Random Musings

 

  What is one thing you’re always going to splurge on? Saving my own time. Anything that provides convenience to me, I will pay a premium for.

  " Nonviolent Communication shows us a way of being very honest, but without any criticism, without any insults, without any putdowns, without any intellectual diagnosis implying wrongness."         The Nonviolent Communication model consists of two parts, empathy and honesty , and four components, observations , feelings , needs , and requests . When I am expressing what is alive in me using observations, feelings, needs and requests I am using honesty. When I am acknowledging verbally someone else's observations, feelings, needs and requests I am demonstrating empathy.  With NVC  we do the same thing. We practice in a safe place. We find what we do in practice is what we do in live situations. So, if you practice responding compassionately, you are much more likely to be compassionate in difficult situations. The long pause at the beginning of this video is similar to the pause th...

 

  In my experience, the most sophisticated decision makers tend to be hypothesis-driven thinkers. They may be engineers solving a technical problem, product designers fulfilling a customer need, or entrepreneurs growing a business. They form a hypothesis about how to reach their goal and then work systematically to either validate or falsify it.    Say you’re tuning a learning algorithm that estimates the health of corn stalks based on input from a tractor-mounted camera. (Many companies are developing products like this to help farmers make decisions about planting, weeding, or harvesting.) If your algorithm is doing poorly, how should you go about improving it?    Some engineers tend to apply a one-size-fits-all rule. Someone who has experience improving algorithms by collecting more data may tend to gather more photos of corn stalks. When that doesn’t work, they may end up trying things more or less at random until they stumble on something ...

 

  Upwind  " If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do"   "But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them yet. Most of the work I've done in the last ten years didn't exist when I was in high school. The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans." "I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway. In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what sho...