Want to check this out, partially as an inducement to get me to do more walking - talk to something like Google Gemini on my phone. See also Coachbot history. (more)

John Cutler: TBM 363: Is Matt A Loser? I've come to the conclusion that the only thing standing between Matt's company achieving a huge multiple in terms of effectiveness is that there is a cadre of senior executives who 1) are incentivized to ignore Matt's advice to get their bonuses, and 2) would need to consume a large serving of "humble pie" if Matt's advice turned out to be effective. (see also (2025-06-14) Cutler Tbm362 How And Why We Help) (more)

Via Fabius Maximus: Just in time for the World Trade Center anniversary, Barack Obama wrote: Section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d), provides for the automatic termination of a national emergency unless, prior to the anniversary date of its declaration, the President publishes in the Federal Register and transmits to the Congress a notice stating that the emergency is to continue in effect beyond the anniversary date. Consistent with this provision, I have sent to the Federal Register the enclosed notice, stating that the emergency declared with respect to the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, is to continue in effect for an additional year.

repetitive practice that you don't have to think about consciously (more)

Christopher Hitchens writes about the revolutionary potential of living "as if". Nobody in the supposedly affluent and disillusioned 50s had seen any of this coming; I am quite certain that there will be future opportunities for people of high ideals, or of any ideals at all. However, in the interval between 1968 and 1989 - in other words, in that period where many of the revolutionaries against consumer capitalism metamorphosed into "civil society" human-rights activists - there were considerable interludes of stasis. And it was in order to survive those years of stalemate and realpolitik that a number of important dissidents evolved a strategy for survival. In a phrase, they decided to live "as if". (more)

book by Edward de Bono (more)

Cedric Chin: Damballa: A Startup Horror Story. In 2006, Merrick Furst was the undergraduate dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. He’d had a remarkable career (more)

Cedric Chin: Putting the Jobs to be Done Interview to Practice. Much has already been written about the interview method, but I thought it would be useful to describe what we’ve learnt from doing it. This includes things that we struggled with, things we found oddly tricky, and things that we wished someone had told us earlier. (more)

Cedric Chin: Is This a Moat: Mailchimp and PayPal’s Algorithmic Advantage. This week, however, I’m going to present two business cases, and then ask a series of questions for members to answer in the forum. Note that I don’t have a great answer for these questions right now. This is an ongoing business puzzle that I’m trying to work out. (more)

Cedric Chin: The Business Expertise Series. In the late 2000s, Naturalistic Decision Making researcher Lia DiBello started studying the expertise of business. She found something remarkable: every great business person shares a common mental model of business. The mental model captures a fundamental set of principles in the domain, is stable across industries and businesses, and seems resistant to change. (more)

Cedric Chin: A Review of BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits. Yesterday, I published a summary of Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, arguing that a self-interested reader would do better to read my summary and then go sign up for BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits course. (more)

Cedric Chin: Ability to See Expertise is a Milestone Worth Aiming For. One of the inconvenient facts of expertise is that experts can see more gradients of expertise than novices can. A friend once described it to me as: “there are more levels of expertise than there are types of incompetence”, and I think about that framing a lot. (more)

The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was a massive, long-lasting student protest which took place during the 1964–65 academic year on the campus of the University of California, UC Berkeley. The Movement was informally under the central leadership of Berkeley graduate student Mario Savio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement (more)

Edmund Gerald Brown Jr. (born April 7, 1938) is an American lawyer, author, and politician who served as the 34th and 39th governor of California from 1975 to 1983 and 2011 to 2019. A member of the Democratic Party, he was elected secretary of state of California in 1970; Brown later served as mayor of Oakland from 1999 to 2007 and attorney general of California from 2007 to 2011. He was both the oldest and sixth-youngest governor of California due to the 28-year gap between his second and third terms. Upon completing his fourth term in office, Brown became the fourth-longest-serving governor in U.S. history, serving 16 years and 5 days in office... Brown was born in San Francisco, California, the only son of four children born to district attorney of San Francisco and later governor of California, Edmund Gerald "Pat" Brown Sr., and his wife, Bernice Layne.[2] Brown's father was of half-Irish and half-German descent.[3] His great-grandfather August Schuckman, a German immigrant, settled in California in 1852 during the California Gold Rush. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Brown (more)

a US President, after being an actor, and governor of California (more)

Ben Settle: copywriting race wars. Tolkien’s races (hobbits, dwarves, elves, orcs, etc) and their respective copywriting styles (more)

Gary Bencivenga's Marketing Maxims. Based on decades of scientific testing, here are my favorite maxims (short, easy-to-remember guiding principles) on how to… (more)

Days of Cal: UC Berkeley in the 60s. For these ten years -- from roughly 1964 to 1974 -- Cal captured the imagination of the United States in a way that happens once a lifetime. (more)

aka Illegal Immigation, Migration (more)

Barack Obama keeps talking about big Infrastructure projects as one response to Credit Crisis 2008. (more)