Highlights from my Reading List – Week 4

Articles

1. 1. How to ask for advice – Micheal Seibel
      

      tldr: think about what you want and ask for it

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   2. I’m a very slow thinker – Derek Sivers
      

      When a friend says something interesting to me, I usually don’t have a reaction until much later.

      When someone asks me a deep question, I say, “Hmm. I don’t know.” The next morning, I have an answer.

      I’m a disappointing person to try to debate or attack. I just have nothing to say in the moment, except maybe, “Good point.” Then a few days later, after thinking about it a lot, I have a response.

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   3. This Is What Happened When I Asked My Friends to Rate Me 
      This is something I really want to do at some point.

      I totally wasn’t anxious. I mean, what really was I going to find out? I’m one of the best people I know. If you could get past the fact that I was sending out a Google Form to ex-girlfriends because of a less-than-perfect Uber rating, you’d see it, too: I’m great. I’m balanced. I’m normal.
      

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   4. Natural Maniacs – Morgan Housel (Understanding Elon Musk)
      

      But no one should be shocked when people who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you don’t like.

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   5. When You’re Hot, You’re Hot: Career Successes Come in Clusters
      Brilliant data viz and storytelling.
      

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   6. How to look at evidence and not translate it into your own agenda
      

      True empathy is hearing and understanding in order to implement solutions to meet the actual user needs, not just our interpretation of those needs.

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   7. Technology entrepreneurship and the disruption of ambition
      

      There has been a great deal of analysis of how technology will disrupt life in the coming decades. Little of this, though, has looked at how technology is changing one of the most powerful forces in shaping society: ambition.

      I argue three things below. First, that digital technology is the most recent in a series of ‘technologies of ambition’ that have enabled ambitious people to maximise their impact over the last millennium or so. Second, that technology entrepreneurship is likely to become the dominant ‘technology of ambition’. Third, that new institutions will be needed to channel, focus and amplify this new ambition (and that Entrepreneur First will be one of them).

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   8. IIT Gandhinagar Decennial
      

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   9. Me, my wife and our matrimonial Slack

Books 

Thinking in Systems: A Primer – Donella Meadows

Hackers and Painters: Paul Graham