University of Orange Sneakers

The contents and teachings of the UoOS should not be relied upon for any purpose other than general misinformation, and the UoOS cannot be held liable for any loss or damage which may arise from using any misinformation contained therein.

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Suicide; social isolation and lack of community - major issues. Overcome by giving back and having a purpose.

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Why Switzerland would be the safest place during WW2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha66FfC-N18&feature=share Country is effectively a bunker; completely neutral, did not join UN until 2002. Surrounded by Austria, France, Italy and Germany. Still not part of EU. All homes built after 1978 are legally mandated to have nuclear bunkers; enough shelter to provide for entire population.

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Focus

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‘I wondered how bereft my experience of the country would be for not having gotten a chance to see them flock together, sitting still or batting around like manic deformed penguin impersonators. Think on that for a moment while I make this point: Everyone comes to Iceland with a version of Iceland they’ve made up for themselves—a place of infinite happiness or infinite pools or infinite fermented shark or infinite Björk—and a visit to Iceland is very much about that particular Iceland, the one that really exists only in your mind.

—

I asked a gas station attendant what I should see around there that was something the locals loved, and he told me about Seljavallalaug | , which is a man-made pool built into the side of a mountain. You change in front of everyone and there are definitely no attendants or towels. How much less touristy could you get? It sounded perfect. I hiked a full mile over a not quite paved path—what other American would do this? I thought triumphantly—realizing that I didn’t have anything that passed for a towel and that it would be very, very cold when I left. I changed into my bathing suit in full view of everyone, and immersed myself in the most delicious warm water of my life while rogue lambs walked up and down the lava rock surrounding the pool. I swam back and forth, talking to my fellow bathers. There was a woman burning up her severance on an extended European vacation, a couple making the most of their pre-child years. There were two women on an Eat, Pray, Love quest, a new classification of traveler who is trying to get over something and find her truth or whatever. They were all American. --- By then I knew that my Iceland was just the Iceland of my mind and not anyone else’s. Someone else’s Iceland could be hiking all day; another’s could be turf houses and troll hunts. Friends who told me to eat fermented shark or whale because it’s what Icelanders do—that’s the Iceland of their minds. The Icelanders I met laughed and said it’s cruel to eat whale and disgusting to eat shark; they would never do it, and they were surprised that this is somehow someone else’s authentic Icelandic experience. But how could you begrudge someone the Iceland of their mind? How could you say that someone else’s desire is less real than your own, even if you live there? We should all be asking ourselves what the Iceland of our minds is, and we should all be looking for ways to find it. If your authentic Iceland is eating fermented shark and puffin soup, then be your authentic Icelandic self and eat those things (though really you shouldn’t). If putting silica on your face and floating in the Blue Lagoon for days is your trip, then you should enjoy it, because it is your trip to Iceland and because all your trips are ones you have earned—you’ve earned them by paying for them, but also by yearning for them, by being as curious as you are. My theory on why Iceland is now inundated with tourists is this: I think Americans who visit Iceland now are seeking a break from ugliness. We want to expose ourselves to a way of life that works, to a place more attentive to what bubbles beneath the surface, where submerging is the national pastime. We want to bring home a souvenir that reminds us that when the volcano erupts, we can all take care of each other. Maybe that’s how Iceland could save us.

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Meanwhile, the digital world—and the ease with which we carry it around in our phones—has filled our lives with new expectations and endless entertainment options. “I can’t think of a business that isn’t affected by more choice and more access to information and an increasing desire for personalization,” says Staggs. So if you’re a theme park, you have a strange dilemma that echoes the dilemmas we face in our digital lives. “Walt Disney World is vast. There’s more to do than you could do in a month,” Staggs says. “That choice is overwhelming.” In fact, it’s called the paradox of choice: You make people happier not by giving them more options but by stripping away as many as you can. The redesigned Disney World experience constrains choices by dispersing them, beginning long before the trip is under way. “There are missions in a vacation,” Staggs says. In other words, Disney knows that parents arrive to its parks thinking: We have to have tea with Cinderella, and where the hell is that Buzz Lightyear thing, anyway? In that way, the park isn’t a playground so much as a videogame, with bosses to be conquered at every level. The MagicBands let you simply set an agenda and let everything else flow around what you’ve selected. “It lets people’s vacations unfold naturally,” Staggs says. “The ability to plan and personalize has given way to spontaneity.” And that feeling of ease, and whatever flows from it, just might make you more apt to come back. Will the world at large ever become something akin to Disney World, loaded with sensors attuned to our every move, designed to free us? There are signs. It’s already starting to appear on Disney cruise ships, and Staggs says airlines, sports leagues, and sports teams have asked about the technology. “We’re just at the beginning of understanding what to do with this,” he says. What Staggs doesn’t share, but what former team members do, is that Disney already has conceived, designed, and engineered many more features that seem to border on science fiction—features even more ambitious than delivering your food to you without your having to ask. The MagicBand contains sensors that let guests swipe onto rides and allow Disney to pinpoint their location. At Be Our Guest, they’re what enable the radios in the table and ceiling to triangulate your location so your server can find you. If Disney decides to install those sensors throughout the park, a new world of data opens up. They could have Mickey and Snow White find . They might use the park’s myriad cameras to capture candid moments of your family—enjoying rides, meeting Snow White—and stitch them together into a personalized film. (The product teams called this the Story Engine.) But they might also know when you’ve waited too long in line and email you a coupon for free ice cream or a pass to another ride. And with that, they’ll have hooked the white whale of customer service: Turning a negative experience into a positive one. It recasts your memories of a place—that’s why casinos comp you drinks and shows when you lose at the tables. Though Franklin wouldn’t comment on the particulars of these possibilities, he did offer an intriguing summary of them. “What people call the Internet of Things is just a technological underpinning that misses the point, ” he says. “This is about the experiential Internet. The guest doesn’t need to know how it happened. It’s about the magic of the food arriving.” These are the experiences that many more designers will soon be striving for: invisible, everywhere, and, in a word, mundane. Which is its own kind of magic.

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What they really mean is, don’t get demoralized. Don’t think that you can’t do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn’t underestimate your potential. People who’ve done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can’t help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject’s life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they’d seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.

Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that’s one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it’s not our fault if we can’t do something as good.

I’m not saying there’s no such thing as genius. But if you’re trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.

So far we’ve cut the Standard Graduation Speech down from “don’t give up on your dreams” to “what someone else can do, you can do.” But it needs to be cut still further. There is some variation in natural ability. Most people overestimate its role, but it does exist. If I were talking to a guy four feet tall whose ambition was to play in the NBA, I’d feel pretty stupid saying, you can do anything if you really try. [2]

We need to cut the Standard Graduation Speech down to, “what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don’t underestimate your abilities.” But as so often happens, the closer you get to the truth, the messier your sentence gets. We’ve taken a nice, neat (but wrong) slogan, and churned it up like a mud puddle. It doesn’t make a very good speech anymore. But worse still, it doesn’t tell you what to do anymore. Someone with your abilities? What are your abilities?

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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 should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward. It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take. ---- The best protection is always to be working on hard problems. Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't. Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense. Well, this seems a grim view of the world, you may think. What I'm telling you is that you should worry? Yes, but it's not as bad as it sounds. It's exhilarating to overcome worries. You don't see faces much happier than people winning gold medals. And you know why they're so happy? Relief. I'm not saying this is the only way to be happy. Just that some kinds of worry are not as bad as they sound. ---- I'm not saying you shouldn't hang out with your friends-- that you should all become humorless little robots who do nothing but work. Hanging out with friends is like chocolate cake. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate cake for every meal. No matter how much you like chocolate cake, you'll be pretty queasy after the third meal of it. And that's what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness. [5] You may be thinking, we have to do more than get good grades. We have to have extracurricular activities. But you know perfectly well how bogus most of these are. Collecting donations for a charity is an admirable thing to do, but it's not hard. It's not getting something done. What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to draw the human face from life. This sort of thing rarely translates into a line item on a college application. ---- Curiosity turns work into play. For Einstein, relativity wasn't a book full of hard stuff he had to learn for an exam. It was a mystery he was trying to solve. So it probably felt like less work to him to invent it than it would seem to someone now to learn it in a class. One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee. Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in. One still hasn't sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox. I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need about the amount you need to go running. I'm often reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don't run for several days, I feel ill. It's the same with people who do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary. Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That's why he's so good. If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity about a promising question. The critical moment for Einstein was when he looked at Maxwell's equations and said, what the hell is going on here? It can take years to zero in on a productive question, because it can take years to figure out what a subject is really about. To take an extreme example, consider math. Most people think they hate math, but the boring stuff you do in school under the name "mathematics" is not at all like what mathematicians do. ----- If it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you do now, at sixteen? Work toward finding one. Great questions don't appear suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes them congeal is experience. So the way to find great questions is not to search for them-- not to wander about thinking, what great discovery shall I make? You can't answer that; if you could, you'd have made it. The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost. Einstein, Ford, and Beckenbauer all used this recipe. They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. So when something seemed amiss to them, they had the confidence to notice it. Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something, or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish. Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This could take years.) ------- Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you think. So let the path grow out the project. The most important thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you learn. Don't disregard unseemly motivations. One of the most powerful is the desire to be better than other people at something. Hardy said that's what got him started, and I think the only unusual thing about him is that he admitted it. Another powerful motivator is the desire to do, or know, things you're not supposed to. Closely related is the desire to do something audacious. Sixteen year olds aren't supposed to write novels. So if you try, anything you achieve is on the plus side of the ledger; if you fail utterly, you're doing no worse than expectations. [8] Beware of bad models. Especially when they excuse laziness. When I was in high school I used to write "existentialist" short stories like ones I'd seen by famous writers. My stories didn't have a lot of plot, but they were very deep. And they were less work to write than entertaining ones would have been. I should have known that was a danger sign. And in fact I found my stories pretty boring; what excited me was the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff like the famous writers. Now I have enough experience to realize that those famous writers actually sucked. Plenty of famous people do; in the short term, the quality of one's work is only a small component of fame. I should have been less worried about doing something that seemed cool, and just done something I liked. That's the actual road to coolness anyway. A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad. [9] So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for the tiny number of good books. The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn. Your life doesn't have to be shaped by admissions officers. It could be shaped by your own curiosity. It is for all ambitious adults. And you don't have to wait to start. In fact, you don't have to wait to be an adult. There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age. [10] This may sound like bullshit. I'm just a minor, you may think, I have no money, I have to live at home, I have to do what adults tell me all day long. Well, most adults labor under restrictions just as cumbersome, and they manage to get things done. If you think it's restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids. The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't. That realization hits most people around 23. But I'm letting you in on the secret early. So get to work. Maybe you can be the first generation whose greatest regret from high school isn't how much time you wasted. Notes [1] A doctor friend warns that even this can give an inaccurate picture. "Who knew how much time it would take up, how little autonomy one would have for endless years of training, and how unbelievably annoying it is to carry a beeper?" [2] His best bet would probably be to become dictator and intimidate the NBA into letting him play. So far the closest anyone has come is Secretary of Labor. [3] A day job is one you take to pay the bills so you can do what you really want, like play in a band, or invent relativity. Treating high school as a day job might actually make it easier for some students to get good grades. If you treat your classes as a game, you won't be demoralized if they seem pointless. However bad your classes, you need to get good grades in them to get into a decent college. And that is worth doing, because universities are where a lot of the clumps of smart people are these days. [4] The second biggest regret was caring so much about unimportant things. And especially about what other people thought of them. I think what they really mean, in the latter case, is caring what random people thought of them. Adults care just as much what other people think, but they get to be more selective about the other people. I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about, and the opinion of the rest of the world barely affects me. The problem in high school is that your peers are chosen for you by accidents of age and geography, rather than by you based on respect for their judgement. [5] The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions it's too obvious to your brain that you're not doing anything with it, and you start to feel uncomfortable. If you want to measure how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment: set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think. You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books, newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a strong craving for distraction. [6] I don't mean to imply that the only function of prep schools is to trick admissions officers. They also generally provide a better education. But try this thought experiment: suppose prep schools supplied the same superior education but had a tiny (.001) negative effect on college admissions. How many parents would still send their kids to them? It might also be argued that kids who went to prep schools, because they've learned more, are better college candidates. But this seems empirically false. What you learn in even the best high school is rounding error compared to what you learn in college. Public school kids arrive at college with a slight disadvantage, but they start to pull ahead in the sophomore year. (I'm not saying public school kids are smarter than preppies, just that they are within any given college. That follows necessarily if you agree prep schools improve kids' admissions prospects.) [7] Why does society foul you? Indifference, mainly. There are simply no outside forces pushing high school to be good. The air traffic control system works because planes would crash otherwise. Businesses have to deliver because otherwise competitors would take their customers. But no planes crash if your school sucks, and it has no competitors. High school isn't evil; it's random; but random is pretty bad. [8] And then of course there is money. It's not a big factor in high school, because you can't do much that anyone wants. But a lot of great things were created mainly to make money. Samuel Johnson said "no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." (Many hope he was exaggerating.) [9] Even college textbooks are bad. When you get to college, you'll find that (with a few stellar exceptions) the textbooks are not written by the leading scholars in the field they describe. Writing college textbooks is unpleasant work, done mostly by people who need the money. It's unpleasant because the publishers exert so much control, and there are few things worse than close supervision by someone who doesn't understand what you're doing. This phenomenon is apparently even worse in the production of high school textbooks. [10] Your teachers are always telling you to behave like adults. I wonder if they'd like it if you did. You may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile compared to adults. If you actually started acting like adults, it would be just as if a bunch of adults had been transposed into your bodies. Imagine the reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go at a time. To say nothing of the things you're taught. If a bunch of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, the first thing they'd do is form a union and renegotiate all the rules with the administration. Thanks to Ingrid Bassett, Trevor Blackwell, Rich Draves, Dan Giffin, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Mark Nitzberg, Lisa Randall, and Aaron Swartz for reading drafts of this, and to many others for talking to me about high school.

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It's in fields like the arts or writing or technology that the larger environment matters. In these the best practitioners aren't conveniently collected in a few top university departments and research labs—partly because talent is harder to judge, and partly because people pay for these things, so one doesn't need to rely on teaching or research funding to support oneself. It's in these more chaotic fields that it helps most to be in a great city: you need the encouragement of feeling that people around you care about the kind of work you do, and since you have to find peers for yourself, you need the much larger intake mechanism of a great city. You don't have to live in a great city your whole life to benefit from it. The critical years seem to be the early and middle ones of your career. Clearly you don't have to grow up in a great city. Nor does it seem to matter if you go to college in one. To most college students a world of a few thousand people seems big enough. Plus in college you don't yet have to face the hardest kind of work—discovering new problems to solve. It's when you move on to the next and much harder step that it helps most to be in a place where you can find peers and encouragement. You seem to be able to leave, if you want, once you've found both. The Impressionists show the typical pattern: they were born all over France (Pissarro was born in the Carribbean) and died all over France, but what defined them were the years they spent together in Paris. _____ Unless you're sure what you want to do and where the leading center for it is, your best bet is probably to try living in several places when you're young. You can never tell what message a city sends till you live there, or even whether it still sends one. Often your information will be wrong: I tried living in Florence when I was 25, thinking it would be an art center, but it turned out I was 450 years too late. Even when a city is still a live center of ambition, you won't know for sure whether its message will resonate with you till you hear it. When I moved to New York, I was very excited at first. It's an exciting place. So it took me quite a while to realize I just wasn't like the people there. I kept searching for the Cambridge of New York. It turned out it was way, way uptown: an hour uptown by air. Some people know at 16 what sort of work they're going to do, but in most ambitious kids, ambition seems to precede anything specific to be ambitious about. They know they want to do something great. They just haven't decided yet whether they're going to be a rock star or a brain surgeon. There's nothing wrong with that. But it means if you have this most common type of ambition, you'll probably have to figure out where to live by trial and error. You'll probably have to find the city where you feel at home to know what sort of ambition you have.

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To grow rapidly, you need to make something you can sell to a big market. That's the difference between Google and a barbershop. A barbershop doesn't scale. 

 For a company to grow really big, it must (a) make something lots of people want, and (b) reach and serve all those people. Barbershops are doing fine in the (a) department. Almost everyone needs their hair cut. The problem for a barbershop, as for any retail establishment, is (b). A barbershop serves customers in person, and few will travel far for a haircut. And even if they did the barbershop couldn't accomodate them. 

Writing software is a great way to solve (b), but you can still end up constrained in (a). If you write software to teach Tibetan to Hungarian speakers, you'll be able to reach most of the people who want it, but there won't be many of them. If you make software to teach English to Chinese speakers, however, you're in startup territory. 

 Most businesses are tightly constrained in (a) or (b). The distinctive feature of successful startups is that they're not. 

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 The most important thing that the constraints on a normal business protect it from is not competition, however, but the difficulty of coming up with new ideas. If you open a bar in a particular neighborhood, as well as limiting your potential and protecting you from competitors, that geographic constraint also helps define your company. Bar + neighborhood is a sufficient idea for a small business. Similarly for companies constrained in (a). Your niche both protects and defines you. 

Whereas if you want to start a startup, you're probably going to have to think of something fairly novel. A startup has to make something it can deliver to a large market, and ideas of that type are so valuable that all the obvious ones are already taken. 

That space of ideas has been so thoroughly picked over that a startup generally has to work on something everyone else has overlooked. I was going to write that one has to make a conscious effort to find ideas everyone else has overlooked. But that's not how most startups get started. Usually successful startups happen because the founders are sufficiently different from other people that ideas few others can see seem obvious to them. Perhaps later they step back and notice they've found an idea in everyone else's blind spot, and from that point make a deliberate effort to stay there. [3] But at the moment when successful startups get started, much of the innovation is unconscious.

What's different about successful founders is that they can see different problems. It's a particularly good combination both to be good at technology and to face problems that can be solved by it, because technology changes so rapidly that formerly bad ideas often become good without anyone noticing. Steve Wozniak's problem was that he wanted his own computer. That was an unusual problem to have in 1975. But technological change was about to make it a much more common one. Because he not only wanted a computer but knew how to build them, Wozniak was able to make himself one. And the problem he solved for himself became one that Apple solved for millions of people in the coming years. But by the time it was obvious to ordinary people that this was a big market, Apple was already established. 

Google has similar origins. Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to search the web. But unlike most people they had the technical expertise both to notice that existing search engines were not as good as they could be, and to know how to improve them. Over the next few years their problem became everyone's problem, as the web grew to a size where you didn't have to be a picky search expert to notice the old algorithms weren't good enough. But as happened with Apple, by the time everyone else realized how important search was, Google was entrenched. 

That's one connection between startup ideas and technology. Rapid change in one area uncovers big, soluble problems in other areas. Sometimes the changes are advances, and what they change is solubility. That was the kind of change that yielded Apple; advances in chip technology finally let Steve Wozniak design a computer he could afford. But in Google's case the most important change was the growth of the web. What changed there was not solubility but bigness. 

The other connection between startups and technology is that startups create new ways of doing things, and new ways of doing things are, in the broader sense of the word, new technology. When a startup both begins with an idea exposed by technological change and makes a product consisting of technology in the narrower sense (what used to be called "high technology"), it's easy to conflate the two. But the two connections are distinct and in principle one could start a startup that was neither driven by technological change, nor whose product consisted of technology except in the broader sense. 

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A company that grows at 1% a week will grow 1.7x a year, whereas a company that grows at 5% a week will grow 12.6x. A company making $1000 a month (a typical number early in YC) and growing at 1% a week will 4 years later be making $7900 a month, which is less than a good programmer makes in salary in Silicon Valley. A startup that grows at 5% a week will in 4 years be making $25 million a month. 

 Our ancestors must rarely have encountered cases of exponential growth, because our intutitions are no guide here. What happens to fast growing startups tends to surprise even the founders. 

Small variations in growth rate produce qualitatively different outcomes. That's why there's a separate word for startups, and why startups do things that ordinary companies don't, like raising money and getting acquired. And, strangely enough, it's also why they fail so frequently. 

Considering how valuable a successful startup can become, anyone familiar with the concept of expected value would be surprised if the failure rate weren't high. If a successful startup could make a founder $100 million, then even if the chance of succeeding were only 1%, the expected value of starting one would be $1 million. And the probability of a group of sufficiently smart and determined founders succeeding on that scale might be significantly over 1%. For the right people—e.g. the young Bill Gates—the probability might be 20% or even 50%. So it's not surprising that so many want to take a shot at it. In an efficient market, the number of failed startups should be proportionate to the size of the successes. And since the latter is huge the former should be too.

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If you want to understand startups, understand growth. Growth drives everything in this world. Growth is why startups usually work on technology—because ideas for fast growing companies are so rare that the best way to find new ones is to discover those recently made viable by change, and technology is the best source of rapid change. Growth is why it’s a rational choice economically for so many founders to try starting a startup: growth makes the successful companies so valuable that the expected value is high even though the risk is too. Growth is why VCs want to invest in startups: not just because the returns are high but also because generating returns from capital gains is easier to manage than generating returns from dividends. Growth explains why the most successful startups take VC money even if they don’t need to: it lets them choose their growth rate. And growth explains why successful startups almost invariably get acquisition offers. To acquirers a fast-growing company is not merely valuable but dangerous too.

It’s not just that if you want to succeed in some domain, you have to understand the forces driving it. Understanding growth is what starting a startup consists of. What you’re really doing (and to the dismay of some observers, all you’re really doing) when you start a startup is committing to solve a harder type of problem than ordinary businesses do. You’re committing to search for one of the rare ideas that generates rapid growth. Because these ideas are so valuable, finding one is hard. The startup is the embodiment of your discoveries so far. Starting a startup is thus very much like deciding to be a research scientist: you’re not committing to solve any specific problem; you don’t know for sure which problems are soluble; but you’re committing to try to discover something no one knew before. A startup founder is in effect an economic research scientist. Most don’t discover anything that remarkable, but some discover relativity.

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The world’s greatest climbers struggle to make sense of this mysterious sang-froid. “Most of us think dying is a really serious, scary thing, but I don’t think Alex does,” says Caldwell, who has climbed extensively with Honnold and considers him a close friend. “He’s wired a little differently from everybody else. The risk excites him, and he knows it’s super badass, but he doesn’t allow himself to go beyond that in his mind. The other great free-soloists always talk about this conversation with death. Alex is like, ‘I’m not going to fall, it’s no big deal.’ That’s what makes him so good.” Even Dean Potter, an openly spiritual man who describes free-soloing as part of a personal art form that includes base jumping, finds Honnold difficult to understand. “Alex is like Spock,” Potter told me. “I freak out at the top of solos and scream — like, super emotional. Then I’m wasted emotionally for months. Alex just does it and walks away and does another.” Honnold doesn’t like this kind of talk; he insists that he worked hard to develop his self-control, and he grows prickly at any suggestion that he is unlike other people. “Before Dean solos something, he has to, like, slaughter a goat and fly with the ravens,” Honnold joked, as if Potter drew on magical aid to see him through danger. “I don’t want to slaughter a goat and fly with the ravens. I just want to climb.”

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Outside Space Indoors

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It turns out, Amtrak’s social media team was listening. When Alicia Lee, Amtrak’s senior communication specialist for social media, brought up the possibility of a residency with the company’s management, everybody assumed she was joking. But when they realized she was serious, they quickly came onboard with the idea, encouraging the three-person social media team to take charge of the nascent program. Amtrak was immediately inundated with 60,000 applications—many more than they had expected. Amtrak eventually enlisted the help of Random House and four judges to help curate the process. “This was all very new to us: we’re in the train business,” Lee says. “Random House was able to give us a 101 on how to process all of these applications.” For Amtrak’s social media team, which thinks primarily about exposing the brand to wider audiences, this residency was a huge win. Not only did 60,000 writers apply, many of them also shared their excitement about the residency with their followers on social media. Those selected to be residents are also encouraged to write posts on the Amtrak blog, which will lead to a spike in web traffic. “We exposed our long-distance service to a huge audience,” Lee says. “When people think about trains, they think about the Northeast or the Pacific Northwest corridors. But with this residency, we were getting more eyeballs on other parts of our service, including cross-country travel.” Lisa Schwarzbaum, who has recently started writing books after a 20-year career as a film critic for Entertainment Weekly, was among the first writers selected for the residency. As someone who has already amassed a large following of readers, she was an ideal candidate to represent Amtrak. She took her writing trip in January and found it to be a productive time to work. “After a lifetime as an entertainment writer, spending time looking out the window and not at a movie screen was really cool,” she says. Unlike many grants in which writers are expected to demonstrate what they have produced, Amtrak does not place any responsibilities on their writers. Schwarzbaum liked the idea of simply being able to clear her mind. “For me it was just about talking to people and watching the country go by at the pace that a train goes,” she says. “It was about looking outward, but from what I hear from other Amtrak writers, many used it as an opportunity to look inward.” Glen Weldon, the author of Superman: The Unauthorized Biography and an NPR contributor, has recently been selected to be an Amtrak writer-in-residence. He’s looking forward to a lot of uninterrupted writing time that will hopefully allow him to finish up a chapter in his upcoming book. “From what I can tell, the Wi-Fi on Amtrak is not that great, and really, that was a huge selling point,” he says. “The thing that this affords you is the time to do nothing but write, with absolutely no distractions.” He points out that many writers, including himself, do not have the luxury of writing full time; most have day jobs, fitting writing into nights and weekends. A residency like this one offers the possibility of tackling a larger project without any other responsibilities.

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" “It took a very dominant, controlling, detail-oriented visionary to build Abercrombie,” says Richard Jaffe, an analyst at Stifel Financial. “And those very same traits undermined the company, kept it from evolving.” Martinez, who’s 75 and spoke by phone from New Albany, says that the Abercrombie campus will remain the same. But he will wear regular shoes. “I wear flip-flops at the beach,” he says. The Gulfstream has been grounded. The conference room that Jeffries had used as his office is now just a conference room. Martinez sits elsewhere. He says the first changes will be to the stores. “Mike was very focused on the stagecraft of our stores,” he says. “I would say an inordinate amount of time was spent on shop keeping. We want customers to be first. We don’t have to turn the company and brands on their heads to do that.” The shirtless men are mostly gone, or at least wearing shirts now. The company wouldn’t say if it will continue to enforce the “Look Book.” The store closings in the U.S. will continue as planned. Martinez says that online revenue could account for as much as 40 percent of total sales in three years. Then there’s the logos. Martinez says Jeffries went too far, so he will add some back, especially internationally, where Abercrombie gets about one-third of its revenue. Beyond that, Martinez can’t say what Abercrombie will look like without Jeffries. That’s for Christos Angelides and Fran Horowitz, the presidents of A&F and Hollister, respectively, and the new CEO to determine. Martinez wouldn’t give any indication of how the search is proceeding. But he did say that Angelides and Horowitz, as well as Jonathan Ramsden, the chief operating officer, are candidates. It could be too late for Abercrombie to fully revive itself, though. “Getting around a tainted brand is the exception, not the rule,” says Jaffe. “Brands can be left standing for something that means nothing.” "

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"Typically, a prisoner’s time in solitary comes with a known end point—that’s what makes it tolerable. At New York’s Sing Sing, where I worked for nearly a year as a corrections officer, an inmate received 90 days “in the hole” for testing positive for marijuana. Assaulting another prisoner or a guard would get you the same or longer. But in California, Texas, and a few other states, prison practices are more extreme. According to Mother Jones, in 2012, of the 11,730 people housed in some form of isolation in California, a third were there indeterminately. The prison sentence handed down by a court had a specified duration, of course, but the portion of that time to be spent in solitary was not specified (and was not knowable to a prisoner). At Pelican Bay, the average length of time in the SHU, based on the 1,156 inmates currently housed there, is 8.2 years. More than 800 (70 percent) of those inmates have been in the SHU for at least 5 years, 347 have been there for more than 10 years, and 6 have been in the SHU for more than 30 years. Decisions about who gets placed in segregated units and for how long are not judicial—they are administrative. Wardens can pretty much do as they please, a characteristic that U.S. prisons share with Guantánamo. * * * I worked in a prison as a guard in order to write a book about it, and looked in on a lot of prisoners in solitary. Some glared angrily. Some regarded me dully. But many didn’t look back at all—they had been deformed by the deficit of stimuli, the utter lack of change, the complete removal from the world. From the outside, you may see signs of what is happening to a prisoner’s mind in solitary, but you cannot really get inside. William Blake, who has spent more than 27 years in solitary in New York State, wrote in an essay for the Yale Law Journal’s Prison Law Writing Contest: “You probably think that you understand boredom, know its feel, but really you don’t… . [I’ve] felt boredom and loneliness to such a degree that it seemed to be a physical thing inside so thick it felt like it was choking me, trying to squeeze the sanity from my mind, the spirit from my soul …” "

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Interview with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem about how to deal with Failure

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The War of Art - Steven Pressfield

Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. "I write only when inspiration strikes," he replied. "Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp." That's a pro. In terms of Resistance, Maugham was saying, "I despise Resistance; I will not let it faze me; I will sit down and do my work." Maugham reckoned another, deeper truth: that by performing the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration, as surely as if the goddess had synchronised her watch with his. He knew if he built it, she would come. --- We fear discovering that we are more than we think we are. More than our parents/children/teachers think we are. We fear that we actually possess the talent that our still, small voice tells us. That we actually have the guts, the perseverance, the capacity. We fear that we truly can steer our ship, plant our flag, reach our Promised Land. We fear this because, if it’s true, then we become estranged from all we know. We pass through a membrane. We become monsters and monstrous.

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"And what about Frank Ocean, the reclusive singer who came up as a member of Odd Future's extended family but hasn't released music since his celebrated 2012 debut, and severed ties with Odd Future's management and publicity firm this past summer? "He's a different case," Tyler says. "He could care less about the spotlight type shit, which is cool. I wish I took his route and just disappeared from social media for the past year," he sighs. "I got too much shit going on... But that would be so tight." It's a relatable sentiment. Ambition comes with many punishments, the most pronounced of which may be earning scorn from the very people you once needed closest. But how else could Odd Future's story end up? Friends brought together over dick jokes and tenth grade music obsessions may grow to answer life's big questions differently— What the fuck do I want to be? What do I want to do?—or opt out of answering them all together. Tyler's strategy is clear: keep speeding forward, crashing through walls, no matter who's riding shotgun along with him."