Category: Uncategorized

Overview

• Waste is wealth yet realized

Modern day politics

• Politicians exudes at appeal designed to push the emotional button of the broadest voter base imaginable
• actual plan not as memorable as the performance dimension of the campaign
  • Trump versus Obama
  • Racial pedigree undercut intellectual pedigree
• meritocracy – as an idea
  • only 32.5% of Americans graduated from college
  • majority are closed off from this ladder
  • resentment brewing

Phase 1

• James town failed experiment
  • input
    • veteran soldiers + convict
    • women
    • cattle
  • expected output
    • stable agrarian community
• class division between land owner versus servants widen
  • Puritans – see class as a form of security
  • White slave owners alienated white non-slave owners
  • reinforced by bloodlines and hereditary transmissions
    • love of liberty and racial exclusivity are ideas passed down
• Thomas Jefferson
  • Anglo-Saxon Americans racial stock superior
  • to outbreed all other races
  • fascination with bloodlines
• Hamond
  • Every advanced society had to exploit its petty laborers
  • Allowing the forming of recognized elites

roaring 1920s 

• Social exclusiveness masked as science and disdain for rural backwardness

1930s

• trailers
  • contradictory symbolism
    • freedom versus rootless with not privacy
    • liberty’s dark side: deviant dystopian wastelands on the fringe of the metropolis
  • permanent housing seem as slums

1940s

• Voters expect huge disparities in wealth but cultivate appear of being no different from the rest of us
• Hillbillies
• Malcolm X
• symbolism of class hierarchy turned upside down
  • Elvis

1980s

• ethnic identity
  • Cracker – to flee and start else where
  • Redneck  – hardworking, fun-loving and independent
  • HillBilly
• Choices people make are both class and gender charged
• Many people remained trapped in the poverty they are born into
• The American dream is a double edged sword
  • able people carve out their own destiny
  • not condemn those who get stuck between the cracks

1990s

• Bill Clinton
  • southerner president
  • embodiment of the American dream

External references

• To kill a mockingbird
• The Beans of Egypt, Chute

The sense of smell goes directly to the limbic and reptilian brain, by passing the prefrontal cortex

• Sun: Desire to grow is inherent and built in (dopamine)
  • beware of desir growing into unhealthy fixation
• Moon: culture shapes our desire
  • our mirror neurons / empathy leads us to instinctively feel socially safe or safe
• Depending on childhood conditions, effect of moon maybe especially strong in some
• important to differentiate between the two
• our logic processing unit not only have to deal with the inputs from the environment but also this internal pulse

• food
• sex
• learning
• thinking
• meditation
• walks
• movies

Ideas to explore

• foraging app – allows u to identify the species of plant or mushroom u see in the wild
• Digital music score reader – allows u to buy and download individual songs for playing in front of your piano
• monetizing sentiment engine
  • advertising
  • subscription

• UI/UX would feel annoying when
  • visual element on the screen bounces around too much
  • visual container’s dimensions constantly changes during interaction due to introduction or removal of sub-elements. It gives the impression of an unwell thought out design
  • too much intermittent visual changes occur after the page loads, before I could start my expected workflow
• Careful design experiments prevents
  • false negative
  • false positive
• Apple
  • only works on commodified technology
  • when there is a compelling story to tell
  • When an engineer managed to get the iPad prototype working for the first time and showed it to Steve Jobs. He screamed at him to get out and come back with a polished experience.
  • The focus is on the experience, not just on whether the simply technology works

• executive coaching is useful for helping you identify your strengths and for determining the kind of executive you are going to be
  • a cheaper way is to serve on other boards
• knowledge acquisition is a good thing
  • be wary of needing to do a deep dive into every single piece of data yourself, learn instead to rely on others for the analysis
  • don’t fall into the trap of requiring too much evidences before making any single decision – that is procrastination
  • read widely and developed deep critical thinking
• hyper communication is the most effective way to curtail the Silo effect commonly observed in companies
  • the listening and data gathering aspects of it
• be a collector of people
  • each profile will satisfy specific needs

• insight – knowledge of the existence of a specific phenomena
• opportunities – understanding that could be applied for gain
• execution – process by which knowledge is applied for gain

Insight

• Until the brain of man evolves to something else, it will continuously oscillate between adrenaline and dopamine. History inevitably repeats itself.
• More can be learned about survival from failure than success
• Since 1970s, crashes have occurred with more frequency

Major events

• 1997 financial crisis
• 2000 dot com bust
• 2003 9/11 incident
• 2004/5 SARs
• 2008 Subprime bust
• 2015 Saudi Arabia oil dump

Company specific

• 1998 Microsoft Anti-Trust
• 2014 Alibaba
• 2015 LinkedIn
• 2016 Apple terrorist scare
• 2017 Equifax data breach
• 2018 Tesla self driving car crash
• 2018 Facebook data scandal

Related writing

• Trading strategy that capitalizes on loss aversion and reversion to mean

Insights

• Only send emails to users that have interacted with your emails within the past 365 days
• Qualitative data is only as useful as your ability to extract insights out of them –
  • Use the Pareto Chart to organize themes
  • Apply 80/20 rule
• Apply efforts where 20% effort that leads to 80% impact
  • Tactics that work at smaller scale might not work well at larger scale

Source

• Reforge blog post – email delivery, cognitive biases and utilizing qualitative data
• Growth hack blog post on how to get to 1,164,418 customers
• Brian Balfour – building a growth engine
• Social capital’s diligence series