Brain Dump n. 2

Living forever is the sum of multiple “one more day”: If you ask someone if he/she wants to live very long, or even forever, you’ll probably get a terrified look. Most people simply refuse the idea of living beyond a certain standard, 85 years for instance. But were you to ask if he/she wants to live an extra day, it would be extremely tricky for the same person to admit he/she would be fine with dying tomorrow. Conditions would need to be extremely hard, like dealing with a serious illness or being caught in the middle of a war with the constant threat of torture.It’s a funny comparison, as obviously a long existence is just basically giving a nod to each and every one of those individual tomorrows that come along.

Whole book vs. summary: I am obviously not the only one who tried to read a book summary (instead of the book itself) just to understand that it does not work quite the same way. Why? Not sure, but I assume that like with most things in life, you need to earn the opinion to really own it. Perhaps reading books is the same. You need to go through the behind-the-scenes of the reasons and motives of the writer to fully grasp the concept. I’d argue tho that one should definitely skip most of the details: the vast majority of books that I love could have been 20% shorter at least.

Distributed HR. I feel that a traditional HR department has immense power to say no but virtually zero power to say yes. The job is to literally prevent someone from going forward. Assuming this is correct, I have been thinking if it makes sense to distribute the interview process among the full team. It’s anyway a great training for the individual.

If you don’t have to seriously think about the risk involved in a career opportunity, it’s probably not the breakout opportunity you are looking for.

Great companies = proactivity toward employees: A great company proactively thinks and takes care of its people's opportunities and problems before the people themselves know about it. Most companies fail at this, a great example of this is equity and stock options. Employees do not know anything about it, both qualitative and quantitative so they wander around asking friends what the meaning is of their 400 shares. I recommend Bending Spoons’ company culture manifesto on this.

Great companies are remote-first: A great company is remote-first. The upsides are clear. The downsides too, but they can be managed. Any resistance simply means that the company doesn’t know how to manage a remote-first setup or that it’s not confident enough to have hired the right people to work remotely. Being a “great” company encompasses quite a wide range (90-100), so there are definitely great companies in the lower range (90-92) that do not have a remote-first setup. But if you are aiming at being a unicorn company and beyond, why not be a unicorn also for your people?

Founder-idea allocation: It’s sad great minds work on marginal improvements like a productivity app when they could lift 1 million people out of poverty. This is perhaps not technically wrong, anybody has the right to spend their time and resources to maximize their happiness. I think it’s simply sad because the willingness to put (a lot of) work is actually there, but only badly allocated.

Most people never say never. But instead of saying today, they say tomorrow.

Mental masturbation: acquiring endless knowledge while ignoring execution.

There are many smart people around. There are many ambitious people around. There are many people with big visions. But there are far fewer people who are all of these things combined.