"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbC4gqZGPSY Ira Glass (This American Life)

"…find a way to make it interesting. That’s what you need to do: find a question that makes the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that’s compellingly mysterious."

Paul Graham

Teens Migrating From Facebook To Comments Section Of Slow-Motion Deer Video (The Onion) →

Zuck giving a talk and doing Q&A at Harvard in late 2005. Makes for an interesting watch.

"I have long been impressed by the role of confidence in an economy. In fact, I’ve written in the past – exaggerating only slightly – that sometimes I think confidence is all that matters. I consider its impact to be significant, pervasive, self-reinforcing and self-fulfilling. The primary impact of confidence on the economy is simple. If people think the economic future will be good, they’ll spend and invest … thus things will be good."

Howard Marks

"The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business."

Warren Buffett

"You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous, because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in– It’s actually kind of tragic because it means you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is."

David Foster Wallace

"

Another dream would be to revolutionize [student] self-assessment, so that in any area–math, psychology, economics, whatever–you could assess your skills and know what you may need to learn. The ideal there is creating a skills-based credential that is well trusted and well understood enough that employers view it as a true alternative to a degree. You could unbundle the idea of “Where did you get this knowledge?” from “What knowledge do you have?”

That would unleash unbelievable open innovation. We see it a little bit today, where a dropout can bring in a sample of computer code and say, “I wrote this code, why do you care what grades I got or whether I went to college?”

"

Bill Gates on Education

The Different Ways to Rank/Organize Media on Web Services

• Social chronological: twitter
• General chronological: blogs
• Social algorithmic: facebook feed
• Social popularity: nuzzel
• Expert curated: songza
• Personalized stack rank: netflix sort by highest rated view
• Generalized stack rank: yelp sort by highest rated view
• Recent popularity: New York TImes most popular article list

I named a bunch of methodologies and there are many more out there.

There are benefits to each approach and it is important to think which way makes the most sense for the product that you are creating. There are a lot of options to choose from and each have their own benefits and draw backs.

When it comes to media consumption (movies, music, restaurant ratings, news) ideally I would like a personalized stack rank system that on top of collaborative filtering is still informed and shows me social, expert and trend signals. It is hard to factor in all of these into one uniform and simple user experience but I think it is the most ideal system.

For example, on Netflix it would be great if on top of their personalized star ratings it would show me what my friends rated and reviewed the movie, what famous movie reviewers said, what awards the film won and if there is any new big news about the film. I realize I am a power user of these type of services and most people are probably fine with their simpler user experience that they currently have. I still think there are ways to make the general experience very clean and simple while adding additional information for power users.

Musings on Soylent: an Interesting Meal Replacement Concoction

About a month ago I came across a blog post on how someone stopped eating food. Rob Rheinhart, a 24-year-old engineer, decided to make Soylent, a liquid replacement for eating that supposedly contains all of the nutrients that you would ever need.

I was captivated by the idea. Even though I love to eat great food, sometimes I just want to get my calories and nutrients as quickly and efficiently as possible. I’d be tempted to use a liquid meal replacement for some portion of my meals if it was proven to be healthy and I could stomach the taste. I’d still eat out with friends quite often (and maybe start to cook more) when I had plans or was in the mood.

Though, sometimes I just want the nutrients and calories as easily and quickly as possible. Sometimes I even end up eating far too many granola bars or peanut butter and wheat thins as a make shift meal replacement when I am focused on something. A nutritional meal replacement beverage seems to be a better call. 

The story got picked up by vice and led to an interesting conversation on hacker news. I think Soylent, with its controversial name, self-experimentation, and activist bent, makes for a very interesting story.

For whatever reason, I had never really seriously considered the idea of frequently using a meal replacement until I read Rob’s blog posts. I’ve seen ensure milkshakes before but they seemed like bad desserts and meant for people on weight-loss focused diets.

There are many meal replacement products on the market and I am not an expert at all but it doesn’t seem like any of them really have a reputation for being grounded in biology and nutrition science while also having a bargain basement price. 

If more research proves the product is healthy, it receives good customer reviews and it is fairly priced, I will try some. If I like it, I may even become a regular consumer of it.

For now, I will just follow as the story develops.

Two side notes:

I hate the name but I have to say it is memorable. The confusion with Soylent Green is unfortunate which apparently is different from Soylent which was made of soya and lentils according to the book that Soylent Green was based upon.

Also thinking about this helped further my interest in thinking about nutrition and food in general. I am very skeptical that Soylent will be the answer or even a small part of it but I am still fascinated by it. Eating a healthy, balanced diet is very important.The entire food system needs to improve: from farms, to the distribution system, to the decisions that we make and the options that we have and choose as consumers.