Starting a company isn't easy. Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn says:

"Starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling the plane on the way down."

But just because it's hard, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. I remember receiving some advice that you shouldn't wait around for the right time to have children as you'll never find it. I suspect starting a company is similar. It reminds me of this lovely quote I have taken to heart from Hugh Laurie:

"It's a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you're ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any."

As far as I could tell, unconsciously or separately, Reid's version relates to Ray Bradbury's earlier advice of jumping off a cliff and building your wings on the way down.

Starting a company

Sir Arthur Eddington, an English astrophysicist, told a short story involving a scientist studying fish by pulling them up with nets. After checking all the fish hauled up, the scientist concludes that there is a minimum size of fish in the sea. But the fish seen were determined by the size of the holes in the net, the smaller ones having slipped through, unmeasurable. The instrument you use affects what you see. Or as Richard Hamming puts it: "You get what you measure."

This analogy provides a nice concrete example of a phenomena that affects us routinely in more subtle ways. What and how we choose to measure affects the conclusions we draw. So, a website may easily measure sales and bounce rate for its pages, while things like trust, authority or satisfaction, which may be more significant longer-term metrics, go unmeasured.

"There is always a tendency to grab the hard, firm measurement, though it may be quite irrelevant as compared to the soft one which in the long run may be much more relevant to your goals. Accuracy of measurement tends to get confused with relevance of measurement, much more than most people believe. That a measurement is accurate, reproducible, and easy to make does not mean it should be done, instead a much poorer one which is more closely related to your goals may be much more preferable. For example, in school it is easy to measure training and hard to measure education, and hence you tend to see on final exams an emphasis on the training part and a great neglect of the education part."

What gets measured gets better (an earlier take on this)

Quote from Chapter 29, You get what you measure, of Richard Hamming's, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn.

If you happen to be in the business of doing research or science Richard Hamming's Bell Lab's talk, You and Your Research (pdf), is an excellent read.

You get what you measure

It all matters. Be it one person, one bird, or one tree. We are all connected. As John Muir wrote in My First Summer in the Sierra:

"As soon as we take one thing by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

The sketch is Heart Lake in his beloved Sierra Nevada.

Hitched to everything else in the universe

Some simple wisdom from Kurt Vonnegut: notice when you’re happy.

“My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania Street, taught me something very important.

He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to NOTICE it. He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery; or fishing, and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door.

Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is”

"So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

More on wellbeing? Here are 5 ways to wellbeing.

If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is

“Just remember that finishing lines are good, but their most important role is to get you over the start line in the first place.”

This little piece of wisdom is from Stevie Smith (not the poet). Stevie embarked on a human-powered journey around the world — Expedition 360 — and reached Hawaii under pedal power*. I learned about him from a little chapter in One Man and His Bike by Mike Carter. The chapter where he speaks with Stevie I immediately reread as soon as I finished it.

Mike also shared this deeper and more poetic version of the same insight:

“Happiness is the acceptance of the journey as it is now, not the promise of the other shore”

*Stevie’s companion Jason Lewis completed the circumnavigation of the world 13 years after they began.

Finishing lines

So often do we talk about speaking with passion, much rarer do we think about listening with passion.

Conversations are two-sided, they only work if one person is listening while the other is talking. Unfortunately, we tend to have a greater innate interest in making sure others know the smart, interesting and important things that we think than truly absorbing what someone else has to say. So I love this quote from Harriet Lerner:

Listen with the same passion with which we want to be heard.

If we all could do this routinely with our colleagues, friends, family, children, and partners I’d guess it’d make quite a difference.

I learned about it from Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead.

Listen with passion

Clayton Christensen, in his book and article ’How will you measure your life?’, discusses what he learned about how to live a life of integrity. Among other things he says:

It’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,”…you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.

I think this is relevant, both in the small things — whether to work out today when it’s raining —  and in the larger decisions which help us be proud of our lives.

The dangers of just this once

There don’t seem to perfect definitions for either recessions or depressions. A recession is commonly defined as two successive declining quarters of GDP, but it’s not gospel. And a depression is a kind of prolonged recession for 3–4 years. So I liked Harry Truman’s clarifying explanation — US president from 1945–1953:

A recession is when your neighbour loses his job.  A depression is when you lose yours.  —Harry Truman 

Recession vs depression

The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system.
— Robert Metcalfe

This law explains a little of the remarkable power of a growing network. Each time you add a user, or node, to the network, the number of connections increase in proportion to the square of the number of users. So, in this simple example where every new node gets a connection to each of the existing nodes, you can see that, say, adding a single node to an 11 node network creates 11 new connections.

It’s a simplified example because in most networks the value is not directly proportional to the number of connections as some connections or users may be more valuable than others, and usually adding a new user wouldn’t create a connection to all existing users — say if it was in a different country, or people spoke a different language, or just cared about different things. But nevertheless, you can see how a network quickly becomes valuable as users join.

So, Facebook has about 2 billion users…

Metcalfe was talking about telecommunications networks and the basic proposition has been modified since it was formulated including by Metcalfe himself.

Once again, just because something is called a law doesn’t mean it is one. See Fitt’s Law

Metcalfe’s Law

Simon Sinek’s simple idea to start with why. To get a better feel, watch his 18min TED talk: How great leaders inspire action. I found his concrete example of “It was the ‘I have a dream’ speech, not the ‘I have a plan’ speech,” helps keep in mind the power of starting with why and painting a vision in order to inspire and lead. Now, if you have a vision, a strategy and a plan, well, then you’re in business.

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.
— Simon Sinek

Simon’s has parallels with another I like:

Products aren’t just things that you buy, they’re things that you buy into.

The golden circle

In his post on Zanshin, a state of relaxed alertness, James Clear writes:

Great archery masters often teach that “everything is aiming.” Where you place your feet, how you hold the bow, the way you breathe during the release of the arrow—it all determines the end result.

I like the idea of zanshin, but I like more the insight that everything is aiming. How every piece of your attitude, preparation, body and state go towards influencing how you perform. No detail too small. Tennis coaches, for example, reinforce being in the ready position before a ball even comes your way. Experience teaches you it does matter.

The concept reminds me of one of my favourite quotes which I think pretty much sums up a great approach to life as a whole and also how I view luck:

I will study and get ready, and perhaps my chance will come.
—Abraham Lincoln

Everything is aiming

The best reference I found on quotations was the quotation section in Larry Trask’s Guide to Punctuation. Alongside clarifications [ ] and suspensions … it contains rules on fun things like quotes in quotes, when to capitalise, dealing with mistakes [sic], adding emphasis [emphasis added], and punctuation inside or outside. On this last point he suggests:

"You may follow your own preference in this matter, so long as you are consistent. If you opt for logical punctuation [putting the punctuation outside the quote], you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you are on the side of the angels, but you should also expect some grim opposition from the other side [that prefers punctuation on the inside]."
— Larry Trask

Quotiquette: The etiquette of quoting

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of information until that point

A mistake

Sam Moreau, User Experience Director at Microsoft. Just one small example.

Had a few questions about this so thought I’d add another simple example. Imagine you want to change your phone number on a service. Rather than display the phone number and have an option in a menu to edit and then a separate edit screen, the phone number itself can be the route to editing. You simply display the current number - clean, no junk. Mousing over it or clicking on it allows you to edit it directly. You remove the need for additional menus, text, instructions, and chrome. The content itself becomes the interface.

The content is the interface

Made me think about it in a different way when I read this.

An increasing or compulsive tendency to avoid pain or boredom and replace inner development with outer stimulation.
— Felicitas Vogt

Source: Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne, p.151

Addiction: an alternative definition

I love this quote from PW Anderson. More often seems like it should be more of the same, but more is different. It would be good if more people considered this.

More is different

In both a “great! we’re improving kind of way,” and also a “teaching to the test” kind of way. From Richard Hamming’s, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering.

What gets measured gets better

In both good and bad ways. Thanks to Seth Godin’s simple power of one a day. Sketchplanations was founded on this simple principle.

Enough molehills make a mountain

“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you account for Hofstadter’s Law.”

Hofstadter’s Law

Building a good framework is like cutting cubes out of fog — Larry Keeley

Advice indirectly from Nigella Lawson in her husband Charles Saatchi’s book. Also, a pretty direct reading from How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Better to be interested than try to be interesting

Be stubborn on vision. Be flexible on details

“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it” - William Arthur Ward

Sketchplanations tagged with quote