Things that were not immediately obvious to me » Blog Archive » The Right Thing:

Ultimately, who you are is determined not by what you might do, or what you’d like to do, or what you would do in some hypothetical; it’s determined by what you do in the situations life actually throws your way. The chief reward of doing the right thing – and the only reward that can’t be taken away – is what doing the right thing tells you about who you are.

Seth’s Blog: Finding your brand essence:

First, decide it’s okay to fail and to make a ruckus while failing. THEN go searching for the way to capture that energy and share it with the world.

Clothes don’t make the man, the man makes the man. Clothes (and the brand) just amplify that.

Things that were not immediately obvious to me � Blog Archive � The Spiral:

The hardest part of understanding something is finding the bottom of the spiral: a simple model of a few aspects of the subject that you can take in all at once, and which can direct you to fruitful lines of inquiry. Many starting points fail either because they are too diffuse to be usefully comprehended by the novice, or so hopelessly oversimplified and inaccurate as to be cut off from any proper understanding of their subject.

Andreessen’s Advice To Old Media: “Burn The Boats”:

Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown. Marc Andreessen has the same advice for old media companies: “Burn the boats.”

(Via @TechCrunch.)

Warren Buffett’s 2009 Letter to Berkshire Shareholders:

Long ago, Charlie laid out his strongest ambition: “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” That bit of wisdom was inspired by Jacobi, the great Prussian mathematician, who counseled “Invert, always invert” as an aid to solving difficult problems. (I can report as well that this inversion approach works on a less lofty level: Sing a country song in reverse, and you will quickly recover your car, house and wife.)

(Via daringfireball.net.)

Stuff:

I first realized the worthlessness of stuff when I lived in Italy for a year. All I took with me was one large backpack of stuff. The rest of my stuff I left in my landlady’s attic back in the US. And you know what? All I missed were some of the books. By the end of the year I couldn’t even remember what else I had stored in that attic.

And yet when I got back I didn’t discard so much as a box of it. Throw away a perfectly good rotary telephone? I might need that one day.

(Via @dhh.)

Conformity: Ten Timeless Influencers | PsyBlog:

Conformity is not in itself a good or a bad thing. For example, creativity is built on some of the pillars of nonconformity: ignoring social norms and authority, eschewing social approval, rejecting structure and cultivating dissent. On the other hand many of societies most basic institutions — government, finance, transport, education — would collapse if people didn’t conform.

(Via kottke.org.)

kung fu grippe:

There’s two directions… companies can move right now. Open, faster, more agile, and more permissive is one. More closed, slower, more calcified, and more hard-assed is certainly another option.

I think the difference is easy to detect. Because it usually reflects the values of a company who think so little of both their audience and their staff that they’d burn cycles on deliberately making their material harder to get.

(Via daringfireball.net.)