As I looked around, I noticed that the most successful people I know have one thing in common: they are masters at eliminating the unnecessary from their lives. The French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry hit on the same idea, writing in his memoir, “Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.” This principle, it turns out, is the key to success.
Opinion | The Great Soybean Conspiracy – The New York Times
How will the administration react to the blowback when the trade war really gets going? Will it admit that it misjudged the effects of its policies? Of course not. What I predict, instead, is that it will start seeing villains under every bed. It will attribute the downsides of trade conflict not to its own actions, but to George Soros and the deep state. I’m not sure how they can work MS-13 into it, but they’ll surely try. The point is that the politics of trade war will probably end up looking like Trum
Source: Opinion | The Great Soybean Conspiracy – The New York Times
But why does it take so long? | Seth's Blog
It might be:
Coordinating the work of many people often leads to slack and downtime.
Persuading others to go along with our ideas requires clarity, persistence and time.
Pathfinding our way to the right answer isn’t always obvious and takes guts.
The first thing we try rarely works, and testing can take a long time to organize.
Persuading ourselves to move forward can take even longer.
A coordinated, committed group with a plan for continuous testing and improvement can run circles around a disorganized group of frightened dilettantes.
rePost: Farnam Street Principles
- Direction Over Speed
- Live Deliberately
- Thoughtful Opinions Held Loosely
- Principles Outlive Tactics
- Own Your Actions
Source: Farnam Street Principles
How to Avoid a Life of Regret
All of this is based on the self-discrepancy theory of the the three selves: the actual self, the ideal self, and the ought self. The actual self is what a person believes themselves to be now, based on current attributes and abilities. The ideal self is comprised of the attributes and abilities they’d like to possess one day—in essence, their goals, hopes, and aspirations. The ought self is who someone believes they should have been according to their obligations and responsibilities. In terms of regrets,
Source: How to Avoid a Life of Regret
Take Note: List Of Mandatory Employee Benefits In The Philippines
This is a useful page:
Employees love benefits almost as much as they love bonuses. For many employees, it’s one of the determining factors whether they’d keep their employment for the long-term or move on to another company. For businessmen and employers, it’s a consideration that must be taken seriously to boost employee satisfaction. Employee benefits are non-salary compensation that can vary from company to company. Benefits are indirect and non-cash payments within a compensation package. They are provided by organizations
Source: Take Note: List Of Mandatory Employee Benefits In The Philippines
The Death of a Once Great City | Harper's Magazine
We have been almost a parody of multiculturalism on our little street. Black and white, Hispanic and Asian; straight, gay, and transgender; families of all kinds—extended, adopted, arranged by convenience or design. Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist. I would come home and see the daughters of our Sikh mailman, before they grew up, playing baseball in the halls. In the evening, I sat at my desk in a little space, in this building cubbyholed with other little spaces and held together by what
Invisible asymptotes — Remains of the Day
People didn’t care about this rational math. People, in general, are terrible at valuing their time, perhaps because for most people monetary compensation for one’s time is so detached from the event of spending one’s time. Most time we spend isn’t like deliberate practice, with immediate feedback.
Wealthy people tend to receive a much more direct and immediate payoff for their time which is why they tend to be better about valuing it. This is why the first thing that most ultra-wealthy people I know do upon becoming ultra-wealthy is to hire a driver and start to fly private. For most normal people, the opportunity cost of their time is far more difficult to ascertain moment to moment.
You can’t imagine what a relief it is to have a single overarching obstacle to focus on as a product person. It’s the same for anyone trying to solve a problem. Half the comfort of diets that promise huge weight loss in exchange for cutting out sugar or carbs or whatever is feeling like there’s a really simple solution or answer to a hitherto intractable, multi-dimensional problem.
Southern Baptists Call Off the Culture War – The Atlantic
By elevating women and distancing themselves from partisan engagement, the members of the SBC appear to be signaling their determination to head in a different direction, out of a mix of pragmatism and principle. For more than a decade, the denomination has been experiencing precipitous decline by almost every metric. Baptisms are at a 70-year low, and Sunday attendance is at a 20-year low. Southern Baptist churches lost almost 80,000 members from 2016 to 2017 and they have hemorrhaged a whopping one milli
Source: Southern Baptists Call Off the Culture War – The Atlantic
The Death of a Once Great City | Harper's Magazine
By trying to improve our cities, we have only succeeded in making them empty simulacra of what was. To bring this about we have signed on to political scams and mindless development schemes that are so exclusive they are more destructive than all they were supposed to improve. The urban crisis of affluence exemplifies our wider crisis: we now live in an America where we believe that we no longer have any ability to control the systems we live under.