It would appear so. FtBCon Homepage says this:
After each session is over, it will almost immediately be saved to the YouTube channel of the person hosting it (the person whose Google+ profile the session was on). It takes a little while for the videos to be processed and posted, so it’s not instant. We’ll update a post with final videos as they become available.
I’m on a business trip, so I won’t be around for this one, but I’m definitely interested in future events.
Ansoff’s matrix, the product portfolio and Kotter’s 8 step model for change are fairly popular choices.
Do you think the Group 1 schools are superior to the rest as far as quality of material goes? I’ve been talking to a friend who goes to a well-known university in Europe and a fellow entrepreneur who visits an ivy-league US school, and while I don’t have the full picture (or syllabus), they didn’t seem much more impressed with the experience than I’ve been.
Elon’s and Manoj’s statements caught my interest since hiring MBA-types is assumed to be a standard move for entrepreneurs who have completed the exploratory phase of reaching product-market-fit and are trying to scale up quickly.
Even if you’re highly skilled in entrepreneurial and/or executive tasks, you’ll need somebody who deals with monitoring, dissemination and handling low-key disturbances. To be honest, I always assumed that you should hire MBAs for this, but now I’m a little more wary.
For the sake of completeness, the two best counter-arguments I’ve heard so far (IRL):
1) MBAs are useful as a baseline business sanity tool, so you can get a decent employee to a point where they’ll understand the basic vocabulary of a lot of different disciplines. For instance, they’ll have a rough picture of what segmenting and targeting a market means, even if they won’t know how to use it in practice, let alone compete with a junior marketer. Someone who’s already read a bunch of stuff and managed a business isn’t going to learn as much and might be disappointed by how close to common sense everything is.
2) MBAs teach you how to maneuver the minefield of the large company, where the decision-making process is complicated by personal alliances, office politics and employee/boss conflicts. To an entrepreneur, this will seem unreasonably complicated (“Why don’t you just walk in a straight line?”), but someone having to deal with a fair share of Dilbert-esque behavior, additional ammunition, whether business lingo or complex models, might come in handy.
I should also note that I’m the only one with a largely critical view and that the rest of my tutor group is quite happy with the program.
That’s a really good point, especially for those who decide to make their living outside of the common “get safe job” paradigm, which to be fair isn’t all that robust (at least in the US), either.
I’ve noticed myself that the anxiety I feel about losing a key component of my business has decreased immensely over the last few years, even though the risk is either the same or slightly higher. Even as a kid I used to feel strange about that. I was scared of big spiders, so whenever I’d catch one in my bed, I’d be terrified for the next couple of days and then completely dismiss it on an emotional level afterwards.
I’m not sure of how to effectively protect myself against that. It seems obvious to me that the current mapping of motivation/anxiety to risk, i.e. abrupt jumps from baseline activity into overdrive once an arbitrary and often foreseeable threshold is met, is pretty bad. However, beyond developing better habits, willpower and networks and having that bleed into not procrastinating on insurance against boring risks, is there really anything useful to do about it?
I don’t think it matters much. I’m not a fan of instant notifications (avg. importance of my email is too low to justify the amount of distraction), but beyond that, checking frequency would be pretty low on my list of email productivity improvements.
I check mine once or twice a day; most of my email is pre-sorted correctly by using a bunch of filters and around a dozen of addresses with different uses and priorities. I don’t think I could work with a global, unsegmented email inbox; I saw a friend use his years ago and it still terrifies me, even with his relatively low inflow (30-50/day).
That would be a cool feature for phone calls. Depending on situation (or mood), switch between happy hours where everyone gets through, serious caller only mode for business hours, and emergency mode for anything social or serious.
For me personally, writing email faster. It’s really easy for me to get immersed trying to write the perfect email or forum post and burn through 40-60min without noticing. They’re not even necessarily long, just excessively pruned and reformatted. Getting comfortable with an email with all the important content and okay phrasing saves me a bunch of time.
On second place, priority filtering, i.e. separating email to respond to from subscriptions, offers and notifications. Category filters are nice, but I don’t think they’re making me more productive.
Anything beyond that is kind of marginal for me. Shortcuts for inserting phrases are fun, but I don’t use them that often. If I had to deal with repetitive inquiries, they’d probably be more important.
Even if you, personally, happen to die, you’ve still got a copy of yourself in backup that some future generation will hopefully be able to reconstruct.
Is there a consensus on the whole brain backup identity issue?
I can’t say that trying to come up with intuition pumps about life extension has made me less confused about consciousness, but it does seem fairly obvious to me that if I’m backing up my brain, I’m just creating a second version who shares my values and capacities, not actually extending the life of version A. Being able to have both versions alive at the same time seems a clear indicator that they’re not the same, and that when source A dies, copy B just goes on with their life and doesn’t suddenly become A.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure the same argument doesn’t apply to one brain at different points in time, too. If you atomize my brain now and put it back together later, am I still A or is A dead? What about koma, sleep, or any other interruption of consciousness?
It’s all kind of a blur to me.
I enjoyed it, thanks for sharing. (Btw, are there more general, practical utility lectures like this?)
When you talk about being underwhelmed with other students, could you go into detail what criteria you’d specifically assess when making that judgment?
I’ve noticed that most intellectual doujins tend to think of themselves as particularly special and of other people as not quite as much, even if the empirical evidence isn’t all that convincing (Mensa can be notoriously bad about this, so is the “I have goals!” self-help crowd), so I always take some time to look at the actual data before adopting a similar belief.
FWIW: The idea of upvoting the poll itself kinda eluded my internal option mapper until right now, even though I like them. Guess my decision making process went straight past “If post interesting then upvote” to “If poll interesting then participate”.
Happy to share my system. This isn’t supposed to be a jab at zero inboxing, I just never felt the need to physically move email. I’ve been using multiple addresses, filters and tags since long before I actually had things to do and they actually continue to do the job pretty well.
My current set-up looks something like this:
Bulk inbox for everything unsorted.
Business inbox for everything sent to me about my job by a person.
Ad inbox for everything sent to me about my job by a robot.
Accounts inbox for bills I intend to keep and any financial mail.
Chat inbox for forum updates and responses to blog posts. >90% university-related discussions.
Private inbox for close friends and family. When my phone is not on priority mode, I also get a notification for these.
Subscription inbox for newsletters and advertisements at me personally. I go through these after work and sometimes tag stuff I want to read during dead time (e.g. waiting in line).
Bulk, Ads, Accounts and Subscription get automatically marked as read when I shut down the program.
Filters sort >90% of my mail for me and are mostly based on the address used, as it saves me the time to manually add the sender to my filters (and hope they only use one email). Since my starting screen shows the bulk folder, I can just glance at the other <10% and move on, as it’s usually unimportant. Today’s bulk mail includes two Japanese book shop coupons, Reddit, two seminar invites, a reminder at myself and a meetup proposal.
I also have an emergency email which has no inbox but forwards mails directly to my phone in all situations. Never been used, of course, because nobody remembers obscure email addresses in emergencies (and my life actually isn’t as action-filled as one would expect the life of a business consultant with a dozen email filters to be...). Still, I like the idea of handing them out in the hope that it makes my other addresses “non-emergency” by contrast.
Each inbox currently holds several thousands of emails and after a few tantrums at having deleted that one email, they will likely stay undisturbed for the next couple of years.
Certain people—some of whom are in positions of enormous power—just do not give a damn about other human beings. A certain head of state in Syria comes to mind.
I’d also say that your ability to care about other people, along with overall sanity, will diminish under constant stress. That’s why “Preserve own sanity” is #1 on my rules to be followed in case of sudden world domination list and something I need to stay aware of even in my current (and normally not that stressful or important) job.
I’m not the organizer, but the Cologne meetup has been happening regularly for a while. The mailing list is here and the date is decided via online poll, but always a Saturday and usually towards the end of the month.
Done!
Hello, everyone. I stumbled upon LW after listening to Eliezer make some surprisingly lucid and dissonance-free comments on Skepticon’s death panel that inspired me to look up more of his work.
I’ve been browsing this site for a few days now, and I don’t think I’ve ever had so many “Hey, this has always irritated me, too!” moments in such short intervals, from the rant about “applause lights” to the discussions about efficient charity work. I like how this site provides some actual depth to the topics it discusses, rather than hand the reader a bullet list of trivialities and have them figure out the application.
I am working as a direct marketing consultant, in the process of getting my MBA (a decision I’ve started to regret; my faith in the scientific validity of academic management begins to resemble a Shepard Tone) and with future ambitions in entrepreneurship, investing, scaling and other things that fit in the “things I’ve never done yet smart people are supposed to be good at” box.
I’m a member of Mensa, casual Poker (winning) and Mahjong (losing) player, enjoy lifting weights, cooking (in an utterly unscientific way that would make Heston Blumenthal weep) and martial arts. I also have an imaginary −5yo son/daughter who keeps me motivated to put in more hours at work so we won’t have financial worries once they get born.
There are a bunch of things I’d like to do with my life long-term, with varying amounts of megalomania, but I’m generally content with focusing on increasing my financial and (practical) intellectual power in the short- to mid-term and let the future decide just how far off my predictions and plans turn out to be. Estimates range from very to utterly.
Here’s hoping LW will help me with that, and that I’ll be helpful to others.