Janan Ganesh: “Knowing what you want is the ultimate life skill. It is more foundational to happiness than either talent or hard work…With it, you will often fail to get what you want. But you won’t succeed in getting what you didn’t want, which is much worse, and less reversible.”
WSJ: “Apologies have become more of a reflex than a real expression of contrition and overusing them might be holding you back…“Don’t give away your power,” counsels Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business and author of a book about commanding authority at work. Apologizing in business, especially when you’ve actually done something wrong, is just asking for trouble, he says. People are never satisfied with an apology, he adds. Groveling and exhibiting vulnerability only make you look weak and sink team morale. Standing your ground comes with risks, he allows. You’ll piss some people off. You might not be liked. He thinks it’s worth it. “You can either conform to what people want you to be, or you can decide that you are going to risk offending people,” he says. “Life is about trade-offs.””
Francisco Toro: “A prodigious body of literature in political science deals with the role of parties within democracy. A leading hypothesis appeared in Responsible Parties, Saving Democracy from Itself by Yale’s Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro, published in 2018. In exhaustive detail, Rosenbluth and Shapiro chronicle how reforms that weaken parties in the name of grassroots involvement fail. Such reforms, they argue, “feed political dysfunction and produce policies that are self-defeating for most voters, even those who advocate the decentralizing reforms.” They end up leaving voters more dissatisfied with the political system, and less able to hold their leaders to account.”
Michael Mignano: “Creativity has become the focal point of our modern Internet economy. What was once just a means of artistic expression now powers much of how we all interact, work, and play online…What if the promise of the “Creator Economy” failed because we collectively (myself included) defined the opportunity for creativity as far too small? What if we were thinking about one small piece of the market for creativity? Surely there is much more to creativity than the tools that enable the top 1% of creators to make money. What if the opportunity for creativity is much bigger than what we’ve all been calling the Creator Economy? I believe it is. I call this opportunity, The Creativity Supply Chain…The Creativity Supply Chain is the global market for creativity in today’s modern economy. It is made up of the supply, incentives, and demand that drive how and why people create. And it rests on the technology-enabled superpowers which turbocharge all of the above, generating massive market value in the process.”
