Bill Venners: “I can’t tell you how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don’t matter. To just be able to make a decision and see what happens is tremendously empowering, but that means you have to set up the situation such that when something does go wrong, you can fix it. When something does go wrong, it doesn’t cost you or your customer an exorbitant amount. It isn’t ridiculously expensive. When you get in situations where you cannot afford to make a mistake, it’s very hard to do the right thing. So if you’re trying to do the right thing, the right thing might be to eliminate the cost of making a mistake rather than try to guess what’s right.” [via Shane Parish]
FT: “A letter can’t be written while you’re walking, or eating dinner, or on a bathroom break from a meeting, or watching television. It requires you to be still and to take the time to gather your thoughts. It requires you to slow down. And when we do slow down, our thoughts have a chance to slow down too, and to sort themselves out. We have space to note and consider our feelings, and time to consider how to choose our words. Researchers suggest that writing by hand has a wide range of benefits, from stimulating neural activity in the brain that can lead to a meditative state, to boosting creativity and our ability to make connections between ideas, to stimulating learning and improving our memory. I am not suggesting that letter-writing is the key to faultless communication, but it is a practice that helps to foster a clarity of thought before we speak things out into the world. Even if we never post the letter, it will probably have informed our thinking and feeling about the person to whom the letter was addressed…In the art and challenge of communication, so much happens in the space between the words.”
NYT: “If one looks at the history of the internet and tech, there are two tracks: financial, and product and tech, [Chris] Dixon told host Kara Swisher. The financial process has been “this crazy uncle that’s jumping up down,” he said. “I thought last year was too high. It think this year, it’s too low. … But it just seems wildly volatile to me in a way that doesn’t fully make sense.” It should be viewed separately from the product and tech track, he said, rather stating it should be through the long lens of history. “I put blockchains into the history of computing,” he said. “If you go back to World War II, every 10 of 15 years or so, there’s been a new computing wave. And for each of those—and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and reading the history of it—each of those waves had what I call the incubation phase…Web3—which combines “the best features of the open, decentralized protocols of Web1 with the advanced modern functionality of Web2″—has the potential to render powerless the handful of giants that control the web, and put that power in the hands of users, Dixon said.”
