“Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.”
(Touchdown 2006, Ballantine)
| #Simplexity #Simplicity #Systems #Leadership
Year: 2024
A growth mindset reframes failure…
"When you work toward your goal, you're taking steps to success." pic.twitter.com/S6LFQoHw5y
— Brian Solis (@briansolis) April 28, 2023
“When you work toward your goal, you’re taking steps to success.”
— Giannis Antetokounmpo
“Dinners are for Old Friends,
but Lunches are for New Ones.”
“…I actually tend to avoid old friends at lunch,
Since it’s so easy to get into multi-hour conversations…”
| #Lunch #Dinner #Friends
“I used to have to sit down at my computer with intent.
I was taking time to go do something online.
And it felt more like hunting or exploring.
Nowadays it’s much more often a passive experience of consumption.
Scrolling on my phone hoping something interesting will come to me via one of the few sites I regularly visit.
I could still go hunting for the niche stuff,
but it’s just so easy to scroll a little bit more.”
“I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.”
“…Let’s imagine that I receive a $100,000 advance for a future book.
Not impossible by any means.
The thing is, and this is the point I think Griffin should lean on more heavily: “advance” is a misleading term.
Advances don’t come all at once, they come in stages, either three or four of them, for instance:
- $25,000 at contract signing;
- $25,000 at submission of an acceptable (but still to be edited) manuscript;
- $25,000 at publication of the hardcover;
- $25,000 at publication of the paperback, or, if the publisher chooses not to make a paperback, one year after the publication of the hardcover.
(Sometimes the unit payments vary: for instance, for Breaking Bread with the Dead my agent negotiated bigger payouts for the first and third stages, smaller ones for the other two.)
In a typical situation, after you sign the contract you might need two years to write the book.
Supposing that your manuscript is pretty good and just needs editing, that process can take several months, and then getting the book ready for publication can take several more months.
And the final payout will come a year after that initial publication.
So while a $100,000 advance sounds like a lot of money, it often ends up being $25,000 a year; not nearly enough to live on.
The moral:
Writing books can be a nice supplement to your day job, but it is virtually impossible for it to replace your day job, even if you’re in the top 5% percent of sales.
That I, several of whose books appear to be in that category, couldn’t make a decent living if I sold three times as many of those books as I do, should suggest … not, as Griffin keeps saying, that no one buys books, but that the whole industry is smaller than most people think and a money machine for only a handful of writers.
You probably have to get into the top 1% of published-by-publishers writers to make a living solely by writing.
Probably only a few hundred, or at most a few thousand, people in the entire world manage that.”
| #Books #Publishing #Writing
“Iteration is all about relentless improvement; not merely fixing what’s broken.
It involves striking the right balance between innovation and problem-solving, one that fosters sustainable forward-moving progress.
Is software anything but constant iteration?
The fundamental objective of iteration is not deciding whether to iterate, but rather prioritizing the most impactful ideas—whether new features, enhancements, or bug fixes.
The challenge lies in prioritizing the big wins and minimizing those distractions that divert focus from those wins. “
| #Iteration #Software #Prioritazation
How an empty S3 bucket can make your AWS bill explode
“Maciej Pocwierz accidentally created an S3 bucket with a name that was already used as a placeholder value in a widely used piece of software.
They saw 100 million PUT requests to their new bucket in a single day, racking up a big bill since AWS charges $5/million PUTs.
It turns out AWS charge that same amount for PUTs that result in a 403 authentication error, a policy that extends even to “requester pays” buckets!
So, if you know someone’s S3 bucket name you can DDoS their AWS bill just by flooding them with meaningless unauthenticated PUT requests.
AWS support refunded Maciej’s bill as an exception here, but I’d like to see them reconsider this broken policy entirely.”
| #AWS #S3bucket #Cloud
“Picking the people and how they work
is the design of design.”
| #Design #Kubrick #People
“Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it.
The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%.
Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %, so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change.
So I was promptly explained that we didn’t care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.
[…] by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.”
– @Javi | Goblin.Band
“oh, WordPress.com development is mostly open source, so if I’m too speciffic, anyone could go to github and find the single PR where that change was shipped, etc.
I don’t want to put anyone under the spotlight, specially engineers who were just doing what they were told to do.
Also, it’s just one example of many, the only thing interesting about that particular example is that I complained about it and I got told about the ‘free user value’ calculation.
But well, on broad strokes, it was about making it harder to tell which features were paid and which ones were free during onboarding.
So a lot of people who wanted to create an account to host a free blog, found themselves being redirected to the shopping cart and asked to pay for things they have selected thinking they were free.”
– @Javi | Goblin.Band
| #Wordpress #OpenSource