I fucking love science. The mindset of make a guess, test it as best you can, and record everything for the next person to learn from seems like the most meaningful path we individuals can take as members of a social species. It emboldens our personal creativity and answers for our impermanence at the same time. This talk explores the ancient relay race of our knowledge in mathematics, starting at 3000 BCE. That we can […]
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Silicon Valley visionary John Perry Barlow died last night. I honestly didn’t know much about him, but reading the outpouring of eulogies across the web today I wish I had met the man. It must be the mark of a life well spent to be able to leave a momentary gaping hole of reverance in the chaos and cynicism that is the web. Everyone has been sharing Barlow’s Principles of Adult Behavior, a list he […]
Let me beguile you just a little bit more about extended families. Let us talk about divorce, and that fact that one out of every three of us here has been or will be divorced. When we do it, we will very likely wrangle and wail and weep formlessly about money and sex, about treachery, about outgrowing one another, about how close love is to hate, and so on. Nobody ever gets anywhere near close […]
I stayed up late and compiled a list of every link we’ve ever included in our NOBL newsletters since we started the company in 2014. If you like reading about the future of work, leadership, and transformation, you’ll dig this. Also, check out our revised Resources page with all of our past newsletters, talks, interviews, and essays.
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. Kurt Vonnegut.
The future will resent us in exact proportion to our failure to have attempted to meaningfully address those systemic problems that we will be known to have been quite aware of. William Gibson.
2×2 matrices map extremes. That’s their function. So as drawn, they obliterate nuance. And yes, they are overused. The measure of a 2×2 matrix isn’t in how well it captures reality, but in the quality of conversation it produces in response to its narrow-mindedness. As you feel out where it fails to accurately depict you or a situation you find yourself in, does it force you to meaningfully examine the underlying factors and forces that […]
These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. Ta-Nehisi Coates.
It would not be easy, no—for in order to win such a battle, he would have to forbid himself the privilege of stopping, and whatever he did right he would have to repeat, as though he were already living in eternity. Tom Junod. This quote really nails something I’ve struggled with since starting a company. When you find something successful you have to keep repeating yourself even if you’d rather, out of vanity or boredom, […]
For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Viktor Frankl.
If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud. Nicholas Nassim Taleb.
On the same day that scientists announced successfully cloning monkeys, this horrific gem about deepfakes was reported by Motherboard: Since we first wrote about deepfakes, the practice of producing AI-assisted fake porn has exploded. More people are creating fake celebrity porn using machine learning, and the results have become increasingly convincing. Another redditor even created an app specifically designed to allow users without a computer science background to create AI-assisted fake porn. All the tools […]
We just launched a new website (!) and I thought it the occasion to look back for a second. We’ve been doing this crazy experiment called NOBL for just about three years and three months now. Year one was a crash course in the basics of running a service business (and I steered us into more than a few fender benders). Years two and three were when we settled into a process and forged our […]
In contrast to the Internet of now, the Internet of a decade back was better, smarter, more interesting and also it didn’t make you want to die all the time. Alex Balk.
Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society. Companies must benefit all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate. Laurence D. Fink. P.S. Eric Posner disagrees: There is no reason to believe that CEOs are capable of determining the best […]
I’m really loving this growing discussion and hypotheses laid out by Katja Grace and her readers. The basic question is this: why did humanity take so long to advance at the start? Rope, the wheel, written word all took tens of thousands of years to develop even though we modern humans would find the lack of these things a daily headache. Go read it.
Gillian Davis and I chatted about change, with numerous rabbit holes along the way. Check out her entire podcast series.
Embracing negativity may also have social benefits. Compared with cheery moods, bad moods have been linked to a more effective communication style, and sadness has been linked to less reliance on negative stereotypes. Feeling down can make us behave more fairly, too. People who saw sad video clips before playing an allocation game were more generous with their partners than those who saw happy clips. Source.
All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are. Those who have cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life. Ten seconds of silence. I’ll watch the time. Fred Rogers.
