Month: August 2005

Why Societies — and Startups — Collapse

Keith McFarland:

Diamond concludes that societies collapse when they fall on hard times and make one or more of four fundamental mistakes:
1) They fail to anticipate problems.
2) They don’t respond promptly when problems arrive.
3) They exhibit something he calls “bad” rational behavior.
4) They adopt “disastrous values.”

I don’t know about you, but I think this is a pretty good list for business failure, too.

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Don Box A Lispnik?

Don Box:

My old friend Ted Pattison used to say that C programmers were the smartest programmers on Earth – if you didn’t believe him you could ask any C programmer and they’d tell you themselves.

As a former C programmer who had a mid-life conversion to Scheme and Lisp, I have to say, this old joke applies to Lisp in spades. The difference is when a Lisp programmer tells you he’s smarter, he’s usually right.

I expect more than our fair share of “I told you so’s” from the Lisp world in mid-September. [Emphasis mine]

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The Independence Myth

gregbd:

Coping with the Daily Grind

Soon excitement gives way to repetition. What was once fresh and exciting becomes tedious and tiresome. Do not get me wrong, there are still some things that are exciting and fresh. It is just that it is difficult to see them through the daily grind of commitments and tasks.

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Book Blog: Growing Your Business with Google by Dave Taylor

Dave Taylor:

In the 21st Century, successful business will be focused on findability, about creating an online and offline presence that helps your customers find you. Business and marketing used to be characterized by efforts to brand your company and get in front of your customers, but that’s not what’s propelling the hot new companies, the entrepreneurs who are already striking it rich in this new world.

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The Making of Flickr

Jesse James Garrett interviews Flickr’s Eric Costello (via Pelle Braendgaard):

JJG: Do you have any formal project management tools?

EC: No, we’re not very formal! That can be kind of frustrating for me as an engineer who has to make the UI work. But it’s also what I thrive on, which is solving UI problems. So although we rarely have everything spec-ed out adequately, it’s part of the fun of doing the development, meeting challenges that arise as we start to actually build the UIs we’ve talked about.

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Life Lessons From Blackjack

Steve Pavlina:

Novices miss golden opportunities. Novice blackjack players will almost invariably play their hands too conservatively. They’ll stand too often when they should hit, and they’ll fail to double down and split pairs as often as they should. They hesitate to hit 16 against a dealer’s 7 or to split a pair of 2s against a dealer’s 4. They give up a lot more to the house by playing defensively, trying not to bust. But expert players exploit every opportunity to maximize their wins, meaning that they’ll double and split far more often when the odds favor doing so. Expert players will bust more often, but they’ll also hit their big hands more often. You see a similar pattern in life too.

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From Chump to Champ

Steve Pavlina:

Darren emphasized what it took to go from chump to champ as he calls it. He had to learn to overcome failure, to fall down on his face again and again, and to keep getting back up to take the stage another day. I was amazed after seeing his 1992 video that someone so clearly lacking in comedic talent would have the wherewithal — nay, the insanity — to ever want to get back up on stage again.

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