Mohit Satyanand: “Less than 40% of adult Indians are employed. This is one of the lowest labour force participation rates in the world. Of our roughly 1 billion adults, less than 400 million are employed. The other 600 million have no jobs, no monetary income, and little choice. That’s more than the adult population of Europe, 600 million Indians empowered with about as much economic agency as Robinson Crusoe and his tiny beachside economy. We can build rural toilets that don’t flush, we can promise to pipe water into them, we can distribute cooking gas cylinders (sometimes); we can run rural hospitals that people would rather not use, and perhaps keep malnutrition at bay. But unless we can offer hundreds of millions more jobs, a huge swathe of our citizens will be spectators at the Grand Mall of Modern India – watching the parade of consumption through its gleaming windows, but unable to pass through its bustling check-out counters.”
Shane Parish: “The source of problems is blindspots. There is something hidden from us that, if we knew, would change how we thought and acted. One of the best ways to reveal blindspots is simply to lengthen your time horizon. A lot of good advice simply boils down to thinking longer term.”
Good advice from Nat Friedman (via Matt Huang). “Smaller teams are better. Faster decisions, fewer meetings, more fun. No need to chop up work for political reasons. No room for mediocre people (can pay more, too!) Large-scale engineering projects are more soluble in IQ than they appear. Many tech companies are 2-10x overstaffed.”
