Author, Investor, Speaker, Mentor
“If you’re itching to make your life something amazing, consider spending less time daydreaming about defying the status quo and answering the critics of your decision, and spending more time gearing yourself up for the challenge of becoming so good that they can’t ignore you.” –Cal Newport, Study Hacks
Here’s an excerpt from a great talk by Sir Ken Robinson of TED fame. It’s from the Union Square Ventures “Hacking Education” event. Besides his take on education (which I completely agree with), note the clever technique he steals from Peter Brooke (who, in fairness, stole it from Plato, who used it in The Republic). … Continue reading The Heart of Education: Wanting To Learn
Pornography is like a Swiss Army knife–it’s useful in many different ways, nearly everyone has owned it at some point, and it usually doesn’t get the respect it deserves. To paraphrase Gordon Gekko, “Porn, for lack of a better word, is good. Porn is right, porn works. Porn clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence … Continue reading Why I Love Pornography
There’s a fascinating post (with hundreds of comments) up at Scienceblogs.com. Mark Chu-Carroll, a Ph.D. who works at Google, writes extensively and passionately about why he’s not attending his 25th high school reunion. Now it’s twenty five years since I got out of that miserable fucking hell-hole. And people from my high school class are … Continue reading Will Facebook Destroy The High School Reunion?
Here’s a real doozy from my old friend and fellow Stanford/HBS grad, Adam Nash of LinkedIn:In every class, for every business case, the argument almost always broke down as follows: The MBA Students: Tell us what the rules of the game are, and we’ll tell you how to win the game. The Government Students: Tell … Continue reading Best post ever on the difference between business and government
Journalism is dead. Long live fandom. Michael Wolff, an old-school journalist, provides the autopsy in his recent Vanity Fair profile of Politico, the site for political junkies and insiders: The granular and focused and O.C.D. nature of Politico’s view of the world changes the language. Laymen can’t enter this conversation, and the people who are … Continue reading How Fandom Killed Journalism (And Why It’s A Good Thing)
What would happen if “The Lord of the Rings” was a D&D campaign? How would real players react to the endless narration and exposition, the grinding monotony of fighting nothing but orcs, and of course, the utter lack of treasure? “DM of the Rings” provides the answer. It’s a 144-page webcomic, using screen captures from … Continue reading Best. Comic. Ever. (especially for old D&D hacks)
One of the things I think PBworks might be useful for is coordinating a study group. Back when I was at HBS, it would have come in handy; the members of my group could have set up a wiki page for each case, and we could have collaborated together on the analysis. We could also … Continue reading Wanted: Law School and Business School Students
Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias poses this provocative question in his latest post: Many people say they favor redistribution from the rich to the poor because they feel sorry for the poor. The poor suffer from having too little money, and it doesn’t take much money to help them a lot. In contrast, the rich … Continue reading If we redistribute wealth, why not beauty?
My latest post on Ask The Harvard MBA seems to have struck a nerve…click on over to read my thoughts on applying market segmentation to racial profiling in the dating world.