Moving.

I love physical books as much as anyone. And when I really want to get a book into my brain, I now purchase both the hardcover and electronic editions. From the point of view of the publishing industry, I am the perfect customer. This also makes me a very important canary in the coal mine—and I’m here to report that I’ve begun to feel woozy.  For instance, I’ve started to think that most books are too long, and I now hesitate before buying the next big one. When shopping for books, I’ve suddenly become acutely sensitive to the opportunity costs of reading any one of them. If your book is 600 pages long, you are demanding more of my time than I feel free to give. And if I could accomplish the same change in my view of the world by reading a 60-page version of your argument, why didn’t you just publish a book this length instead?

Read the whole piece. This is the best articulation of the issue that I've ever seen.

Please withdraw the free-update offer. We will not hold you to it.

Really. Please. I’m a TextMate customer and I’ve been using the same license since 2006.¹ This is an application that I use every day to do most or all of my job. And I bet many of your customers will say the same thing.

Given the value that we get out of TextMate, it’s already grossly underpriced. Please let us give you more money.

You promised the free update in a different era, probably expecting different circumstances. Things have changed.

If the free-update offer still stands when TextMate 2 ships, I will not take you up on it. I’m buying TextMate 2 as a new customer at full price. And I bet many other developers will gladly do the same.

I'll be doing the same. TextMate is my operating system. Everything below it is the kernel.

Inability to get things done may manifest itself in multiple ways including:

• Lack of urgency.  Used to a large company environment where its OK if things take a few weeks longer.
• Easily distracted.  Heavy procrastinator.
• Lazy / doesn't work hard.  Some very smart people are basically lazy.  Don't tolerate this.
• Starts but never finishes things.
• Lack of follow through - makes commitments but does not follow up.
• Argumentative. Arguing incessantly about how to do something rather then just doing it.
• Slow.  Taking a long time to code (or do) something simple.
• Perfectionist.  Tendency to overdesign something and to spend 4 weeks building the perfect implementation versus 1 week building the thing that "just works" for 95% of the time.  Sometimes the edge cases need to be covered, but in most raw startups this is not the case.  On the business side this manifests as someone heavy on analysis, low on "doing".

This is a powerful list.

When hiring your initial engineering team, the more tools you have to discern who the truly amazing engineers are the better.  One approach we took at Mixer Labs (a company I founded that Twitter bought last year) was to graph # of years of experience vs how the person did in their interviews (this was an arbitrary scale where we rated people 1-10, focused on performance on the same set of questions, rather then raw intelligence alone.)  They key is to have the same group of people on your team do the ratings, and to have the list of prior interviewees listed on the same ranking scale, so that it is easy to compare people.

To our surprise, we found that in general, the way people did on their interview roughly corresponded to the number of years of experience they had.  Indeed, when you graph things out, the graph looked roughly like this:

This graph helped us quickly hone in on anyone who was an outlier on the graph (i.e. their performance/knowledge in the interview outweighed their years of experience).  For example, from this perspective the person with 4 years experience who scored a "7" was a much better hire then the people with 7 or 8 years experience who scored a "7" or even an "8".  The interview performance outliers also tended to be amongst the most productive people on the team once they joined the company.

I've done a lot of hiring over the last couple of years and I'm always looking for superior ways of finding talent and identifying duds. This technique is quite promising.

When he was in eighth grade, Steve Jobs decided to build a frequency counter for a school project and needed parts. Someone suggested that he call Bill Hewlett. Finding a William Hewlett in the telephone book, the 12-year-old Jobs called and asked, "Is this the Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard?" "Yes," said Bill. Jobs made his request. Bill spent some time talking to him about his project. Several days later, Jobs went to HP and picked up a bag full of parts that Bill had put together for him. Subsequently, Jobs landed a summer job at HP. He later went on to co-found Apple Computer. 

Think of how amazing this is.  The founder and CEO of one of the major companies of the time, Bill Hewlett, got on the phone with a random 12-year-old he had never heard of.  He then proceeded to personally make sure to assemble the bag of HP parts the kid needed.

In an article to be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers studied the relationship between the status and the power of a job, said Nathanael Fast, assistant professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business.

The study, "The Destructive Nature of Power without Status," determined that the combination of some authority and little perceived status can be toxic.

"We found that people who had high power and high status, they were pretty cool," Fast told CNN. "But it was people who had power and lacked status who used their power to require other persons to engage in demeaning behavior."

Seems intuitive.

In experiments first reported in 1998, Baumeister and his collaborators discovered that the will, like a muscle, can be fatigued. Immediately after students engage in a task that requires them to control their impulses — resisting cookies while hungry, tracking a boring display while ignoring a comedy video, writing down their thoughts without thinking about a polar bear or suppressing their emotions while watching the scene in "Terms of Endearment" in which a dying Debra Winger says goodbye to her children — they show lapses in a subsequent task that also requires an exercise of willpower, like solving difficult puzzles, squeezing a handgrip, stifling sexual or violent thoughts and keeping their payment for participating in the study rather than immediately blowing it on Doritos. Baumeister tagged the effect “ego depletion,” using Freud’s sense of “ego” as the mental entity that controls the passions.

Baumeister then pushed the muscle metaphor even further by showing that a depleted ego can be invigorated by a sugary pick-me-up (though not an indistinguishable beverage containing diet sweetener). And he showed that self-control, though almost certainly heritable in part, can be toned up by exercising it. He enrolled students in regimens that required them to keep track of their eating, exercise regularly, use a mouse with their weaker hand or (one that really gave them a workout) speak in complete sentences and without swearing. After several weeks, the students were more resistant to ego depletion in the lab and showed greater self-control in their lives. They smoked, drank and snacked less, watched less television, studied more and washed more dishes.

Together with intelligence, self-control turns out to be the best predictor of a successful and satisfying life. But Baumeister and Tierney aren’t endorsing a return to a preachy puritanism in which people are enjoined to resist temptation by sheer force of will and condemned as morally irresolute when they fail. The “will” in willpower is not some mysterious “free will,” a ghost in the machine that can do as it pleases, but a part of the machine itself. Willpower consists of circuitry in the brain that runs on glucose, has a limited capacity and operates by rules that scientists can reverse-engineer — and, crucially, that can find work-arounds for its own shortcomings.

This explains a lot. Please read the whole thing, and then the book.

More than anything, today’s GOP assails President Obama for spending. Of course, to do so, they must ignore the fact that Obama’s new spending of $1.44 trillion pails in comparison to that of George W. Bush who clocked in at $5.07 trillion in new spending. Bush must have been drawing inspiration from Reagan who increased government spending by 69 percent and more than tripled our national debt from $700 billion to $3 trillion.

Just think of the attack ads Bachmann, Perry, and Romney might run against Reagan with those kinds of numbers. I can just hear it now, “There is a bear in the woods. For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. But Ronald Reagan increased our debt to $3 trillion and now we can’t afford any bear traps.”

And that’s just what they could throw at Reagan on the economy. Don’t forget, the nation’s 40th president also gave amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants, negotiated with terrorists in Iran, supported the conservative maligned Earned Income Tax Credit, sought to eliminate nuclear weapons, and signed an abortion rights law in California.

Let’s face it, if Ronald Reagan ran for president in 2012 he’d be fighting it out for 6th place in Republican primary polls with Rick “don’t Google me” Santorum.

Instead of dropping Reagan’s name, perhaps today’s GOP would do better by the American people if it dropped its idol worship of the Gipper and worked with President Obama to create jobs and fix our struggling economy.

lolz

Um...