- Churches turned to art to attract and retain parishioners
Blog
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“Samsung Rising” by Geoffrey Cain
- Korean national pride and Samsung are often synonymous
- Samsung wanted to be taken as seriously as Apple
- Focused on generalist in the early years
- “I don’t tell them. They’re supposed to notice.” On note taking habits
- Buying a newspaper allowed them to aggressively manage their public image
- In the revolution, banks were pulled from corporations and leaders had to manufacture their way into good graces
- Korea is open and still nationalist
- If Samsung failed, much of Korea’s economy would also collapse
- “Change everything but your wife and kids”
- In the 90’s, Samsung started to look for a coherent design
- Samsung started looking for products and designs that could be distinctive
- At the height of the Asian Financial Crisis, Samsung started exporting phones to the US
- “Running a big company is like running a cemetery. There are thousands of people beneath you and no one is listening.”
- Samsung’s chairman executed a sketchy stock trade, after which there was intense legal scrutiny
- Legal problems continue to plague the company
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“Is a river alive?” by Robert MacFarlane
- Ghost rivers run under cities, often through the sewers
- Resource are not, they become
- “Rivers remember their many homes”
- Turtle gender is determined by the nest temperature
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“The 4 Hour Workweek” by Timothy Ferris
- Having $1m in a bank account is not the dream but how they live
- Look for ways to relocate to lower expenses
- Control when you do what and where
- Do things differently when the status quo is broken
- Focus on emphasizing your skills instead of improving your weaknesses
- (Lean into what you do well instead of trying to be perfect)
- Distress and eustress are opposites
- “Realistic” goals have more competition than the unrealistic ones
- Happiness and boredom and opposites
- More customers is not the goal
- “Parkinson’s law” says tasks swell in urgency around its perceived effort
- “Am I being productive or just being active?”
- “If this is the only thing I do today, will I be satisfied?”
- Do these things first in the day
- Be weary of too much information and from the wrong sources
- “Will I use this information for something immediate and urgent?”
- “Learn to be difficult when it counts”
- Have meetings to solve a problem, not define it
- “Puppy dog close” is when you do a trial run
- Refine problems before scaling people
- Try to remove “you” from the equation
- People can dislike you but should never misunderstand you
- Don’t appear to be the decision authority
- “Decide in advance on the rules, stakes, and quitting time”
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“The Art of Uncertainty” by David Spiegelhalter
- Uncertainty is about one’s relationship with the outside world
- “Unknown knowns” is an important category
- Anxiety should give way to likely outcomes
- Chance is for random acts
- “Ignorance” is different from “uncertainty”
- ‘Hazards’ are damage from risks
- Hedgehog knows one big thing while the fox knows many things
- Where possible, use numbers to communicate uncertainty
- Random values are better thought as being “swamped” rather than “due”
- “Monte Carlo” was named from “The name comes from the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco, where the primary developer of the method, mathematician Stanisław Ulam, was inspired by his uncle’s gambling habits.”
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method
- It is running simulation to derive a model rather than calculating it
- Avoid picking your birthday in a lottery to reduce the number of people you would share with
- Never give a probably of 1:1 except to known True things
- Probability is not a determined attribute of the natural world
- Having an “none of the above” bucket lets you track unknowns and adjust later
- “Once in a hundred years” does not mean you have 100 years between incidents
- Providing baseline-risk is useful (what are your chances of randomly dying tomorrow)
- Noting a lack of certainty does not tend to directly erode trust
- Especially if you are clear about what is being done to manage the uncertainty and what the next steps are
- Seek to inform rather than persuade
- Include what can and cannot be inferred from the data
- Don’t strive to be trusted but to be trustworthy