If there’s any truth in the fringes, this virus might in fact have been tailored.
1,096 karma · joined May 5, 2016
Unfortunately, there’s not that many companies with that problem, and the market never materialized to the necessary degree and they sold the existing contracts and pivoted. That said, it was a home run for what it did.
If you find the right problem, AI can create massive value. The hard part is never the learning, it’s finding and framing the right problem.
When I went back years later and just went as myself, my wife and I were immediately welcomed in without much questioning. For those wondering, this is not a club where being with a woman is necessarily advantageous, but I will certainly admit that it likely had an impact.
The biggest things I saw them looking to screen out, beyond drunk - high - obnoxious, were youth and naïveté. They seem to largely be aiming at people who know exactly what they’re getting into, and are relaxed about it + not overly attached to the outcome.
Just so you know exactly what I had on, and how much it flies in the face of some of the advice... on Friday: White t-shirt, jeans, baseball cap. Saturday: Grey Everlane pocket t-shirt, backwards baseball cap, Patagonia 5” running shorts, Off-white Adidas Marathon sneakers. I did learn to dress like you’re going to dance for hours in Friday night, and jeans got hot and shirt came off real quick, so I adjusted on Saturday.
Wife went more classic and wore black jean shorts, black tee with a ripped collar, black baseball cap, black adidas.
As an example, I got to know the leadership at the DGDG dealer group in the Bay Area over the past couple of years, and they've fully embraced the notion that there's not much money to be made on the sale itself -- and the more you try to make, the more your customers dislike you.
Instead, they aim for the price you might be able to negotiate down to somewhere else, and focus on making it an extremely pleasant experience. The goal is for you to return for trade-ins, maintenance, and all other auto related transactions.
The first start up I worked for built a piece of software that was adopted by large enterprises in regulated industries with 3 engineers, because they got to piggyback off of the Salesforce foundation.
It’s just a different flavor of abstraction.
Good enterprise software is almost never one size fits all, and there is responsibility on both sides to end up with something great.
It's about shifting the budgeted comp of the under-performers to the over-performers. Inevitably, you will end up with a bunch of over-performers killing it, and the under-performers who can't make their number will leave. It's a giant selection process.
Good employees make bank. Bad employees quit and go somewhere with less downside risk.
We've all been in rooms where someone misses the point, or says something that proves they're not keeping up with the conversation -- it happens. What's unique about people in the bay is how unforgiving and judgmental they can be about those errors, and it's only heightened if the person is above a certain age.
There are other ways to do this, but they require you to leave your world behind. For many, their environment is what built and maintains their unhealthy relationship to food.
For me, the day I left Texas was the day I started dropping pounds. Then, the day I left Utah for London was the day I dropped even more pounds. Then, the day I started running was the day I began approaching my lower limit (likely bordering into unhealthy body fat % on marathon race day).
The biggest challenge of you and the commenter above you was that you were swimming up stream. Hopping into a stream that leads away from fat behavior, instead of toward it can do much of the work for you.
I fully appreciate that's a luxury, but it's something people who have a choice should consider.
Desire / Curiosity is #1. (Not “I want money” — I must do X, solve Y, create Z) Discipline is probably number #2.
(This other front page article really nails the wrong kind of desire: https://www.bennettnotes.com/post/obsessed-with-success-and-... )
Some people have 1, and little to no 2. Some people have 2, and have completely lost all 1, preferring to learn to love and appreciate what they have, which is great.
Some people’s 1 is shallow and fleeting and changes daily.
The ones who have both find a way to align what they like doing with what makes them money and devote more time and effort to that than anyone else. This leads to an exceptional individual, who might do something great, if they can apply their 2 to things that capitalize on their exceptionality — ultimately, they need to be exceptional enough that others recognize it and start to take on work for them / propel them towards further capitalization for their own benefit.
If you’re exceptional and no one can see it, you’ll never clear that last bar. You have to apply 1 and 2 to figure out marketing and networking and be seen, or find someone who believes in you enough to do that part for you. You might have to move. You might have to face embarrassment and/or ridicule. You will face all manner of headwinds, and most people will fail not because they don’t know the steps, but because there are some steps they refuse to take (probably for very good reasons).
And yes, I do believe everyone has it within themselves to be exceptional at something — they just need to find the right thing. Today, more than ever, exceptionality pays.
If twitch and competitive gaming had been a thing in my childhood, I’d probably be a pro gamer. I was wiring my PS2 through capture cards and uploading gameplay videos online before YouTube existed, standing out in wars against the perennial top 5 clans on the Socom GameBattles ladders. There was no money in it back then. I was just obsessed. Now there’s money everywhere, hunting for exceptional individuals who have mastered a thing, so they can convert them into more money.
In summary, be exceptional and then show people.
—— I just pulled this out of my ass, but I kinda like it. Happy to discuss and have it picked apart.
Shit, today you can literally be exceptional at showing people your path to trying to be exceptional at something else. There are loads of people doing that really well.
The same could be said for my recent dive into David Foster Wallace. Absolutely loving reading his writing, but more affirmation of my own thoughts than expansion. I also realize this is probably because I’m reading both decades after publication, which means time has caught up to their ahead of the curve ideas.
The most I’ve gotten out of a book, in terms of altering the way I think about the world and life, is Simone De Beauvoir and the Ethics of Ambiguity. Man, I love me some Simone.
Yeah, there is a lot that you’re saying that’s a perfectly valid objection to my oversimplification, and maybe to his whole thing, but I’ll be the first to admit that it’s easy to take it apart the way I’ve relayed it. I put plenty of words in his mouth in my previous comment.
As mentioned, he spent 15 years writing the book because he wanted it to say it the right way.
There was a whole forum after it came out where a bunch of philosophy students would argue about his theories and what he meant and what that means and what falls into which category, and every once in a while he would pop in and say, “I see what you’re thinking, but no, that’s not what I meant at all, it’s actually this.”
I’d love to hear your thoughts on his own words though. You obviously know far more than I do about Philosophy.
Wikipedia of Metaphysics of Quality is probably a better cliff notes than me: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig%27s_Metaphysics_of_Qu...
You used the phrase, evolutionary forces in your explanation. To him, that’s quality.
The force that compelled the amoeba to move towards nutrients and away from danger is quality.
In Lila, written for something like 15 years after ZMM was published, he posits that quality can be broken into 2 essential forms: Dynamic quality and static quality. They basically correlate to liberalism and conservatism. In his mind, both are essential for evolutionary progress and are the source of all that is.
Dynamic quality is often random, unconventional, and disruptive. It’s some wild mutation that ends up being a positive, or some rogue actor who ends up birthing a movement for good. It is essential to progress beyond what is currently.
Static quality is all that is good currently. It’s the breadth of learned knowledge. It’s the safety of what’s gotten us this far. Abandoning it entirely is a recipe for chaos and potentially great loss.
In his estimation, the combination of these 2 forms of quality is what makes evolution work, and he believes humans are not the highest expression of evolution.
He outlines levels of the world that are conquered in the name of progress and that each one supersedes the one before it.
The first level is non-living matter. It’s just there, not doing much. The second is biological. It bends the non-living stuff to its will.
The next level is social. It uses the living stuff for its benefit. The good of the whole outweighs the good of the individuals. People are to the society like food is to people. They power it, create it, become it, and it carries on after they’re gone.
He uses the example of New York, consuming human productivity for its own benefit. Feasting on humans to grow bigger and stronger, and shitting them out the other side.
The final level, as he sees it, is intellectual. Ideas supersede the societies. They bend them to their will. The idea that slaves should be free is strong enough to risk destruction of the society.
His ethics is based on these levels. At the biological level, sex is always quality. At the societal level, the wrong sex can threaten the community / society and becomes more nuanced, only quality sometimes. Society > biology. At the intellectual level, slavery is bad, even though it results in strong communities and cities and has many benefits.
My plane is taking off, so I finished that off poorly, but read Lila is that’s at all intriguing. It’s my favorite book.
Is quality purely subjective? Everyone has their own version? No. There are levels of quality that we can all agree on, even if we don’t always understand why. Art. Writing. Photography. You know quality when you see it, but it defies a true definition. First instinct says it’s subjective, but universally pleasing forms and displays say otherwise.
They suggest there is such a thing as objective beauty (quality). Faces that are perfectly symmetrical are objectively more appealing. They are quality. They invoke a feeling of being drawn in. Accepting. Gravity.
Conversely, there are things that are objectively off-putting. Everyone hates them. They (almost) universally disgust us. Push us away. Anti-gravity.
Plenty of people will argue I’m wrong and anything Landing in either category is still subjective. There are people who enjoy having human feces in their mouth. Seems like that might be right.
Pirsig’s point is that the quality judgement, the thing that makes it possible for a thing to like or dislike (going all the way to electrons, neutrons, and protons “liking” and ”disliking” each other) another thing it’s engaged with is what makes it possible for the thing to begin to define subjects and objects, period.
What differentiates a subject from an object, if not some deep notion of “I like this, give me more of this” and “this hurts me, get it away”. That’s what he calls quality, and what he posits is at the basis of all that matters.
—-alright. I’ve had 3 Pliny’s tonight and I tried. If this is all nonsense, I’m eager to hear why so I can learn a thing or two and know more than I do now—-
If you can’t do that, they were right to refuse the 32hr/wk proposal. If you can, just do it, sneak in some studying, and act like it took you 40.