Hey Everyone,
Hope you're having a great week. Here are a few things I've been reading, writing and pondering lately. Enjoy!
I really liked the post from Eugene Wei about a communication tactic that Jeff Bezos employs. It’s simple, but really effective. Eugene explains it in detail (and I recommend reading the post), but here’s a quick snippet that sums it up nicely:
Take one example "Day 1." I don't know when he first said this to the company, but it was repeated endlessly all my years at Amazon. It's still Day 1. Jeff has even named one of the Amazon buildings Day 1. In fact, I bet most of my readers know what Day 1 means, and Jeff doesn't even bother explaining what Day 1 is at the start of his letter to shareholders, so familiar is it to all followers of the company. Instead, he just jumps straight into talking about how to fend off Day 2, which he doesn't even need to define because we all can probably infer it from the structure of his formulation.
2. The Reason Why People Can't Write Well
Amen to this.
For [Harvard psychologist Steven] Pinker, the root cause of so much bad writing is what he calls "the Curse of Knowledge", which he defines as "a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose."
I really liked Noah Kagan’s podcast interview with Alan Weiss, author of “Million Dollar Consulting.”
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5. Random Links
- If you have some time on your hands: The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”
- I’m such a sucker for posts like this (but proud to say I’ve done the one in my home state): The Best Hike in Every State
- Oooooh: How to build a static website on Airtable
- Gary Clark Jr.’s version of Come Together is so cool. If you love that, you’ll also dig this.
Have a great weekend!
Jimmy
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