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An explicit belief in change

Jimmy Daly

Jimmy Daly

• 2 min read

Hey there,

Hope you're week is off to a great start. Enjoy this week's issue and if you're feeling inspired, pass it on.

1. How to Be an Expert in a Changing World

Like most Paul Graham essays, this one is worth re-reading now and then.

When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world.

The first step is to have an explicit belief in change. People who fall victim to a monotonically increasing confidence in their opinions are implicitly concluding the world is static. If you consciously remind yourself it isn't, you start to look for change.

2. How ReadMe Designed Their Interview Process

This is such a great post from ReadMe founder Greg Koberger on how they hire. It's so cool to see such a thoughtful approach to a traditionally boring subject. He even shares their entire employee handbook in the post.

We go into interviews with the mindset that we want the interviewee to succeed. We do this by setting clear expectations. We do this through documentation (go figure!)—interviewees know how to prepare, what we're looking for, and how they'll be evaluated. No tricks, no drills, and no bullsh*t.

3. Evernote Should Be Dead By Now

Evernote raised $270 million and still couldn't pay its bills. They've scaled back over the past year and are on track to grow about 40 percent this year. Katie Benner tells the story of the shift back to reality in Silicon Valley.

“Here we sit, a year after we were supposed to die,” said Chris O’Neill, 43, chief executive of the start-up, which is based in Redwood City, Calif. “It was hard for employees to readjust expectations. They had only known a world where another fund-raise was just around the corner.”

4. How to make Slack less bad for you

A cynical, but realistic take how to handle the Slack problems in your life.

Let’s acknowledge that they are actually in the much more profitable business of making money and driving product usage by belching out a cataclysm of urgent red circles and desktop alerts and mobile notifications.

We should also note that they will be in this business until the not-too-distant day when every single office worker is either face down in a pool of their own blood or rocking back and forth in a county asylum muttering “Slackbot told me to do it”.

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