Reading

line, they are open and curious. Further, we reveal that when leaders are below the line, their primary commitment is to being right, and when they are above the line, their primary commitment is to learning.

Shifting is moving from closed to open, from defensive to curious, from wanting to be right to wanting to learn, and from fighting for the survival of the individual ego to leading from a place of security and trust.

Content answers the question, “What are we talking about?” Context answers the question, “How are we talking about the content?”

great leaders pay more attention to how conversations are occurring than to what is being talked about.

The To Me state of consciousness is synonymous with being below the line. From our perspective, 95% of all leaders (and people) spend 98% of their time in that state. If I am in the To Me consciousness, I see myself “at the effect of,” meaning that the cause of my condition is outside me. It is happening To Me. Whether I see the cause as another person, circumstance, or condition, I believe I’m being acted upon by external forces.

Leaders in To Me are “at the effect of” the markets, competitors, team members who “don’t get it,” suppliers, the weather, their own mood, their spouse, their children, their bank account, and their health, to name a few. They believe that these external realities are responsible for their unhappiness (if only my spouse weren’t mean, I’d be happy); for their failures (if only my sales team would work harder, our top line would go up); and for their insecurities (if my board gave me a larger share of the company, I’d be secure). This “at the effect of” way of seeing the world doesn’t mean that leaders are always unhappy or upset. On the contrary, some are quite happy and successful, but the point is that they are pinning the cause of their well-being on external factors. We call this To Me mindset “victim consciousness”. In our experience, a significant difference exists between being a victim and having a victim consciousness. Most people would agree that children abused by alcoholic parents are victims. Thirty years later, if those same children, now adults, are still blaming their parents for their problems and suffering, they are living in a victim consciousness. Victim consciousness is a choice. As we mentioned, from our experience, most people choose to live this way. Those operating in the To Me victim consciousness are constantly looking to the past to assign blame for their current experience. They fault themselves, others, circumstances, or conditions for what is happening in their lives. Their thoughts and conversations are often dominated by “why” questions: “Why did this happen to me?” “Why don’t they respect me?” “Why are we losing market share?” “Why are my kids failing in school?” They search for answers that assign responsibility for the cause.

The gateway for moving from To Me to By Me is responsibility…

When leaders shift from below the line to above it, they move from the To Me to the By Me state—from living in victim consciousness to living in creator consciousness and from being “at the effect of” to “consciously creating with.” Instead of believing that the cause of their experience is outside themselves, they believe that they are the cause of their experience. To Me leaders think that the world should be a certain way, and if it isn’t, something needs to be different. For example, it should be warm and sunny out and it’s not, therefore the weather should be different. My children should obey me and when they don’t, they should be different. My employees should “get it” and they don’t, so they need to be different. Sometimes, however, the world is just the way they think it should be, although this is rare and fleeting for To Me leaders. The By Me leader chooses to see that everything in the world is unfolding perfectly for their learning and development. Nothing has to be different. They see that what is happening is for them. We suggest to leaders that life is like one big learning university, where we all enroll in classes that are perfectly designed to support our education. In these classes, we can either be “at the effect of” the teacher, the curriculum, and the other students or “consciously creating with.” To do the latter, a leader chooses curiosity and learning over defensiveness and being right (two cornerstones of the To Me consciousness). Instead of asking “Why is this happening to me?” the By Me leader asks questions like, “What can I learn from this?” “How is this situation ‘for me’?” “How am I creating this and keeping this going?”

The gateway for moving from To Me to By Me is responsibility—actually, what we call radical responsibility: choosing to take responsibility for whatever is occurring in our lives, letting go of blaming anyone (ourselves, others, circumstances, or conditions), and opening through curiosity to learn all that life has to teach us.

In the Through Me state of leadership, the “me” starts to open to another. Curiosity begins to guide this leader to a different set of questions, such as, “Am I the center of the universe?” “Is there something going on in addition to me?” “What is the nature of this other?” “Is it possible to be in relationship to this other?”

heroing is a primary form of unconscious leadership. It is toxic because it leads to burn out, supports others in taking less than their full responsibility (being victims), and rewards behaviors that ultimately lead to individual and team breakdown.

I commit to taking full responsibility for the circumstances of my life and for my physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being. I commit to supporting others to take full responsibility for their lives.

self-blame is equally as toxic as blaming others, or circumstances, and it is NOT taking responsibility.

shift from believing that the world should be a particular way to believing that the world just shows up. Second,

shift from rigidity, close-mindedness, and self-righteousness to curiosity, learning, and wonder

Taking 100% Responsibility Worksheet.

four competencies trump all others as the greatest predictors of sustained success: self-awareness, learning agility, communication, and influence.

Effective leaders learn to get into a state of wonder on a consistent basis.

Though conscious leaders have a good grasp on what they know and are interested in what they don’t know, they are inexorably drawn to what they don’t know they don’t know.

Commit to learning over being right. Decide that even though you will get defensive at times, you will make the choice to shift to curiosity whenever you recognize you’re defensive and below the line. Also decide that you will consider everything in life as a learning opportunity and value learning above all else. Share this commitment with key people in your life and request their support.

Ask wonder questions. Keep a list and share them with people close to you.

commit to feeling my feelings all the way through to completion. They come, and I locate them in my body then move, breathe and vocalize them so they release all the way through.

we frequently prevent the natural release of emotions by recycling them, which occurs when we get stuck in a cognitive/emotive loop. Cognition is thinking and emoting is feeling. When our mind gets involved, we create an endless loop that causes emotions to recycle rather than release.

The body releases naturally when you vocalize and let it move to match energy. By vocalization, we don’t mean “talk about it,” because that usually leads to recycling. Rather, we just mean make a sound.

If you repress or recycle emotion, it can harden into a mood: Anger becomes bitterness. Fear becomes anxiety. Sadness becomes apathy. And these moods can last for years.

ANGER: Anger tells a leader that something is not, or is no longer, of service. Or, that something is not aligned, and must be changed or destroyed so that something more beneficial can replace it.

Fear tells a leader that something important needs to be known.

something new wants to be learned. Fear invites your full attention and presence.

SADNESS: Sadness tells a leader that something needs to be let go of, said goodbye to, moved on from. Sadness is the energy of loss.

JOY: Joy tells a leader that something needs to be celebrated, appreciated, or laughed at, or someone needs to be patted on the back. Countless leaders fail to create a culture of celebration and appreciation because they’re cut off from their joy.

When a feeling arises pause and… Locate the sensation in your body. What are the “bits” doing? Breathe and allow the bits to simply do what they do. Move and/or make a sound to match what the bits are doing.

“the team that sees reality the best wins.”

most firms and leaders practice selective candor, or put another way, they withhold.

leaders who reveal (facts, thoughts, feelings, and sensations) have a free flow of abundant energy for accomplishing their vision.

Candor is one of the great antidotes to boredom. If couples learn to reveal rather than to conceal, boredom is rarely an issue in the relationship.

whenever we withhold, we withdraw. Initially, withdrawing is often subtle. We slightly pull back from the other. We no longer fully engage with them. Often we say to ourselves that this person cannot be fully trusted, justifying our disengagement. This withdrawal leads to the final step in relational disconnection: we project.

unequal, unfair world that we can never change or escape. As Twist

He sees everything; he sees them set the coffin down at His feet, sees the child rise up, and his face darkens. He knits his thick grey brows and his eyes gleam with a sinister fire. He holds out his finger and bids the guards take Him. And such is his power, so completely are the people cowed into submission and trembling obedience to him, that the crowd immediately makes way for the guards, and in the midst of deathlike silence they lay hands on Him and lead him away.

care not to know whether it is Thou or only a semblance of Him,

does it matter to us after all whether it was a mistake of identity or a wild fantasy? All that matters is that the old man should speak out, that he should speak openly of what he has thought in silence for ninety years.”

Thou mayest not add to what has been said of old,

Whatsoever Thou revealest anew will encroach on men’s freedom of faith; for it will be manifest as a miracle, and the freedom of their faith was dearer to Thee than anything in those days fifteen hundred years ago.

to do so had gathered together all the wise men of the earth- rulers, chief priests, learned men, philosophers, poets- and had set them the task to invent three questions, such as would not only fit the occasion, but express in three words, three human phrases, the whole future history of the world and of humanity- dost Thou believe that all the wisdom of the earth united could have invented anything in depth and force equal to the three questions which were actually put to Thee then by the wise and mighty spirit in the wilderness?

we can see that we have here to do not with the fleeting human intelligence, but with the absolute and eternal.

what is that freedom worth if obedience is bought with bread? Thou

In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet,

will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free,

And if for the sake of the bread of Heaven thousands shall follow Thee, what is to become of the millions and tens of thousands of millions of creatures who will not have the strength to forego the earthly bread for the sake of the heavenly? Or dost Thou care only for the tens of thousands of the great and strong, while the millions, numerous as the sands of the sea, who are weak but love Thee, must exist only for the sake of the great and strong?

They will marvel at us and look on us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful

Choosing “bread,” Thou wouldst have satisfied the universal and everlasting craving of humanity- to find someone to worship. So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But

to find community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity

man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?

So that, in truth, Thou didst Thyself lay the foundation for the destruction of Thy kingdom, and no one is more to blame for it.

those forces are miracle, mystery and authority.

Is the nature of men such, that they can reject miracle, and at the great moments of their life, the moments of their deepest, most agonising spiritual difficulties, cling only to the free verdict of the heart?

Thou didst not know that when man rejects miracle he rejects God too; for man seeks not so much God as the miraculous.

Freedom, free thought, and science will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves, others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet and whine to us: “Yes, you were right, you alone possess His mystery, and we come back to you, save us from ourselves!”

hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil.

For if anyone has ever deserved our fires, it is Thou. To-morrow I shall burn Thee.

“look around you at the gifts of God, the clear sky, the pure air, the tender grass, the birds; nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, only we, are sinful and foolish, and we don’t understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep.”

“And that we are all responsible to all for all, apart from our own sins, you were quite right in thinking that, and it is wonderful how you could comprehend it in all its significance at once. And in very truth, so soon as men understand that, the Kingdom of Heaven will be for them not a dream, but a living reality.”

No sort of scientific teaching, no kind of common interest, will ever teach men to share property and privileges with equal consideration for all. Everyone will think his share too small and they will be always envying, complaining and attacking one another. You ask when it will come to pass; it will come to pass, but first we have to go though the period of isolation.”

the isolation that prevails everywhere, above all in our age- it has not fully developed, it has not reached its limit yet. For everyone strives to keep his individuality as apart as possible, wishes to secure the greatest possible fullness of life for himself; but meantime all his efforts result not in attaining fullness of life but self-destruction, for instead of self-realisation he ends by arriving at complete solitude.

mankind in our age have split up into units, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides himself and hides what he has, from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them.

have science; but in science there is nothing but what is the object of sense. The spiritual world, the higher part of man’s being is rejected altogether, dismissed with a sort of triumph, even with hatred. The

For the world says: “You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don’t be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires.” That is the modern doctrine of the world.

we're now seeing customer support and content marketing give way to a new era of customer relationships: the customer community.

four factors that contribute to a sense of community: membership, influence, integration/fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection.

think about how to create real community for your people, rather than just slapping the title onto everything. Because if you can create a true sense of community for people, that's what will make them care enough to contribute. And that's what will unlock all the business value we'll talk about in this book.

When talking about the value of community, people often focus on customer retention, and how being a part of a community will make customers more loyal. This value is big and shouldn't be ignored, but the BIG competitive advantage comes from how you activate those loyal customers to contribute their energy, knowledge, and skills. It's their contributions that unlocks scale. It sounds simple enough, but it's actually a MASSIVE shift in mindset for most businesses.

Ultimately, what makes a business successful is the same thing that makes a community successful: Owning a topic in people's minds. Building community is one of the most powerful ways to establish your brand as the most trusted leader in a category, or to get people bought into a category that you're working to create. You want your community to be the first place people think of when they have a problem that needs solving in your category. For millions of developers, when they get stuck on a problem, the first place they think of to go for help is Stack Overflow. For millions of sales admins, when they have a problem, they turn to the Salesforce Trailblazer community. For inbound marketers, there's no better resource than the Inbound conference and community hosted by Hubspot. Humans are creatures of habit. When we find something that works, we do it again and again until neural pathways form and it becomes automatic.

Owning a topic in people's minds is quite simple (but not easy): you need to successfully solve their problem for them enough times that your community becomes the most efficient and trusted place they know of to get an answer, and they form a new habit. They need to feel confident that if they ask a question in your online community, they will get quality answers in a reasonable amount of time. They need to feel confident that if they show up to your event, the content and the attendees will be high quality, and they'll get the value they came for.

two things that every community program should focus on: How it creates value, belonging, and emotional safety for members How it creates value and measurable results for the business

elements of community are there: symbols, common language, shared sense of identity and purpose, communal spaces, an intentional culture, levels of leadership, etc.

The community team is responsible for organizing and facilitating spaces for members to connect with each other.

SPACES Model: The Six Business Outcomes of Community

All community programs will drive at least one, but often multiple, of these six business outcomes: Support: Customer service and support. The goal is to improve customer support and satisfaction, and reduce support costs by empowering members to answer questions and solve problems for each other. Product: Innovation, feedback, and R&D. The goal is to accelerate innovation and improve your product offering by creating spaces for members to share their feedback and discuss ideas that they'd like to see you apply to your product. Acquisition: Growth, marketing, and sales. The goal is to increase brand awareness, grow market share, and drive SEO, traffic, and leads, by hosting online and offline community spaces and/or empowering ambassadors to create content, organize events, and advocate on your behalf. Contribution: Collaboration and crowdsourcing. The goal is to motivate and accelerate the contribution of content, products, and services on your platform, marketplace, or social network. This is a common objective for companies whose core offering is a community, or is inherently social. Engagement: Customer experience, retention, and loyalty. The goal is to increase customer retention, average contract value, and customer satisfaction by giving customers a sense of belonging and organizing engaging and valuable community experiences. Success: Customer success and advancement. The goal is to make customers more successful at using your product, resulting in increased spend, retention, and satisfaction, by empowering them to teach each other, help each other skill up, and grow in their careers.

The purpose of a Support community is to create a space where your customers can answer questions for each other.

Product teams absolutely love having an engaged community that they can always turn to for feedback.

For our own product Bevy, it's rare that a company becomes a customer who hasn't engaged in the CMX community in some way. It's very likely that they've attended an event and have multiple people participating in our community before they ever get on the phone with a sales representative. Our sales reps love hearing that, because they know that there's already established trust. That makes their job a lot easier. There's absolutely a wrong way to use community to drive sales. But when it's done right, and authentically, it can become your company's strongest growth engine.

“How well does it connect people? What new network does it create?”

This is why the naive view is wrong to believe that creating more powerful information technology will necessarily result in a more truthful understanding of the world. If no additional steps are taken to tilt the balance in favor of truth, an increase in the amount and speed of information is likely to swamp the relatively rare and expensive truthful accounts by much more common and cheap types of information.

When it comes to uniting people, fiction enjoys two inherent advantages over the truth. First, fiction can be made as simple as we like, whereas the truth tends to be complicated, because the reality it is supposed to represent is complicated. Take, for example, the truth about nations. It is difficult to grasp that the nation to which one belongs is an intersubjective entity that exists only in our collective imagination. You rarely hear politicians say such things in their political speeches. It is far easier to believe that our nation is God’s chosen people, entrusted by the Creator with some special mission. This simple story has been repeatedly told by countless politicians from Israel to Iran and from the United States to Russia. Second, the truth is often painful and disturbing, and if we try to make it more comforting and flattering, it will no longer be the truth. In contrast, fiction is highly malleable. The history of every nation contains some dark episodes that citizens don’t like to acknowledge and remember. An Israeli politician who in her election speeches details the miseries inflicted on Palestinian civilians by the Israeli occupation is unlikely to get many votes. In contrast, a politician who builds a national myth by ignoring uncomfortable facts, focusing on glorious moments in the Jewish past, and embellishing reality wherever necessary may well sweep to power. That’s the case not just in Israel but in all countries. How many Italians or Indians want to hear the unblemished truth about their nations? An uncompromising adherence to the truth is essential for scientific progress, and it is also an admirable spiritual practice, but it is not a winning political strategy.

Telling a fictional story is lying only when you pretend that the story is a true representation of reality. Telling a fictional story isn’t lying when you avoid such pretense and acknowledge that you are trying to create a new intersubjective reality rather than represent a preexisting objective reality.

For the scientific revolution to gather pace, scientists had to trust information published by colleagues in distant lands.

unlike the Catholic Church, the Académie des Sciences did not command huge territories and budgets. But scientific institutions did accrue influence thanks to a very original claim to trust. A church typically told people to trust it because it possessed the absolute truth, in the form of an infallible holy book. A scientific institution, in contrast, gained authority because it had strong self-correcting mechanisms that exposed and rectified the errors of the institution itself. It was these self-correcting mechanisms, not the technology of printing, that were the engine of the scientific revolution. In other words, the scientific revolution was launched by the discovery of ignorance.[91]

innate censors and motivators exist in the brain that deeply and unconsciously affect our ethical premises; from these roots, morality evolved as instinct. If that perception is correct, science may soon be in a position to investigate the very origin and meaning of human values, from which all ethical pronouncements and much of political practice flow.

Which of the censors and motivators should be obeyed and which ones might better be curtailed or sublimated? These guides are the very core of our humanity.

To chart our destiny means that we must shift from automatic control based on our biological properties to precise steering based on biological knowledge.

Are human beings innately aggressive? This is a favorite question of college seminars and cocktail party conversations, and one that raises emotion in political ideologues of all stripes. The answer to it is yes.

Degeneracy in the brain means that your actions and experiences can be created in multiple ways. Each time you feel afraid, for example, your brain may construct that feeling with various sets of neurons.

Author: "Bill Bryson"

Created: 2026-05-20T18:38:23

Tag: []

Genre:

reading_status: Read

rating: Great

Format: Book

Finished: 2017-04-08

Published: 2003

Summary: "Second Licanius Trilogy book — the Boundary weakens as ancient enemies return and alliances fracture."

Tag: []

Genre:

reading_status: Read

Finished: 2024-03-10

rating: Great

Format: Book

Source: Kindle

-

-

-

The rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX.

Summary: |-

Hard Drive charts Gates's missteps as well as his successes: the failure of OS/2 and the embarrassing delays in bringing Windows to the marketplace; the highly publicized split with IBM, which then forged an alliance with Apple to battle Microsoft; the public relations fallout over various exploits of Gates; and the investigations by the Federal Trade Commission. Wallace and Erickson also examine the combative, often abrasive side of Gates's personality that has alienated many of Microsoft's rivals and even employees, and led to his being labeled "The Silicon Bully" by Business Month Magazine. They report:

In the early 80's, Microsoft's Multiplan lost out to Lotus 1-2-3 in the marketplace. According to one Microsoft programmer, a few of the key people working on DOS 2.0 had a saying at the time that "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run." They managed to code a few hidden bugs into DOS 2.0 that caused Lotus 1-2-3 to breakdown when it was loaded. "There were as few as three or four people who knew this was being done," the employee said. He felt the highly competitive Gates was the ringleader.

The first two female executives hired at Microsoft in 1985 were recruited to meet federal affirmative action guidelines so that the company could qualify for a lucrative Air Force contract. One source says,"They would say, 'Well, let's hire two women because we can pay them half as much as we will have to pay a man, and we can give them all this other crap work to do because they are women.' That's directly out of Bill's mouth...." Gates treated one of these executives so badly that she asked to be transferred away from him.

Microsoft managers used the company's e-mail system to secretly spy on employee work habits. Only those employees who worked weekends could collect bonuses. In time word got out and some employees logged into their e-mail on weekends with a modem from home so it would appear they had come in.

From Brainchild to Billionaire

Born outside Seattle to socially prominent parents, Gates was a gifted child with a photographic memory. He first encountered computers as a seventh-grader at the prestigious Lakeside private school, and quickly outstripped his instructors in expertise.

As a Harvard student in 1973, he spent most of his time playing with computers--and winning at high-stakes poker--but he never graduated. Instead, education took a back seat to ambition. In 1974, Gates and his friend Paul Allen developed a BASIC language for the Altair 8080, the world's first personal computer. Surviving on catnaps and working on a Harvard computer rigged to mimic the Altair-- a machine they had never seen--their program ran successfully the first time it was tried."It was the coolest program I ever wrote," Gates said, and it set the industry standard.

In 1975, with a vision of a computer in every home and the conviction that the fledgling computer industry was about to soar, the two formed Microsoft.Ironically, it was in collaboration with IBM--a company that dwarfed them in size, represented an entirely different corporate culture, and would later become a bitter rival--that Microsoft hit upon its greatest success to date. When IBM needed an operating system for its new PC, Big Blue turned to Microsoft. Gates turned to Seattle Computer products, a small, local computer company and, in what was one of a long series of brilliant business deals, purchased the rights to DOS for $50,000. Now labeled MS-DOS, it too became the industry standard and generates more than $200 million a year, helping to make Microsoft the most successful start-up company in the history of American business and enabling Gates to proceed with such projects as Word, Multiplan, OS/2 and Windows. When Microsoft went public in 1986, its shares were traded with a frenzy virtually unprecedented on Wall Street, and many of its employees became paper millionaires.

-

-

Summary: "Reimagining of Huckleberry Finn from the enslaved Jim's perspective, exploring race, language, and selfhood in antebellum America."

Tag: []

Genre: Fiction

reading_status: Read

Finished: 2026-02-15

rating: Great

Format: Audiobook

Source: Libby

-

different kind of markets, israel day care, queues for political hearings, Incentives vs invisible hand

Markets crowd out other values, which atrophy without use

Tag: []

Genre: SciFi

reading_status: Read

Finished: 2022-02-15

rating: Great

Format: Audiobook

Source: Libby

We need our work to have meaning, and the communities that succeed the most are clearly able to draw a connection between the work of their members and the broader mission of the overall community. This is why activist groups such as Amnesty International, the Sierra Club, and Black Lives Matter generate so much devotion: their members feel their work has much broader meaning.

social capital is a key currency in communities.

social capital isn’t just generated by contributing something worthwhile to the community, but in how you produce

Do not let your sales team treat your community members as a pipeline. This is a surefire way to annoy them. Instead, build your community and let your members naturally bring people to your business. As an example, I have sometimes set up a community concierge, where established community members can reach out to members of the company to introduce prospective customers.

don’t think of your community as merely a subservient group.

build it, take a strategic approach, train and integrate your team tightly, carefully review results, modify your approach, and operate on a clear cadence,

Building a great community is fundamentally about creating an ecosystem in which people produce meaningful work, are able to thrive, are motivated to keep growing, and can help sustain the future success of the community. Doing this well is all about understanding the drivers and motivations of people, and using tech as a means to address and harness those drivers and motivations. Don’t let the tech dominate your thinking.

Building a culture requires discipline and focus. It requires you and your team to show up every day to build engagement, relationships, and value. Many companies I work with struggle to stick to the plan they make, but it is important to see it through.

“MAKE A PLAN AND STICK TO IT”

I am a firm believer in intentionality. Don’t try to do something. Don’t use half measures. Get in there, roll your sleeves up, quit your excuses, and make it happen. Results are driven not just by determination but also by a clear head and clear strategy.

the community mission provides a clear way in which the community is an engine that powers and accomplishes broader success.

-

Over-specialization makes people blind to connections

Too much over-specialization in this world, limiting creativity

Late specializers have better "match quality" with what they settle into

Also more likely to make connections across disciplines and have more outlier outcomes.

Every part of the software system needs to be owned by exactly one team. This means there should be no shared ownership of components, libraries, or code. Teams may use shared services at runtime, but every running service, application, or subsystem is owned by only one team.

ownership of code should not be a territorial thing. The team takes responsibility for the code and cares for it, but individual team members should not feel like the code is theirs to the exclusion of others. Instead, teams should view themselves as stewards or caretakers as opposed to private owners. Think of code as gardening, not policing.

organizations should not allow a software subsystem to grow beyond the cognitive load of the team responsible for the software.

stream-aligned team aims to produce a steady flow of feature delivery. A stream-aligned team is quick to course correct based on feedback from the latest changes. A stream-aligned team uses an experimental approach to product evolution, expecting to constantly learn and adapt. A stream-aligned team has minimal (ideally zero) hand-offs of work to other teams. A stream-aligned team is evaluated on the sustainable flow of change it produces (together with some supporting technical and team-health metrics). A stream-aligned team must have time and space to address code quality changes (sometimes called “tech debt”) to ensure that changing the code remains safe and easy to do. A stream-aligned team proactively and regularly reaches out to the supporting fundamental-topologies teams (complicated subsystem, enabling, and platform). Members of a stream-aligned team feel they have achieved or are in the path to achieving “autonomy, mastery, and purpose,”

An enabling team acts as a messenger of both good news (e.g., “There’s a new UI automation framework that can reduce our custom test code by 50%.”) and bad news (e.g., “Javascript framework X, which we’re using extensively, is no longer actively maintained.”). This helps with management of the technology life cycle.

An enabling team acts as a messenger of both good news (e.g., “There’s a new UI automation framework that can reduce our custom test code by 50%.”) and bad news (e.g., “Javascript framework X, which we’re using extensively, is no longer actively maintained.”). This helps with management of the technology life cycle.

The critical difference between a traditional component team (created when a subsystem is identified as being or expected to be shared by multiple systems) and a complicated-subsystem team is that the complicated-subsystem team is created only when a subsystem needs mostly specialized knowledge. The decision is driven by team cognitive load, not by a perceived opportunity to share the component.

The litmus test for the applicability of a fracture plane: Does the resulting architecture support more autonomous teams (less dependent teams) with reduced cognitive load (less disparate responsibilities)?

Promise theory as a way to design systems for team interaction. Promise theory—devised by technologist and researcher Mark Burgess—explains how and why it is preferable to construct inter-team relationships in terms of promises rather than in terms of commands and enforceable contracts.

-

-

-

-

Anything that can be shared, will

Including ads, reviews and ads converge as a filter

We will be tracked more not less

VR moves us from Internet of info to Internet of experience. Makes you understand things at a much deeper level

Jobs are made up of a lot of tasks, and AI will take over many of the tasks

Previously read, revisiting for AGI context

-

-

An important function of almost every system is to ensure its own perpetuation. System purposes need not be human purposes and are not necessarily those intended by any single actor within the system. In fact, one of the most frustrating aspects of systems is that the purposes of subunits may add up to an overall behavior that no one wants.

Keeping sub-purposes and overall system purposes in harmony is an essential function of successful systems.

A system generally goes on being itself, changing only slowly if at all, even with complete substitutions of its elements—as long as its interconnections and purposes remain intact.

The least obvious part of the system, its function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system’s behavior.

if you see a behavior that persists over time, there is likely a mechanism creating that consistent behavior. That mechanism operates through a feedback loop.

Balancing feedback loops are goal-seeking or stability-seeking. Each tries to keep a stock at a given value or within a range of values.

flow can’t react instantly to a flow. It can react only to a change in a stock, and only after a slight delay to register the incoming information.

there are questions you need to ask that will help you decide how good a representation of reality is the underlying model. Are the driving factors likely to unfold this way? (What are birth rate and death rate likely to do?) If they did, would the system react this way? (Do birth and death rates really cause the population stock to behave as we think it will?) What is driving the driving factors?

difference comes because of the difference between stocks and flows.

Resilience arises from a rich structure of many feedback loops that can work in different ways to restore a system even after a large perturbation. A single balancing loop brings a system stock back to its desired state. Resilience is provided by several such loops, operating through different mechanisms, at different time scales, and with redundancy—one kicking in if another one

-

Words that work, whether fiction or reality, not only explain but also motivate. They cause you to think as well as act. They trigger emotion as well as understanding.

Few things are more valuable than reputation—the integrity of a company’s brand—and articulating overblown promises as a result of undisciplined language can be an incredibly dangerous game to play.

it generates an “I didn’t know that” response, you have succeeded.

people will forget what you say, but they will never forget how you made them feel. If the listener can apply the language to a general situation or human condition, you have achieved humanization.

if the listener can relate that language to his or her own life experiences, that’s personalization.

good advertisements, in a much more minor way, accomplish much the same thing. They make idealists of us all.

Paint a vivid picture.

the word imagine is perhaps the single most powerful communication tool because it allows individuals to picture whatever personal vision is in their hearts and minds.

Rule Nine Ask a Question

making the same statement in the form of a rhetorical question makes the reaction personal—and personalized communication is the best communication.

You have to give people the “why” of a message before you tell them the “therefore” and the “so that.”

Some people call this framing. I prefer the word context, because it better explains why a particular message matters.

Relevance is one reason market research is so crucial. Until you know what drives and determines a consumer’s or a voter’s decision-making process, any attempt to influence him or her is really just a shot in the dark.

Beyond market research, the most important factor in guaranteeing relevance is imagination. It’s important to shed your own perspective and try to put yourself in your audience’s position, seeing the world through their eyes.

rules of effective communication, all summarized in single words: simplicity, brevity, credibility, consistency, novelty, sound, aspiration, visualization, questioning, and context.

The language lesson: A+B+C does not necessarily equal C+B+A. The order of presentation determines the reaction.

asked Americans whether they would be willing to pay higher taxes for “further law enforcement,” and 51 percent agreed. But when I asked them if they would pay higher taxes “to halt the rising crime rate,” 68 percent answered in the affirmative. The difference? Law enforcement is the process, and therefore less popular, while reducing crime is the desirable result. The language lesson: Focus on results, not process.

Bad English, whether to sell products or politicians, is abstract and clichéd—designed for the ear but not the intellect. Good English is concrete and alive—and at the same time informative and memorable.

Feelings and emotions are what generate words that work.

From earlier notes:

1. D

2. D

3. Aligned incentives. Self interest is good for the whole network,

-

From earlier notes:

From earlier notes:

From earlier notes:

From earlier notes:

From earlier notes:

Disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, return on luck

Flywheel, bullets to cannonballs, hedgehog concept

From earlier notes:

Success for stickiness: (1) Simplicity (proverbs, exclude all possible) (2) Unexpectedness (open gaps in knowledge) (3) Concreteness (imagery, specifics) (4) Credible (5) Emotional appeal (people not abstractions) (6) Stories. The villain — the curse of knowledge.

Simple

Unexpectedness

Concreteness - able to visualize and make sense to a novice for whom abstractions make no sense

From earlier notes:

From earlier notes:

-

From earlier notes:

From earlier notes:

From earlier notes:

From earlier notes:

-

From earlier notes:

From earlier notes:

Not as good as his others but still great

From earlier notes:

“their performance is bad but they are good"

From earlier notes:

From earlier notes:

From earlier notes:

From earlier notes:

-

-

Beinoffs story with some interesting tactics on his journey. Very accessible but not that useful

We are obliged by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here. Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it?

When we have unified enough certain knowledge, we will understand who we are and why we are here.

Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings.

The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities. The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship.

Yes!

social sciences will continue to split within each of its disciplines, a process already rancorously begun, with one part folding into or becoming continuous with biology, the other fusing with the humanities.

Every college student should be able to answer the following question: What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important for human welfare?

conviction that culture is governed by laws as exact as those of physics.

“The sole foundation for belief in the natural sciences,” he declared, “is the idea that the general laws directing the phenomena of the universe, known or unknown, are necessary and constant. Why should this principle be any less true for the development of the intellectual and moral faculties of man than for other operations of nature?”

Postmodernism is the ultimate polar antithesis of the Enlightenment.

Enlightenment thinkers believe we can know everything, and radical postmodernists believe we can know nothing.

To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.

The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.

so many accomplished scientists are narrow, foolish people, and why so many wise scholars in the field are considered weak scientists.

dissect a phenomenon into its elements, in this case cell into organelles and molecules, is consilience by reduction. To reconstitute it, and especially to predict with knowledge gained by reduction how nature assembled it in the first place, is consilience by synthesis.

Some biochemists believe that to achieve that final step, each energy contribution in turn must be calculated with an accuracy still beyond the grasp of the physical sciences.

THE GREATEST CHALLENGE today, not just in cell biology and ecology but in all of science, is the accurate and complete description of complex systems.

do general organizing principles exist that allow a living organism to be reconstituted in full without recourse to brute force simulation of all its molecules and atoms?

The mind is supremely important to the consilience program for a reason both elementary and disturbingly profound: Everything that we know and can ever know about existence is created there.

For thousands of generations people lived and reproduced with no need to know how the machinery of the brain works. Myth and self-deception, tribal identity and ritual, more than objective truth, gave them the adaptive edge.

human nature: genius animated with animal craftiness and emotion, combining the passion of politics and art with rationality, to create a new instrument of survival.

What is lacking is a sufficient grasp of the emergent, holistic properties of the neuron circuits, and of cognition, the way the circuits process information to create perception and knowledge.

For example, a particular taste might be partly classified by the combined activity of nerve cells responding to different degrees of sweetness, saltiness, and sourness.

Consciousness consists of the parallel processing of vast numbers of such coding networks.

Consciousness is the virtual world composed by the scenarios.

There is no single stream of consciousness in which all information is brought together by an executive ego. There are instead multiple streams of activity, some of which contribute momentarily to conscious thought and then phase out. Consciousness is the massive coupled aggregates of such participating circuits. The mind is a self-organizing republic of scenarios that individually germinate, grow, evolve, disappear, and occasionally linger to spawn additional thought and physical activity.

I link, therefore I am.

Short-term memory is the ready state of the conscious mind. It composes all of the current and remembered parts of the virtual scenarios. It can handle only about seven words or other symbols simultaneously. The brain takes about one second to scan these symbols fully, and it forgets most of the information within thirty seconds. Long-term memory takes much longer to acquire, but it has an almost unlimited capacity, and a large fraction of it is retained for life. By spreading activation, the conscious mind summons information from the store of long-term memory and holds it for a brief interval in short-term memory. During this time it processes the information, at a rate of about one symbol per 25 milliseconds, while scenarios arising from the information compete for dominance.

What is emotion? It is the modification of neural activity that animates and focuses mental activity.

All the evidence from the brain sciences points in the opposite direction, to a waiting coffin-bound hell of the wakened dead, where the remembered and imagined world decays until chaos mercifully grants oblivion.

It is the specialized part of the mind that creates and sorts scenarios, the means by which the future is guessed and courses of action chosen.

The persistent form and intensity of emotions is called mood.

hard problem is more elusive: how physical processes in the brain addressed in the easy problems give rise to subjective feeling.

science explains feeling, while art transmits it.

science and art is the transmission of information, and in one sense the respective modes of transmission in science and art can be made logically equivalent.

culture is the total way of life of a discrete society—its religion, myths, art, technology, sports, and all the other systematic knowledge transmitted across generations. In

“Culture is a product; is historical; includes ideas, patterns, and values; is selective; is learned; is based upon symbols; and is an abstraction from behavior and the products of behavior.”

There are sixty-seven universals in the list: age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organization, cooking, cooperative labor, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination, division of labor, dream interpretation, education, eschatology, ethics, ethno-botany, etiquette, faith healing, family feasting, fire-making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift-giving, government, greetings, hair styles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool-making, trade, visiting, weather control, and weaving.

different teams of researchers, matches between genes and epigenetic rules are even rarer.

Tag: []

Genre: SciFi

reading_status: Read

Finished: 2022-05-15

rating: Great

Format: Audiobook

Source: Libby

Joanna Lord NOTION_PAGE

"With" not "on" - Making your stack work

Questions

Community

Opportunistic channels (clubhouse)

fragmented brand and transitions

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HdLw7ps2WX8eGpglLFLWbaTFyKJ8UTM/view](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HdLw7ps2WX8eGpglLFLWbaTFyKJ8UTM/view)

Interesting highly factual bio of Godel, but not the most accessible or generlizable bio

-

-

-

History of advertising and seeking attention. nothing groundbreaking though

women who had one to three servings of chocolate each week—especially in the first and third trimesters—“had a 50 percent or greater reduced risk of preeclampsia than

oral sex appears to reduce the incidence of preeclampsia—especially if semen is swallowed. How you bring up that particular piece of information is up to you.

Frame your first ultrasound pic of the baby.

Plan a romantic, predelivery babymoon weekend

Scary book about what actually is required to run government and what it does and how Trump's admin has failed...but also about bloat

-

Danny's take (2026-07-30): "It was okay, not great."

-

The universe buries hidden treasures within us all and then stands back to see if we can find them. The courage to hunt for then...

Joan didion - I don't know what I think until I write it

-

-

-

-

From earlier notes:

Created: 2017-01-27T02:27:00

Summary: |-

Best Thing: Reviewers appreciate the book's engaging narrative style and breadth of historical coverage, making complex topics accessible and enjoyable for a wide audience.

Worst Thing: Some critics mention that the book oversimplifies certain historical events and cultures, which may lead to a lack of depth in understanding the complexities of world history.

Tag: []

Genre: Understanding the World

reading_status: Read

Finished: 2016-01-15

rating: Great

-

Childhood may be defined as the age of play; therefore some children are never young, and some adults are never old.

The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth. Si jeunesse savait, et vieillesse pouvait!—“If youth knew how, and old age could!”

happiness is in making things rather than in consuming them.

Every philosopher, like Plato, should be an athlete; if he is not, let us suspect his philosophy.

The pangs of despised love and the bitterness of truth will not long torture a frame made sound and strong by sleep in the air and action in the sun.

Discovering the world, youth discovers evil, and is horrified to learn the nature of his species. The principle of the family was mutual aid; but the principle of society is competition, the struggle for existence, the elimination of the weak and the survival of the strong. Youth, shocked, rebels, and calls upon the world to make itself a family, and give to youth the welcome and protection and comradeship of the home: the age of socialism comes. And then slowly youth is drawn into the gamble of this individualistic life; the zest of the game creeps into the blood; acquisitiveness is aroused and stretches out both hands for gold and power. The rebellion ends; the game goes on.

is it not time that we should be brave enough to face the issue, and understand that civilization must either restore early marriage or abandon love?

Desire is too strong to be dammed so unreasonably with moral prohibitions; its power has grown with every generation, for every generation is the result of its selected vigor; soon the flood of life will break through our insincerities and make new ways and morals for us while we shut our eyes.

YOUTH MIDDLE AGE OLD AGE Instinct Induction Deduction Innovation Habit Custom Invention Execution Obstruction Play Work Rest Art Science Religion Imagination Intellect Memory Theory Knowledge Wisdom Optimism Meliorism Pessimism Radicalism Liberalism Conservatism Absorption-in-future Absorption-in-present Absorption-in-past Courage Prudence Timidity Freedom Discipline Authority Vacillation Stability Stagnation

forget our radicalism then in a gentle liberalism—which is radicalism softened with the consciousness of a bank account.

In the romantic years she had been a goddess; suddenly she finds that she is a cook. The discovery is discouraging. Why should she maintain the laborious allurements of dress and rouge for a man who looks upon her as an economical substitute for a maid?

just as the child grew more rapidly the younger it was, so the old man ages more quickly with every day.

Desire, not experience, is the essence of life; experience becomes the tool of desire in the enlightenment of mind and the pursuit of ends.

If I could live another life, endowed with my present mind and mood, I would not write history or philosophy, but would devote myself to establishing an association of men and women free to have any tolerant theology or no theology at all, but pledged to follow as far as possible the ethics of Christ, including chastity before marriage, fidelity within it, extensive charity, and peaceful opposition to any but the most clearly defensive war. I can imagine what fun the wits of the world could have with this paragraph, and I know how unpopular and precarious my proposed fellowship of semi-saints would be; but I would rather contribute a microscopic mite to improving the conduct of men and statesmen than write the one hundred best books.

I can praise Christianity for winning wider acceptance of moral ideas by transforming these into pictures, narratives, dramas, and art, and thereby helping to tame the unsocial impulses of mankind.

We do not need a new religion so much as a return to the old one in its essentials and its simplicity.

Personally I should define morality as the consistency of private conduct with public interest as understood by the group.

It implies a recognition by the individual that his life, liberty, and development depend upon social organization, and his willingness, in return, to adjust himself to the needs of the community.

The passage from rural mutual surveillance to concealment of the individual in the urban multitude has almost ended the force of neighborly opinion to control personal behavior.