The Wisdom Wall
9 quotable lessons, heuristics and mental models. Every one is playable at the moment it was said. No fortune cookies allowed.
“This iterative approach is the way to learn quickly and improve, even with what you're trying to do is very mission critical and failure intolerant.”
“one way you get status inside this thing called the company where you spend so many of your waking hours is to be in the loop. And so subconsciously, almost all the time, we humans, we want to be part of the process. We want to be in the loop. We want to be consulted. Either in a hard way or a soft way. We want to…”
“I think in general, When we analyze these very powerful technologies, we conclude that nothing improves the human condition and the state of nature more than technological progress.”
“It's also, in some sense, the opposite of cross-functional coordination and process and structure and hierarchy. Now, I'm not saying that ownership equals chaos or equals anarchy, but it involves a lot less of all of those things than we became fond of in the industrial era.”
“I think they've, they've upgraded the technology that is the company.”
“Peter's insight, the insight of a lot of geeks that I work with is that you need to do some planning. You need a minimum viable plan. After that, the only way you're going to learn about reality and learn about what the customer wants or learn about how long your kitchen's going to take is to start doing stuff and…”
“the teams that worked the hardest to reduce their dependencies were the ones that were most successful later on.”
“Robert Trivers, the most important evolutionary biologist since Darwin. Trivers said the reason we are overconfident is because confidence is valuable for individual members of a very social species. If you believe that you're really, really good, you will appear that way to other people and they will want it to have…”
“Overconfidence will make you invest way too much money in, I don't know, like the metaverse, for example, or the fire phone, or your pet project. Overconfident, uh, successful leaders will have a very strong tendency To take their organizations in bad directions, which can be very, very expensive.”