Amazon link This is a classic book on negotiation, introducing the theory of principled negotiation. The idea is that most negotiations tend to become positional negotiations fairly quickly; I offer a book for sale for $20, you offer me $10, I go $18, you go $12, we end up at $15. Positional negotiations make sense […]
Retconning life
Re-reading my searching for continuity post, I find it somewhat amusing how easy it was for me to construct a story that fits my previous patterns of behavior. The story of our self is always miraculously consistent, no matter how our motivations shifted and changed along the way. It reminds me of the comic book […]
Ultimate culture
I decided to try to find some ultimate frisbee this weekend. The weather’s been really nice, and I just wanted to get out in the sun and run around and have a good time. So I did a bunch of Google’ing and came up with a couple options. Option 1 was an 11am game on […]
The Only Sustainable Edge, by Hagel and Brown
As I mentioned last month, I was reading this book mostly because I enjoyed The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid so much. I finally finished it off last weekend, and figured I should at least do a perfunctory review. It was pretty awful. The writing was terrible – I […]
I’m published!
Issue 3 of Ambidextrous Magazine has just come out (so recently that it’s not even listed on their website yet), and an article I wrote is in there. This is very exciting for me, as it is the first time I have been published. The article was something I concocted based off of a quote […]
Searching for continuity
I apologize for the relentlessly solipsistic posts recently. Being in New York in a new environment is giving me a chance to re-examine what I take for granted. It’s interesting to see what behaviors translated through the move untouched (e.g. I still prefer eating in to going out), and what hasn’t (e.g. I don’t miss […]
The fundamental interconnectedness of all things
DocBug wrote up a great post, discussing how he has been trying to “translate” the spiritualistic beliefs of some of his friends “into a form that a philosophically-minded but skeptical materialist like myself can accept.” I think this is a fascinating topic, because I’ve been on a similar journey. The more I learn, the more […]
Positioning, by Ries and Trout
Amazon link This is a classic book in marketing, and therefore one of the books that Joel asked us to read. The main message of the book is that consumers have a limited mindspace. They can only pay attention to a certain number of things before they just lose track and don’t care any more. […]
Humility
I have been extraordinarily fortunate in my life to have things generally go as I hope they will. I got to go to the schools I wanted to, I got the jobs I wanted to, I’ve done the activities I wanted to. Things just seem to fall into place for me. Part of it is […]
Living forever
One of the topics that came up in conversation last night with Wes’s crowd was whether people wanted to live forever. Opinions varied; some people felt that without the pressure of death, we would never get around to doing anything at all – procrastination would always win out. Others felt strongly that life was too […]
