shift the way you want to function, to get better or to perform better, or to move away from things like addictive behavior, it's foolish to think you can do that by changing your thoughts first, the way to control our nervous system and feel the way we want to feel is, is to run that backward, if you change your behavior, then your thoughts, your feelings, and your perceptions change.

People must take control of their minds and body in a way that forces them to calm down, to reduce their stress response. You're too activated, you're too alert, you're too agitated and you want to be less alert, less activated, and less agitated. There is another friction where the world around you is happening very fast and you feel buried and overwhelmed, we need to get more activated, we need more energy, and we need to be able to learn more about life when we're feeling overwhelmed. For people trying to navigate stress, they need to understand what kind of stress they're dealing with. Are you exhausted and having to get your energy up, or is your energy too high and you're having a hard time getting your energy down? The solutions to those are quite different. Trying to control the mind with the mind is like trying to control fog, it's vapor you're never going to grab it. The nervous system includes the brain but also all the connections to the body and back again. When you can't control your mind, you want to do something purely mechanical.

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SIMON SINEK NOTES

HOW TO STOP HOLDING YOURSELF BACK The human brain cannot comprehend the negative, it is incapable. We reinforce things when we put things in the negative. "I can't do this" vs "I'm going to keep doing this" It's a huge thing when you convert things to affirmative. When you tell a pilot, don't hit the obstacle they will hit the obstacle, if you ever see skiers, ski through trees. If you go through hills on skis and keep going "Don't hit a tree, don't hit a tree, don't hit a tree". You will be only looking at trees, and you will hit a tree. As opposed to "Follow the path, follow the path" You will only see the path. If you focus on the obstacles, all you see are the obstacles, if you focus on the path, all you will see is the path, you get to focus on your career, it's your perspective.

ALL TIMES ARE UNCERTAIN There is no such thing as a certainty outcome, there is a huge difference between finite mindsets and infinite mindsets. A finite-minded leader is afraid of surprises and does not like uncertainty which is why they work in very short time frames. You can affect a lot of certainties if you only think quarter to quarter. If you think in 5-year increments you know we have no control over those outcomes. Finite-minded players, like to play with short time frames because it makes them feel better, even though the game is infinite. Infinite-minded players embrace uncertainty and find opportunity in surprise. All times are uncertain, there is never a time in history that has been certain.

NO ONE IS BORN WITH SELF-CONFIDENCE Our self-confidence is determined based on how we were raised, the parents we had, the teachers we had, and the bosses we had. If someone is insecure we have to prove to them over and over and over again, because we don't know where they came from. You have a problem, you are not the problem, that's the point, too many times people have been told that there is a problem. It's going to time and patience to build confidence again.  

HOW INSTANT GRATIFICATION IS RUINING YOUR LIFE We are seeing an increase in suicide rates, we're seeing an increase in deaths due to drug overdose, and we're seeing more kids taking leaves of absence due to depression. We will see a scenario, we will have an entire population going through life, never finding joy, they will never find deep fulfillment in work or in life, they will just waft through life.

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ANDREW HUBERMAN CONTROLLING YOUR DOPAMINE

WHAT IS DOPAMINE

Dopamine controls how you feel right now, and how you feel an hour from now, it has everything to do with your level of motivation, your level of desire, and your willingness to push through effort. Dopamine is the primary determinant of how motivated we are, how excited we are, how outward-facing we are, and how willing we are to lean into life and pursue things. Dopamine is a universal currency for moving us towards goals, how much dopamine is in our body at a time, compared to how much was in our system a minute ago, and how much we remember enjoying a particular moment in the past. That dictates your so-called quality of life and desire you pursue things. Dopamine is a currency and it's the way that you track pleasure, how you track success, it's how you track whether you're doing well or doing poorly. If your dopamine is low you will not feel motivated, if your dopamine is high, you will feel motivated. If you understand dopamine, you will be in a perfect position to use it, you will be in an excellent position to modulate and control your dopamine release, for optimization and drive.

PLEASURE-PAIN BALANCE We all have a dopamine setpoint, if we continue to participate in dopamine-stimulating activities, eventually we won't experience the same joy from those behaviors. Pleasure-pain balance is based on how much dopamine is there and how much is ready to be released into the system. If you do something which releases huge levels of dopamine, pleasure drops because there isn't enough dopamine to release after. Dopamine levels can drop in imperceptible ways until it reaches a threshold of low dopamine, and we don't get pleasure from anything anymore.

MODULATING DOPAMINE LEVELS Exercise increases dopamine, exercise has different levels of dopamine depending on how much a person enjoys that exercise. A key thing to dopamine is to understand the peaks and the baseline and how they influence one another because once you do that, you can start to make really good choices in the short run and in the long run, to maintain your level of dopamine baseline, and still get the peaks, and get elevated desire and motivation. A sufficiently high-level healthy dopamine level is what drives the evolution of our species, and drives the level of life progression, dopamine is a good thing.

INTERMITTENT RELEASE OF DOPAMINE The real key is to chase high levels of dopamine release every time we engage in activities. Intermittent reward schedules are the primary schedule of how casinos keep you gambling. The central schedule by which elusive partners keep you texting. Intermittent schedules are the way the internet and social media and all highly engaging activities, keep you motivated and pursuing. There is something called dopamine reward prediction error, when we expect something to happen we are highly motivated to pursue it, if it happens great we get the reward, and the reward comes in various chemical forms, including dopamine, we are more likely to engage in that behavior again. This is the basis of casino gambling, how they get you to go again and again, even though you're losing money. Intermittent schedules can keep you motivated and engaged, make sure dopamine peaks don't occur too often, and vary how much dopamine you experience with that activity. Whatever activities you'd like to continue over time, pay attention to how much dopamine you get and modulate accordingly. Examples of how to modulate dopamine, maybe do something alone that you usually would do in a group so it's a different experience, don't listen to music when exercising if it's part of why you enjoy exercise, changing colors on your phone so it's less pleasurable. Dopamine controls the perception of time, when we engage in an activity for the sole purpose of reward, time will feel longer because we are not releasing dopamine during the effort, only the reward. Access reward from the process and associate dopamine release from friction and challenge you are in during effort instead of only once goal is achieved, convince yourself the effort is part of the good part.

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Ed Mylett Notes

What's something that you need to drop that's no longer needed? Is it a person? Is it a thought? Is it behavior? Is it an emotion? One of those things you are probably carrying with you from the past is that you needed to get through a circumstance, through a relationship, an obstacle, a setback, a failure or to produce the results you currently get. But that thought, that emotion, that behavior, that person, is no longer needed for you to go to the next level of your identity, the next level of your performance, the next level of yourself. If you are stuck, you are stuck at a story, the story you're telling yourself that doesn't serve you anymore, and you have to evaluate what that story is. There are all types of stories we are telling ourselves that don't serve us anymore, maybe it's a story about your past, a story about your parents, a story about previous relationships, a story about a success you used to have, you keep talking about that doesn't serve you to get to the next level. What you have achieved to this point t that story you keep talking about, every second you spend in that story about some degree, some relationship, some successful business you had in the past. Every time you live in that story your strip time and focus from the news story. What's the new story your telling yourself? You can't have a new identity without a new story. You keep repeating this story to yourself, simultaneously trying to create a new identity, you can't take that old story to the new identity. One of the things we need to begin a new identity is to tell a new story. What's your new story? Who are you now? What are you all about now? Where are you going now? What is this new version of you? At any point in your life, you can create your script, you can write a new script anytime you want. Any time you want you can become a new character.

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SELF IMAGE NOTES

The tiredness you feel is trying to be an artificial, idealized image of yourself you've created in your mind. Understand that your image of yourself isn't real. - Quora Answer

A good self-image is vital to our happiness and our goals in life. Our self-image is the conception of the sort of person I am. Each of us builds a self-image out of our beliefs of ourselves. It's unconsciously formed from past experiences. Our successes and failures, our humiliations and triumphs, and the way we were treated by our parents. It determines the way we interpret other people's reactions to us. In short, this self-image we have of ourselves is a life governing device. Our feelings, thoughts, actions, and even our abilities. We are the person we believe ourselves to be, and we are consistently that person in everything.

Our self-image can be changed. If for some reason we have developed an image that is too limited to achieve our maximum results, that image can be enlarged and improved. We can't outgrow the limits we impose on ourselves, our thoughts, habits, and abilities must be those we believe ourselves to be. We can set new limits but we can't surpass the limits of our current image.

We form a mental image of ourselves through experience and we can change ourselves the same way, through experience. If that experience is not available through us, we can through psychology create that experience, synthetically. Scientists agree that the human nervous system is incapable of distinguishing between actual experience and the same experience imagined vividly. Worry is a good example, when a person worries about something he projects himself mentally, physically, and emotionally into a situation that hasn't even occurred.

If a person has feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, humiliation, and eventually headaches and an upset stomach. As far as his mind and body are concerned he has failed, and if he worries about it long enough and concentrates on failure long enough he will upset himself to the point that he will fail. - Earl Nightingale

[teshknowledgenotes]

CAL NEWPORT YOUTUBE NOTES

Deep work is when you're focusing without distractions, on cognitively demanding tasks, which is something we've all done, but we have never really given it a name.

WHY DEEP WORK IS RELEVANT TO KNOWLEDGE WORKERS? The more comfortable you are with deep work, the more comfortable you are falling into a state of intense concentration, and the easier time you will have to master complicated things. In an increasingly competitive knowledge economy, the ability to keep up with rapidly changing systems and ideas is crucial, or you'll be left behind. It helps you produce more things and higher quality things for the same amount of time.

HOW TO SCHEDULE DEEP WORK? Time blocking is very important, if you're facing your workday, don't let your inbox or to-do list drive you. Don't just come into your day and think, what do I want to do next? Here's the time available let me make a plan for it. I have a meeting here, I have an appointment here, here's what's left what do I want to do with it. This half-hour I'm going to work on this, this 90 minutes I'm going to do this. Blocking out in advance is very effective, you're going to get a lot more done than going through your day saying, what's next?

BOREDOM IS ESSENTIAL FOR PRODUCTIVITY You have to have some boredom in your regular schedule or your mind is going to form a Pavlovian connection as soon as I form boredom I get stimuli. Once it forms that connection it's not going to tolerate deep work. Your mind should get used to the idea that you don't get stimuli otherwise you can't write for 3 hours. Boredom drives us towards action. Embrace boredom regularly. What has happened in the era of the smartphone is we can eliminate boredom from our life. The smartphone can allow you to go through an entire day without that feeling of I'm bored, I want some novel stimuli. You can always deliver that to yourself with a smartphone. The reason this is a problem for deep workers is that over time it builds a very strong association. Boredom leads to phone stimuli. A key foundation to succeeding with deep work is to break the Pavlovian connection. The best way to break this basis is just to experience boredom where you just remain bored. Your brain then breaks that connection and rewrites the script. Another way to train yourself to do deep work is to take a professional problem and go for a walk. Walking works better than sitting and running. While you're walking you try to make progress on this problem, just in your head. Another way to train yourself to do deep work is to get a timer and say "I'm gonna work on this particular task deeply. I'm going to start my timer and I'm not gonna do any distraction, no glances, no just checks, no inboxes, no phones, no conversations, til the timer gets down to zero."

DO LESS, DO BETTER, KNOW WHY Have a couple of bets placed on a couple of things on a roulette table, but not too many things. Try to do those things very well, see how it goes. A small number of things try to do them very well. Know why means have some sort of connection to value. In general, say this is worth doing and see where it leads.

FOCUS IS ESSENTIAL & CONTEXT SWITCHING IS BAD A key aspect of focus is not that you're concentrating hard on something, it's that you do it without distraction. Context switching kills the human capacity to think. If I change what I'm paying attention to, to something different, even if it's brief, and bring it back to the main thing I'm doing, that causes a huge cognitive pile up that makes it very hard to think clearly. Even if you think, I'm writing code and all my tabs are closed, I'm not multitasking, and I have no notifications. But every 5 minutes you quickly check, your inbox or your phone, which initiates a context shift in your brain. You rip yourself halfway through what you're focused on and go back to what you're doing, your trying to switch back to the original thing, but your brain is in the process of switching to these emails and understanding the context. Your result for doing anything goes down. Your fatiguing too, by the time you get to midday, you can't think anymore. You've exhausted yourself.

OVERLOAD The thing that is burning people out, the thing that is causing a lot of dissatisfaction, or one of the many factors of knowledge work is having more on your plate than you can easily imagine accomplishing and having an incoming stream of more piling on top of that. You enter this state of having an overwhelming amount of obligations and three different things happen. There is mental short-circuiting that happens, that's in charge of making long term plans for our goals. That thing short circuits when you give it seventy-five different obligations and seven hundred different e-mails. If the brain cannot figure out a plan to deal with these certain things, then you feel anxious and overwhelmed. The short-circuiting effect directly makes us feel bad. When you have more than you can handle, when you're in a stage of chronic overload, each of those things can take up most of your schedule. If all your time is spent servicing the small things, you make very little progress on the things that remain, more things pile up, then you get farther behind and it becomes miserable. All the stuff that makes an impact, you're very rarely doing. This is why we feel bad because we are dealing with an overhaul of work. The work should stop at a central system from which you can pull when you have free time. When you are done working on what you have, you can pull something else. When you burst and throw it on your plate with no constriction. Flexibility is critical. During industrial hours, if you work on an assembly line, the main thing that matters is how much time you have to work on that assembly line. The union would fight for fewer hours, that's where the 40-hour workweek came from. It's not the number of hours, it's the number of things you have on your plate, you will be miserable until you solve that problem. You need to figure out how to re-engineer your work system so that you don't have too much on your plate and cause a lot of misery. Pull-based systems, are when you have a small number of things on your plate, but you work on them intensely. Then pull on the next one when you're finished. From a company's perspective, more things will get done at a higher quality, employees will be happier, it's a bit of a win-win situation.

[teshknowledgenotes]

MAKER VS MANAGER

NOTES TAKEN FROM https://fs.blog/maker-vs-manager/

A manager’s day is, as a rule, sliced up into tiny slots, each with a specific purpose decided in advance. Many of those slots are used for meetings, calls, or emails. The manager’s schedule may be planned for them by a secretary or assistant.

Managers spend a lot of time, “putting out fires” and doing reactive work. An important call or email comes in, so it gets answered. An employee makes a mistake or needs advice, so the manager races to sort it out. To focus on one task for a substantial block of time, managers need to make an effort to prevent other people from distracting them.

Managers don’t necessarily need the capacity for deep focus — they primarily need the ability to make fast, smart decisions. In a three-minute meeting, they have the potential to generate (or destroy) enormous value through their decisions and expertise.

A maker’s schedule is different. It is made up of long blocks of time reserved for focusing on particular tasks, or the entire day might be devoted to one activity. Breaking their day up into slots of a few minutes each would be the equivalent of doing nothing.

A maker could be the stereotypical reclusive novelist, locked away in a cabin in the woods with a typewriter, no internet, and a bottle of whiskey to hand. Or they could be a Red Bull–drinking Silicon Valley software developer working in an open-plan office with their headphones on. Although interdisciplinary knowledge is valuable, makers do not always need a wide circle of competence. They need to do one thing well and can leave the rest to the managers.

Meetings are pricey for makers, restricting the time available for their real work, so they avoid them, batch them together, or schedule them at times of day when their energy levels are low. As Paul Graham writes:

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

It makes sense. The two work styles could not be more different.

A manager’s job is to, well, manage other people and systems. The point is that their job revolves around organizing other people and making decisions. As Andrew Grove writes in High Output Management:

…a big part of a middle manager’s work is to supply information and know-how, and to impart a sense of the preferred method of handling things to the groups under his control and influence. A manager also makes and helps to make decisions. Both kinds of basic managerial tasks can only occur during face-to-face encounters, and therefore only during meetings. Thus, I will assert again that a meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but rather using the time spent in them as efficiently as possible.

A maker’s job is to create some form of tangible value. Makers work alone or under a manager, although they might have people working with them. “Maker” is a very broad category. A maker could be a writer, artist, software developer, carpenter, chef, biohacker, web designer, or anyone else who designs, creates, serves, and thinks.

Making anything significant requires time — lots of it — and having the right kind of schedule can help. Take a look at the quintessential maker schedule of the prolific (to say the least) writer Isaac Asimov, as described in his memoir:

I wake at five in the morning. I get to work as early as I can. I work as long as I can. I do this every day of the week, including holidays. I don’t take vacations voluntarily and I try to do my work even when I’m on vacation. (And even when I’m in the hospital.)

In other words, I am still and forever in the candy store [where he worked as a child]. Of course, I’m not waiting on customers; I’m not taking money and making change; I’m not forced to be polite to everyone who comes in (in actual fact, I was never good at that). I am, instead, doing things I very much want to do — but the schedule is there; the schedule that was ground into me; the schedule you would think I would have rebelled against once I had the chance.

We all know the benefits of a solid routine — it helps us to work smarter, look after our health, plan the trajectory of our days, achieve goals, and so on. That has all been discussed a million times and doubtless will be discussed a million more. But how often do we think about how our days are actually broken up, about how we choose (or are forced) to segment them? If you consider yourself a maker, do you succeed in structuring your day around long blocks of focused work, or does it get chopped up into little slices that other people can grab? If you regard yourself as a manager, are you available for the people who need your time? Are those meetings serving a purpose and getting high-leverage work done, or are you just trying to fill up an appointment book? If you do both types of work, how do you draw a line between them and communicate that boundary to others?

Cal Newport writes:

We spend much of our days on autopilot—not giving much thought to what we are doing with our time. This is a problem. It’s difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don’t face, without flinching, your current balance between deep and shallow work, and then adopt the habit of pausing before action and asking, “What makes the most sense right now?”

There are two key reasons that the distinction between maker and manager schedules matters for each of us and the people we work with.

First, defining the type of schedule we need is more important than worrying about task management systems or daily habits. If we try to do maker work on a manager schedule or managerial work on a maker schedule, we will run into problems.

Second, we need to be aware of which schedule the people around us are on so we can be considerate and let them get their best work done.

We shouldn’t think of either type of work as superior, as the two are interdependent. Managers would be useless without makers and vice versa. It’s the clash that can be problematic. Paul Graham notes that some managers damage their employees’ productivity when they fail to recognize the distinction between the types of schedules. Managers who do recognize the distinction will be ahead of the game. As Graham writes:

Each type of schedule works fine by itself. Problems arise when they meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager’s schedule, they’re in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they know that some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work in.

Makers generally avoid meetings and similar time-based commitments that don’t have a direct impact on their immediate work. A 30-minute meeting does not just take up half an hour of an afternoon. It bisects the day, creating serious problems. Let’s say that a computer programmer has a meeting planned at 2 pm. When they start working in the morning, they know they have to stop later and are prevented from achieving full immersion in the current project. As 2 pm rolls around, they have to pause whatever they are doing — even if they are at a crucial stage — and head to the meeting. Once it finishes and they escape back to their real work, they experience attention residue and the switching costs of moving between tasks. It takes them a while — say, 15 to 20 minutes — to reach their prior state of focus. Taking that into account, the meeting has just devoured at least an hour of their time. If it runs over or if people want to chat afterward, the effect is even greater. And what if they have another meeting planned at 4 pm? That leaves them with perhaps an hour to work, during which they keep an eye on the clock to avoid being late.

Software entrepreneur Ray Ozzie has a specific technique for handling potential interruptions — the four-hour rule. When he’s working on a product, he never starts unless he has at least four uninterrupted hours to focus on it. Fractured blocks of time, he discovered, result in more bugs, which later require fixing.

In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain describes an experiment to figure out the characteristics of superior programmers:

…more than six hundred developers from ninety-two different companies participated. Each designed, coded, and tested a program, working in his normal office space during business hours. Each participant was also assigned a partner from the same company. The partners worked separately, however, without any communication, a feature of the games that turned out to be critical.

When the results came in, they revealed an enormous performance gap. The best outperformed the worst by a 10:1 ratio. The top programmers were also about 2.5 times better than the median. When DeMarco and Lister tried to figure out what accounted for this astonishing range, the factors that you’d think would matter—such as years of experience, salary, even the time spent completing the work—had little correlation to outcome. Programmers with ten years’ experience did no better than those with two years. The half who performed above the median earned less than 10 percent more than the half below—even though they were almost twice as good. The programmers who turned in “zero-defect” work took slightly less, not more, time to complete the exercise than those who made mistakes.

It was a mystery with one intriguing clue: programmers from the same companies performed at more or less the same level, even though they hadn’t worked together. That’s because top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said that their workspace was acceptably private, compared to only 19 percent of the worst performers; 76 percent of the worst performers but only 38 percent of the top performers said that people often interrupted them needlessly.

A common argument makers hear from people on a different schedule is that they should “just take a break for this!” — “this” being a meeting, call, coffee break, and so on. But a distinction exists between time spent not doing their immediate work and time spent taking a break.

Pausing to drink some water, stretch, or get fresh air is the type of break that recharges makers and helps them focus better when they get back to work. Pausing to hear about a coworker’s marital problems or the company’s predictions for the next quarter has the opposite effect. A break and time spent not working are very different. One fosters focus, the other snaps it.

Remember Arnold Bennett’s words: “You have to live on this 24 hours of time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use … is a matter of the highest urgency.”

[teshknowledgenotes]

Bjarke Stroustrup Notes

We can describe the process of developing a program as having four stages:

1) Analysis: What's the problem? What does the user want? What does the user need? What can the user afford? What kind of reliability do we need?

2) Design: How do we solve the problem? What should be the overall structure of the system? Which parts does it consist of? How do those parts communicate with each other? How does the system communicate with its users?

3) Programming: Express the solution to the problem (the design) in code. Write the code in a way that meets all constraints (time, space, money, reliability, and so on). Make sure that the code is correct and maintained able.

4) Testing: Make sure the system works correctly under all circumstances required by systematically trying it out. Programming plus testing is often called implement" on. This simple split of software development into four parts is a simplification.

Thick books have been written on each of these four topics and more books are still about how they relate to each other. One important thing to note is that these stages of development are not independent and do not occur strictly in sequence. We typically start with analysis, but feedback from testing can help improve the programming; problems with getting the program working may indicate a problem with the design, and working with the design may suggest aspects of the problem that had been overlooked in the analysis. Using the system typically exposes weaknesses of the analysis.

The crucial concept here is feedback. We learn from experience and modify our behavior based on what we learn. That's essential for effective software development. For any large project, we don't know everything there is to know about the problem and its solution before we start. We can try out ideas and get feedback by programming, but in the earlier stages of development, it is easier (and faster) to get feedback by writing down design ideas, trying out those design ideas, and using scenarios on friends.

The best design tool we know of is a blackboard (use a whiteboard instead if you prefer chemical smells over chalk dust).

Never design alone if you can avoid it! Don't start coding before you have tried out your ideas by explaining them to someone. Discuss designs and programming techniques with friends, colleagues, potential users, and so on before you head for the keyboard. It is amazing how much you can learn from simply trying to articulate an idea. After all, a program is nothing more than an expression (in code) of some ideas.

Similarly, when you get stuck implementing a program, look up from the keyboard. Think about the problem itself, rather than your incomplete solution. Talk with someone: explain what you want to do and why it doesn't work. It's amazing how often you find the solution just by carefully explaining the problem to someone. Don't debug (find program errors) alone if you don't have to!

The focus of this book is implementation, especially programming. We do not teach "problem-solving" beyond giving you plenty of examples of problems and their solutions. Much of problem-solving is recognizing a known problem and applying a known solution technique. Only when most subproblems are handled this way will you find the time to indulge in exciting and creative "out·of-the-box thinking." So, we focus on showing how to express ideas clearly in code.

[teshknowledgenotes]

RICHARD FEYNMAN NOTES

There is a popular misconception that science is an impersonal, dispassionate, and thoroughly objective enterprise. Whereas most other human activities are dominated by fashions, fads, and personalities, science is supposed to be constrained by agreed rules of procedure and rigorous tests. It is the results that count, not the people who produce them. This is, of course, manifest of nonsense. Science is a people-driven activity like all human endeavors, and just as subject to fashion and whim. In this case, fashion is set not so much by choice of subject matter, but by the way, scientists think about the world. Each age adopts its particular approach to scientific problems, usually following the trail blazed by certain dominant figures who both set the agenda and define the best methods to tackle it. Occasionally scientists attain sufficient stature that they become noticed by the general public, and when endowed with outstanding flair a scientist may become an icon for the entire scientific community.

There isn't any solution to the problem of education other than to realize that the best teaching can be done only when there is a direct individual relationship between a student and a good teacher, a situation in which the student discusses the ideas, thinks about the things and talks about the things. It's impossible to learn very much by simply sitting in a lecture or even by simply doing problems that are assigned. But in our modern times, we have so many students to teach that we have to try to find some substitute for the ideal. Perhaps my lectures can make some contribution. Perhaps in some small place where there are individual teachers and students, they may get some inspiration or some ideas from the lectures. Perhaps they will have fun thinking them through - or going on to develop some of the ideas further.

[teshknowledgenotes]

Storytelling for Business with Donald Miller

One of the things I tell brands is if you want to grow your brand or you want your product to change lives. Position yourself and your company as a guide, helping other heroes win, don't be a victim, don't be a hero, don't be a villain, be the guide. Make the customer the hero.

The average person spends about 30% of their time daydreaming. It's a survival mechanism when you daydream or your mind just checks out, or you're just staring at your phone. That's your brain recharging, what your brain is saying is that there is nothing in my environment right now, that I need to survive therefore I'm going to rest my mind. The only thing that can stop a brain from daydreaming, is a story when you sit down to watch a story or read a book or listen to a podcast. Your brain will stop daydreaming, it will plug in and start paying attention. The reason that happens is that stories ask questions, and then they don't give you answers until the end.

The story has a powerful ability to compel a human brain, there are some rules about the story, it can not be confusing, you have to know what the hero wants, the hero has to transform, and if you break some of these rules, people will start to daydream during their story. They won't know why they're doing it but they will start to daydream. The same is with brands, if you have not identified what you have helped your customer achieve, and if especially you haven't identified the problem your brand solves, for the hero customer, they will stop paying attention to you. That has to be crystal clear within seconds of interacting with your brain and if it is not, they're going to stop paying attention.

Most brands don't get it they try to walk in and tell their story, "My grandfather started a company and it's 75 years old, and we're trying to increase our metrics". None of that has anything to do with the customer, it's all about you, don't tell your story, invite your customer into a story. In which they can experience a transformation and have their problem resolved. Human beings are drawn to that, just like they're drawn to Netflix, you should think of your company as one of the shows on Netflix, and you're trying to get people to press on it and engage.

If Jason Bourne wanted to know who he was but also wanted to, lose 35 pounds, wanted to run a marathon, also wanted to marry his sweetheart, also wanted to adopt a cat. You would lose the audience because it's about too many things. That's a mistake most brands make, brand is about too many things, it's about delivering too much value or too many things of value to the customer, so the customer can't get their mind about what the customer is really about.

If you want to be successful and skyrocket in your career, own a problem. A lot of times you will look at brands and they have taglines, "Trust is the commodity we exchange". If your tagline, is trust is the commodity we exchange, I have no idea the problem that you're trying to solve. There is no reason for me to do business with you. We come with poetic ways to promote our business, but unless we come up with creative ways to solve on clear terms, people will pass us by. Clarity is the key if you are confused you lose.

When you are young, most of our genius hits us in our youth, it could be cluttered by an identity crisis. We cast out on our own, and we're trying to prove that we're strong and able and capable. That gets in the way, it's usually only after we have succeeded that we establish the kind of confidence that we need. It's at that point that we heal our wounds and turn around and help somebody else. Those people are interested in working with us. Helping somebody else is what's meaningful in life.  

The way a story hooks you is it opens and closes story loops. Jason Bourne wants to know who he is that's a story loop, so we are going to open the story loop of who Jason Bourne is, what's his real identity, where this guy comes from. We're not going to close that until the end of the movie, because the second we close that, the movie is over.

The opening and closing of story loops is the only thing that motivates human behavior. Feeling lazy is a story loop, getting out of bed closes it. Everything is driven and closed by story loops, if everyone on your team knows how to open a narrative story loop, they know how to motivate human behavior. That's why it's very important to be a storyteller if you want to win in the world today.

The only reason people open their wallets to spend money is to solve a problem. The only reason they go to your website is to solve a problem. If they don't sense that you can solve their problem they will not spend their money. What I always say is own a problem, what problem do you own, what problem does product in your company own, what problem does each division own, then you want to repeat with words, we solve this problem over and over and over again. That's the only way to build a brand. If I told you a story that had no problem in it, it wouldn't make any sense.

If you get outside of yourself for a minute and think about the people around you, you become the leader that people enjoy interacting with.

[teshknowledgenotes]

THE HARD THING ABOUT HARD THINGS - AUDIOBOOK

The hard part about self-help books is that they try to provide a recipe for challenges that have no recipes, there is no recipe for complicated dynamic situations, there is no recipe for building a high-tech company. There is no recipe for leading a group of people out of trouble. There is no recipe for playing NFL Quarterback, there is no recipe for running for president and there is no recipe for running a team when your business has turned to crap. That's the hard thing about hard things there is no formula for dealing with them.

I've been inspired by many friends advisors and family members who have helped me throughout my career. Also by hip hop rap music, because hip hop artists aspire to be both great and successful and see themselves as entrepreneurs. Many of the themes competing making money, being misunderstood provide insight into the hard things. I share my experiences in the hope of providing clues and inspiration for others who find themselves in the struggle to build something out of nothing.

In football, being able to handle fear is 75% of the game. I was the only kid on the football team who was good at math. So my teammates and I didn't see each other in many classes. As a result, I ended up moving in multiple social circles and hanging out with kids with very different outlooks on the world. It amazed me how a diverse perspective utterly changed the meaning of every significant event in the world. For instance, when Run DMC's hard time album came out, with its relentless bass drum, it sent an earthquake through the football team, but not even a ripple through my calculus class. Ronald Reagan's strategic defense initiative was considered an outrage amongst young scientists due to its questionable technical foundation. Those aspects went unnoticed at football practice. Looking at the world through such different prisms, helped me separate facts from perception, this ability would serve me incredibly well later when I became an entrepreneur and CEO. In particularly dire circumstances when the facts seemed to dictate a certain outcome, I learned to look for alternative narratives and explanations coming from radically different perspectives to inform my outlook. The simple existence of an alternate possible scenario is often all that's needed to keep work alive amongst a worried workforce.

Netscape knew that by improving the browser to make it secure, more functional, and easier to use, they could make the internet the network of the future. That became the mission at Netscape, a mission that they would gloriously accomplish. Interviewing with Mark was like no other job interview that I'd ever had. Gone were questions about my resume, my career progression, and my work habits. He replaced them with a dizzying inquiry into the history of e-mail, collaboration software, and what the future might hold. I was an expert on the topic because I'd spent the last several working on the leading products in the category. But I was shocked by how much a 22-year-old kid, knew about the history of the computer business. I'd met many young smart people in my career, but never a young technology historian. Mark's intellect and instincts surprised me. But beyond Mark's historical knowledge, his insights about technology such as replication were incisive and on point. A week later I got the job, I was thrilled, I didn't care what the offer was, I knew that Mark and Netscape would change the world. I wanted to be a part of it. I could not wait to get started.

Media companies focused on things like creating great stories, whereas technology companies focused on better ways of doing things.

Through the seemingly impossible loud cloud series C & IPO processes, I learned one important lesson. Startup CEOs should not play the odds, when you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it, you just have to find it. It does not matter whether or not your answers are 9/10 or 1/1000, your task is the same. In the end, I did find the answer, we completed the deal with EDS, and the company did not go bankrupt. People always ask me what's the secret to being a successful CEO. Sadly, there is no secret, but if there is one skill that stands out it's the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves. It's the moments when you feel like hiding or dying, that you can make the biggest difference as the CEO.

Most management books focus on how to do things correctly so that you don't screw up, this book provides insight on what you should do when you screw up. The good news is I have plenty of experience at that and so does every other CEO.

Every entrepreneur starts their company with a clear vision for success, you will create an amazing environment and hire the smartest people to join you, together you will build a beautiful product that delights customers and makes the world just a little bit better, it's going to be awesome. Then after working night and day to make your vision a reality. You wake up to find things did not go as planned. Your company did not unfold like the Jack Dorsey keynote that you listened to when you first started. Your product has issues that will be very hard to fix. The market is not quite where it's supposed to be, your employees are losing confidence and some of them will quit. Some of the ones who quit were quite smart and had the remaining ones wondering if staying makes sense. You running low on cash and your venture capitalist tells you that it will be difficult to raise money, given the European economy catastrophe. You lose a competitive battle, you lose a loyal customer. You lose a great employee, the walls start closing in, where did you go wrong, why didn't your company perform as envisioned. Are you good enough to do this? As your dreams turn into nightmares, you find yourself in the struggle.

2:02:00 Struggle Speech Starts The struggle is wondering why you started the company in the first place. The struggle is when people ask you why you don't quit, and you don't know the answer. The struggle is when your employees think you lying and you think they might be right. The struggle is when food loses its taste. The struggle is when you don't believe you should be the CEO of your company. The struggle is when you know you are in over your head. The struggle is when you know you can't be replaced. The struggle is when everyone thinks your an idiot but nobody will fire you. The struggle is when self-doubt becomes self-hatred. The struggle is when you're having a conversation with someone and you can't hear a word that they're saying because all you can hear is the struggle. The struggle is when you want the pain to stop. The struggle is unhappiness, the struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better but you feel worse. The struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone. The struggle has no mercy, the struggle is the land of broken promises and crushed dreams. The struggle is a cold sweat, the struggle is where your guts boil so much that it feels like you will spit blood, the struggle is not failure, but it causes failure especially if you are weak, always if you're weak. Most people are not strong enough. Every great entrepreneur, from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg has gone through the struggle and struggle they did so you are not alone. But that does not mean you will make it. You may not make it, that is why it is a struggle. The struggle is where greatness comes from.

There is no answer to the struggle but here are some things that helped me. Don't put it all on your shoulders. It's easy to think the things that bother you will upset your people more. That's not true, the opposite is true, nobody takes the losses harder than the person most responsible. Nobody feels it more than you, you won't be able to share every burden, but share every burden that you can. Get the maximum number of brains on the problem. Even if the problems represent existential threats when I ran Opsware and we were losing many competitive fields, I called in all hands and told the whole company that we were getting our asses kicked and if we didn't stop the bleeding we were going to die. Nobody blinked, everybody rallied and built a winning product that saved my sorry ass.

Play long enough and you might get lucky, in the technology game tomorrow looks nothing like today, if you survive long enough to see tomorrow, it might bring you the answer that seems so impossible today. Don't take it personally, the predicament that you are in is probably all your fault, you hired the people, you made the decisions, but you knew the job was dangerous when you took it. Everybody makes mistakes, every CEO makes thousands of mistakes, evaluating yourself and giving yourself an F doesn't help, remember that this is what separates the women from the girls, if you wanted to be great this is the challenge, if you don't want to be great, then you never should've started a company.

I thought it was my job and my job only to worry about the company's problems. Had I been thinking clearly, I would've realized I shouldn't have been the only one to worry about the product not being right, because I wasn't the one writing the code that would fix it. A much better idea would be to give the problem to the people that could fix it, but who would be personally excited and motivated to do so. If we lost a big prospect, the whole organization needed to understand why so that we could together fix the things that were broken in our products. If I insisted on keeping the setbacks to myself there is no way to jumpstart that process. Why it's imperative to tell it like it is, there are three key reasons why being transparent about companies' products makes sense. One is trust, without trust communication break, more specifically in any human interaction the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust, consider the following if I trust you completely, then I require no explanation or communication of your process whatsoever because I know whatever you were doing is in our best interest. On the other hand, if I don't trust you at all, then no amount of talking explaining, or reasoning will have any effect on me because I don't trust that you were telling me the truth.

Two the more brains working on the hard part the better. To build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. It's a total waste to have lots of big brains, but not let them work on your greatest problems. A brain no matter how big cannot solve a problem it doesn't know about. As the open-source community, given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow.

Three, a good culture is like the old RIP routing protocol, bad news travels fast. Good news travels slow. If you investigate companies that have failed, you will find that many employees knew about the fatal issues long before those issues killed the company, if employees knew about the deadly problems. Why didn't they say something? Too often the answer is the company culture discouraged the spread of bad news. So the knowledge lay dormant until it was too late to act. A healthy company culture encourages companies to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems openly and freely can quickly solve them. A company that covers up its problems frustrates everyone else involved. The resulting action item for CEO's build a culture that rewards not punishes people for getting problems into the open where they could be solved.

If you run a company you will face overwhelmingly psychological pressure to be overly positive, stand up to the pressure, face your fear and tell it like it is.

If you don't know what you want, you are unlikely to get it.

Almost everyone who builds technology companies knows that people are the most important asset. Properly run startups place a great deal of emphasis on recruiting and the interview process, to build their talent base, too often the investment in people stops there. Often founders start companies with visions of elegant often beautiful product architectures, that will solve so many of the nasty issues that they were forced to deal with at their previous jobs. Then as their company becomes successful, they find that their beautiful product architecture has turned into a Frankenstein. How does this happen, as success drives the need to hire new engineers at a rapid rate, companies neglect to train the new engineers properly as the engineers are assigned tasks they figure out how to complete them as best they can. Often this means replicating existing facilities in the architecture, which leads to inconsistencies in the user experience, performance problems, and a general mess. And you thought the training was expensive. An outstanding training program can address issues head-on. The best place to start training is a topic that is most relevant to employees. The knowledge and skill they need to do their job. I call this functional training, functional training can be as simple as training an employee with your expectations for them. An engineering Bootcamp can be used to bring recruits completely up to speed on all of the historical nuisances, of your product. The training courses should be tailored to the specific job. There are only two ways for a manager to improve the output of an employee, motivation, and training. Therefore training should be the most basic requirement for all managers in your organization.

PRODUCT MANAGERS Nobody in the industry defined the product manager job. Good product manager vs bad product manager. Good product managers know the market, the product line, and the competition extremely well operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence, and are the CEO of the product. Good product managers take full responsibility and measure themselves in terms of the success of the product. They're responsible for the right product, the right time, and all that entails. A good product manager knows the context going in. The company, revenue funding, competition, etc. They take responsibility for devising and executing a winning plan. No excuses. Bad product managers have lots of excuses, not enough funding, the engineering manager is an idiot, Microsoft has 10 times as many more engineers working on it. I'm overworked I don't get enough direction, our CEO doesn't make this kind of excuse and neither should the CEO of a product. Good product managers don't get all of their time soaked up by the various organizations that must work together to deliver the right product at the right time. They don't take all the product team minutes, they don't project manage the various functions, they are not gophers for engineering, they are not part of the product team. They manage the product team, engineering teams don't consider good product managers a marketing resource, Good product managers are the marketing counterparts to the engineering manager. Good product managers crisply define the target, the what, as opposed to the how, and manage the delivery of the what. Bad product managers feel best about themselves when they figure out how. Good product managers communicate crisply to engineering in writing and verbally. Good product managers don't give direction informally. Good product managers gather information formally. Good product managers create collateral, FAQs, presentations, and white papers that can be leveraged by salespeople, marketing people, and executives. Bad product managers complain that they spend all day answering questions, for the sales force and that they are swamped. Good product managers anticipate serious product flaws and build real solutions. Bad product managers put out fires all day. Good product managers take written positions on important issues, competitive silver bullets, tough architectural choices, tough product decisions, and markets to attack or yield. Bad product managers voice their opinions verbally and lament that the powers that be won't let it happen. Once bad product managers fail they point out that they predicted they would fail. Good product managers focus the team on revenue and customers. Bad product managers focus the team on how many features the competitors are building. Good product managers define good products, that can be executed with a strong effort. Bad product managers define products that can't be executed or let engineering build whatever they want, which solves the hardest problem. Good product managers think in terms of delivering superior value to the marketplace during product planning and achieving market share and revenue goals, during the go-to-market phase. Bad product managers get very confused about the differences between delivering value, matching competitive features, pricing, and ubiquity. Good product managers decompose problems. Bad product managers combine all problems into one. Good product managers think about the story they want to be written by the press. Bad product managers think about covering every feature and think about being technically accurate with the press. Good product managers ask the press questions Bad product managers answer any press questions. Good product managers assume members of the press and the analyst community are smart. Bad product managers assume analysts and journalists are dumb because they don't understand the subtle nuisances of their particular technology. Good product managers, air on the side of clarity. Bad product managers, never explain the obvious. Good product managers define their job and their success. Bad product managers, constantly want to be told what to do. Good product managers send their status reports in time and every week because they are disciplined. Bad product managers forget to send their status reports in on time because they don't value discipline.

Here are some interview questions I found very helpful. What would you do in your first month on the job? Look for candidates who look for more new initiatives than you think are possible. This is a good sign. How will your new job differ from your current job? Look for self-awareness of the differences here, if they have the experience of what you need, they will be articulate on this point. Beware of candidates who believe too much of their experience, is immediately transferable, it may pay down the line but likely not tomorrow. Why do you want to join a small company? Beware of equity, being the primary motivation, 1% of nothing is nothing. It's much better if they want to be more creative. The most important difference between big and small companies is the amount of time running vs creating. A desire to do more creating is the right reason to want to join your company. Content-free executives have no value in startups, every executive must understand the product, the technology, the customers, and the market. Force your newbie to learn these things, consider scheduling a new meeting with your executives. Require them to bring a comprehensive set of questions about everything they heard that day but did not completely understand. Answer those questions in depth, start with first principles, bring them up to speed fast. If they don't have any questions fire them. If in 30 days you feel like they're not coming up to speed, definitely fire them.

How do you hire someone good? Step one know what you want. Step one is the most important in the process, also the one that gets skipped most often. Tony Robbins said, "If you don't know what you want, the chances that you'll get it are extremely low".

Be clear in your mind about what you expect from this person upon joining your company, what will this person do in his first 30 days, what do you expect their motivation to be for joining? Do you want them to build a large organization for them right away? Or hire only one or two people over the next year.

After assembling an interview team, keep these questions in mind, who will help you figure out whether the candidate meets the criteria, these may be internal or external people. They could be board members, other executives, or experts. Who do you need to support the decision when the executive is on board.

Assign questions to interviewers based on their talent, specifically make sure the interviewer who asks the questions, deeply understands what a good answer sounds like.

Well, it might work to have individual employees, who optimize for their careers, counting on senior managers to do all the right things, for all the wrong reasons is a dangerous idea.

In business intelligence is always a critical element in any employee. Because what we do is difficult and complex, and the competitors are filled with extremely smart people. However, intelligence is not the only important quality. Being effective in a company also means working hard, being reliable, and being an excellent member of the team, when I was a CEO this was one of the most difficult lessons for me to learn. I felt that it was my job to create an environment where brilliant people of all backgrounds, personality types, and work styles would thrive. I was right, that was my job, companies with people from diverse backgrounds and workstyles can succeed have significant advantages in recruiting and attaining top talent over those that don't.

The proper reason to hire a senior person is to acquire knowledge and experience in a specific area. For example, as a technical founder, you probably don't have terrific knowledge on how to build a worldwide sales channel, how to create an invisible brand, or how to identify and negotiate ecosystem-altering development deals. Acquiring a world-class senior person can dramatically accelerate your companies ability to succeed in these areas. One good way to test whether to go with outside experience or go with internal promotion is to figure out whether you value inside knowledge or outside knowledge more for the position. For example, for engineering managers, comprehensive knowledge of the codebase and engineering team is usually more important and difficult to acquire than knowledge of how to run scalable engineering organizations. As a result, you might very well value the knowledge of your organization more than that of the outside world. Hiring someone to sell your product to large enterprises, the opposite is true, knowing how your target customers, think and operate, knowing their cultural tendencies, understanding how to recruit and measure the right people, in the right regions of the world to maximize your sales, these things turn out to be far more valuable than knowing your own companies product and culture. This is why when the head of engineering gets promoted within she often succeeds. When the head of sales gets promoted she almost always fails. Asking yourself do I value external or internal knowledge more for this position, will help you determine whether to go for experience or youth.

If you manage engineers, drawing out issues will be an important skill to master. Some questions I found effective to be in one's, if we could improve in any way, how would we do it, what's the number one problem with our organization, why? What's not fun about working here? Who's working the hardest? Who do you admire? If you were me what changes would you make? What don't you like about the product? What's the biggest opportunity that we're missing out on? What are we not doing that we should be doing? Are you happy working here? In the end, the most important thing is that the best ideas, the biggest problems, and the most intense employee life issues make their way to the people who can deal with them.

Ask 10 co-founders about company culture and what it means and you'll get 10 different answers. It's about office design, it's about screening out the wrong kind of employees, it's about values, it's about fun, it's about alignment, it's about finding like-minded employees, it's about being cult-like. What is culture, does culture matter? If so, how much time should you spend on it? The primary thing that any technology startup must do, is building a product that is 10 times better at doing something than the current prevalent way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast and enough. Or in large enough volume to matter. The second thing that any technology startup must do is to take the market. If it's possible to do something 10x better, it's also that you won't be the only company to figure it out. Therefore you must take the market before somebody else does. Very few products are 10x better than the competition, so unseeing the new incumbent is much more difficult than unseating the old one. If you fail to do both of those things your culture won't matter one bit.  

The first scale technique to implement is specialization. In startups everybody starts as a jack of all trades, engineers write code, manage the build system, test the products and increasingly deploy it and operate it. This works out in the beginning because everybody knows everything, and the need to communicate is minimized. There are no complicated handoffs because there is nobody to hand anything to. As the company grows it becomes increasingly difficult to add new engineers, because the learning curve gets super steep. Getting an engineer up to speed becomes more difficult than doing the work yourself. At this point, you need to specialize, by dedicated people in teams, with such tasks as the built environment, the test environment, the operations. You will create some complexity, handoffs amongst groups, potentially conflicting agendas, and specialized rather than common knowledge. To mitigate these issues, you need to consider other scale techniques like organizational design and process.

In the case of an interview process, you will be looking for an outstanding employee. If that's the goal what's the process to get there. Figure out how you'll know if you are getting what you want at each step. Are you getting enough candidates, are you getting the right candidates. Will your interview process find the right person for the job? Once you select the person will you accept the job? Once they accept the job will they become productive? Once they become productive will they stay with your company? How will you measure each step? Engineer accountability into the system, which organization and which individual is responsible for each step, what could you do, to increase the visibility of their performance. The process of scaling a company is not unlike the process of scaling a product. Different sizes of companies impose different requirements on the companies architecture. If you address those requirements too early, your company will seem heavy and sluggish, if you address those requirements too late. Your company may meltdown under the pressure. Be mindful of your company's true growth rate, as you add architectural components. It's good to anticipate growth, but it's bad to over anticipate growth.

Everybody learns to be a CEO by being a CEO, no training as a manager, a general manager, or any other job prepares you to run a company. The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company. This means that you will face a broad set of things that you don't know how to do. It requires skills that you don't have. Nevertheless, everybody will expect you to know how to do them because you are the CEO.

When CEOs get too stressed, they make these two mistakes. One, they take things too personally, two they do not take things personally enough. In the first scenario the CEO takes every issue incredibly seriously, and personally and urgently moves to fix it, given the volume of the issues. This motion usually results in one of two scenarios, if the CEO is outwardly focussed she ends up terrorizing the team until nobody works at the company anymore. If the CEO is inwardly focussed she ends up feeling so sick from all the problems, that she can end up barely making it to work the next morning. In the second scenario, to dampen the pain of the rolling disaster that is the company, the CEO takes a pollyannish attitude, it's not so bad, in this view none of the problems, is that bad and they don't need to be dealt with, by rationalizing the issues the CEO feels better about herself. The problem is that she doesn't fix any of the problems. The employees get quite frustrated that the chief executive keeps ignoring the most basic problems and conflicts. Ultimately, the company turns to crap, ideally, the CEO will be urgent but not insane. She will move aggressively and decisively without feeling emotionally culpable. If she can separate the importance of the issues from how she feels about them. She will avoid demonizing her employees or herself.

If people trust you, they will still listen to your vision even if it's articulate. If you are super competent, they will trust you and listen to you. If you can paint a beautiful vision, people will be patient with you.

In the technology business, you rarely know everything up front, the difference between being mediocre and magical is often the difference between, letting people take creative risks and holding them too tightly accountable. Accountability is important but it's not the only thing that is important

Embracing the unusual parts of my background would be the key to making it through, it would be those things that would give me unique perspectives and approaches to the business, the things that I would bring to the table that nobody else had.

[teshknowledgenotes]

SIMON SINEK NOTES

Two Essential Interview Questions For Culture Fit What is it that you have to give to our organization that we will need? What is it that you selfishly want from us?

QUESTIONS YOU SHOULD BE ASKING What is your purpose within your organisation? Why do you do what you do? Are you happy doing what you’re doing? Do you buy into your own career? How good are you at communicating what you believe? How do you practice authenticity? Is everything that you say and everything you do congruent?

During an interview, Sinek says he always asks the interviewer these questions: What’s the company’s cause? What do you stand for? Do you love your job? What are you hoping to build that’s bigger than the money you make? What’s the vision of the company?

SIMON SINEK QUOTES “Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them; they hire already motivated people and inspire them.” – Simon Sinek “100% of customers are people. 100% of employees are people. If you don’t understand people you don’t understand business.” – Simon Sinek “You don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills.” – Simon Sinek