ALBERTO ALESSI'S "FORMULA" 

Do you use much market research to develop your products?

I use the Formula, a mathematic model that I developed at the beginning of the 1990s to decide if we should put a new prototype into production.

That sounds very scientific, very unpoetic!

The Formula was provoked by my brothers and cousins. They wanted to know why I was taking decisions what to do or not to do. Even I didn’t know. It was done here. [He touches his stomach.] So I put together all 300 projects that I had helped develop—some big successes, balanced by big fiascoes. The idea was to understand the reasons for these very unequal lives, and then predict the reaction of our customers.

I have two central parameters. [He sketches a grid.] One is called SMI. It means sensation, memory, and imagination, and tries to explore what people mean when they say, “Oh, what a beautiful object!” Beauty alone no longer expresses properly the relations of people with an object. You cannot use beauty when you describe a Starck project, for example. The second parameter is called CL, which means communication language. It measures the ability of a product to communicate something like status or values. A gold Rolex watch, for example, conveys wealth, while a Richard Sapper teakettle indicates cultural sensitivity. Each product can be scored 1 to 5 on each parameter. But we still had several products with the same scores, yet with very unequal lives. So I was obliged to add two more parameters: function and price.

Walk me through how some product would rate on this scale.

Let’s take the Philippe Starck squeezer, the Juicy Salif. In the first phase of its life, communication was very strong: a 5. On the function scale, people thought it was an innovation; only later did they discover that it wasn’t working so well! Give it a 4. Its price was about $60, for a score of 4, and its SMI, a 5, so its final score was 18. That meant it should sell about 100,000 pieces per year. A score of 12 is very risky—1,000 to 2,000 pieces. Since the Formula then was not very precise, you could be a bit wrong, and it could be a disaster. Twenty years later, in the Juicy Salif’s second phase, its SMI is the same. [He writes down a 5.] Communication is less. [He writes a 4.] In terms of function, everybody knows it doesn’t work, so that is a 2. Price is still reasonable, but we have introduced so many plastic pieces, it is not as impressive. Give it a 3. Today, it is a 14—about 50,000 units a year.

How accurate is the Formula?

If it is used on existing typologies, where Alessi has an existing product, it is very precise. If we face a new typology, where we don’t have enough experience, like watches, we have to fine-tune it. It is a delicate activity to tune. On existing Alessi typologies, it cannot fail.

What part tends to trip you up?

On the function, we know what works. Same for price. Even in communication, we understand the effect of an object. But where we can misunderstand is in SMI. I can easily be wrong, confusing my personal taste with the taste of my customers.

Do you make the final decisions about products?

Yes. But it’s very precious for me to understand the final score of the Formula. Not to manage by, but to understand the risk.

Does this formula work across cultures?

We do not see important differences among our core customers. They are not design victims, but they are surely not average customers. Their reactions are similar, both in Tokyo and Milan.

Silk Road, China

Day with the Dealer

Always love seeing food related doc, especially about mushrooms. But salmon sperm...? WTH.

WHY FOUNDERS DON'T SELL 

By: Kate Losse

For a few hours yesterday my Twitter timeline was composed of people marvelling at Snapchat’s decision not to accept 3 billion dollars in a takeover offer from Facebook. To many, the decision is inconceivable: why would not having 3 billion dollars ever be better than having 3 billion dollars? What else could you possibly want?

Some speculated that what Snapchat is after is more money; that they rejected the offer because they imagine that one day they could make more. Perhaps that is the case, but one of the things that people overlook when these kinds of decisions are made is that they often aren’t about money at all.

When I found out that Mark Zuckerberg decided to turn down a 1 billion offer from Yahoo in 2006 it didn’t surprise me. I was sitting in the pool at a house that the as-yet-unprofitable Facebook had rented for employees, but I had negative money in the bank (student loans and an hourly wage job). If Mark had accepted the offer I suppose I would have gotten some money, maybe enough to pay my debt and chill for a while. But it was so inconceivable at the time that he would sell, that I didn’t even think about it. I knew it would never happen. Why? Two things: power and culture. These are the things people don’t factor in when they wonder why people don’t sell their companies at the first or even the second major offer. Because a billion dollars can buy a lot of things— it can even buy power, certainly, because rich people by definition have power— but one thing it can’t buy is the power to change the entire culture. That can be priceless.

When Mark Zuckerberg turned down the Yahoo offer, Facebook was just getting started, and seven years later Facebook has incontrovertibly changed the culture, embedding itself in every aspect of nearly everyone’s lives. Even now that I don’t work there, even now when I travel across the world, Facebook is around me, on people’s laptops and phones and the subject of their conversations. Regardless of place, people are stopping to upload photos and often, lament their attachment to a virtual world they feel they can now, never leave.

After Twitter and Instagram in 2009 and 2011 respectively (the first Facebook tried to buy, the second it succeeded in buying), Snapchat posed the latest, real threat to Facebook’s omnipresence. To Mark and Facebook, seeing people stop to post a photo to Snapchat instead of Facebook must have been disturbing, and therefore Snapchat needed to be bought. But the very fact that Facebook needed to buy Snapchat is perhaps why Snapchat needed to say no. In posing a real threat to Facebook, Snapchat proved that it may have that one elusive thing that no money can buy: the ability to change how people behave, to become central to their relationships with one another, to re-architect human contact, to be masters of the human domain.

The ability to shape the world’s culture is something that Facebook has and doesn’t want to lose, and as evidenced by the buyout offer and rejection, is an ability that Snapchat has and doesn’t want to lose either. And this, to a founder of a hot startup, is how 3 billion dollars becomes meaningless.

If you want to build a ship, don’t gather people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.-Saint Exupéry

The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation–if I may use that biological term–that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in…-Joseph Schumpeter on Creative Destruction, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

MUJI IS GOOD FOR YOU 

Jasper Morrison on MUJI

My father was in the advertising business, and one of his clients was the Irish Brewery, Guinness. When I was about eighteen years old, before I went to design school, he arranged a job for me at the London brewery. My job was to design Guinness products for the African market, where it was believed that the beer had the magical power to improve the manhood of anyone who could afford it. The advertising slogan for the company at that time was “Guinness is good for you,” and in fact it had been proved by doctors that Guinness was good for you, so they started to give it to the patients in hospitals. When MUJI asked me to write something about the company I remembered this phrase because there seemed to be some parallels between the beer company’s outrageous claim, which turned out to be an honest one, and MUJI. Can a company be good for you? I think so.

In a world where everything is marketed and calculated to be a best seller (even if very few succeed) it is surprising to find a company which takes an opposite approach with the products they offer. Stripping things down, reducing form and colour and denying them the primary role which they usually have would seem like a sure way to lose sales. Such a ‘philosophy’ could never have been developed in the west, where to sell anything you have to shout louder than your neighbour, and where the marketing department controls everything, including the president. So it’s no surprise to find that this company’s origin is Japan, a country with the strongest tradition of sensibilities in aesthetics and daily life.

There are critics who would argue that the MUJI concept is just another marketing theme, exploiting a niche in the market for those who may be tired of all the other marketing themes. This may be true if you think of the glass of water being half-empty, but to the one who sees it half-full, MUJI is genuine. If you take away MUJI there is a big hole which nothing else can fill. If the MUJI concept is just another marketing theme then how come there are no others copying it as they do every other theme which has originality?

As a public company there’s no question of MUJI operating like a charity, and yet for the consumer there’s an impression of generosity: not just economic, but also conceptual. A typical MUJI product has just a small bit of extra thought which aims to be helpful to the customer, like the marker pen which is wider at one end than the other, signalling clearly and simply the thickness of the marker stroke at each end, or the towel with a detail which divides the whole into smaller squares which allows it to be cut up into floor cloths when it’s useful life as a towel is up. These are just two examples. Other MUJI products may express their concepts less visibly, and yet in use, over time, show another kind of generosity, the type which comes from doing a job well for a long time without complaint. 

So how can MUJI be good for you? Generally speaking, things are not good for us; too many or too valuable and we are corrupted. But, we all need some things (even Gandhi had a pair of spectacles, some sandals, a bowl, a dish and a pocket watch) and to some extent we are defined by our choices of those things. We may reveal to others in our choice of things that we have good taste or bad taste, expensive taste, cheap taste, modest taste, flashy taste, snobbish taste or no taste at all. Between the moment of choosing and paying for something and the day we no longer have a need for it, there are certain exchanges between the thing and us. The service provided by the thing on the one hand and how we feel about being its owner on the other hand. For some, owning a Ferrari may be the most important thing in life, but is owning something which only a few others can afford good for you? I don’t think so. 

There is an English importer of wine which has been selling Bordeaux wine in England for more than 300 years, and besides all the expensive wines that they offer, there’s one which they call “Good Ordinary Bordeaux,” which costs much less than the others but which is fine to drink as an everyday wine. Similarly, the MUJI concept is to make things as well and as cleverly as possible at a reasonable price, for the thing to be ‘enough’ in the best sense of the word, and this kind of ‘enough’ is good for you because it removes status from the product/consumer equation and replaces it with satisfaction. The kind of satisfaction that you have when the money you exchange for the thing is in good proportion with the value which you receive from the thing, and the thing itself is good at being itself without any pretension of being anything more special.

INSIDE PIXAR'S LEADERSHIP

If I look at the range, you’ve got one [constraint] that is art school, I’m doing this for arts sake, Ratatouille and WALL-E clearly fall more on that side, the other is the purely commercial side, where you’ve got a lot of films that are made purely for following a trend, if you go entirely for the art side then eventually you fail economically. if you go purely commercially then I think you fail from a soul point of view… we’ve got these elements pulling on both sides, the art side and the commercial side… and the the trick is not to let one side win. That fundamentally successful companies are unstable. And where we have to operate is in that unstable place. And the forces of conservatism which are very strong and they want to go to a safe place. I want to go to the same place for money, I want to go and be wild and creative, or I want to have enough time for this, and each one of those guys are pulling, and if any one of them wins, we lose. And i just want to stay right there in the middle.

10 CREATIVITY TIPS FROM J.CREW CEO MICKEY DREXLER

"Every business could be creative."

I talk to so many people about the lack of creativity in companies in America. Part of creativity is contrarianism. Creativity battles common wisdom. Because if there's common wisdom, there's an opportunity. In my own experience, whatever was a good idea was a bad idea to most people.

"Companies are in the Stone Ages organizationally."

You can tell by the offices. "I'm going to see the king!" The king is on the top floor and there are 17 people in front of the king's office. There are layers of bureaucracy. It shouldn't be like that.

"Most companies should have a rule about how big they get."

Not necessarily assigning a billion-dollar value or 10-billion-dollar value, but companies that become too ubiquitous go one way.

"America's companies are built to destroy creativity."

If you become the head of a big company today, you're not the youngest person in the world. You have a contract. You get a jet. You have a huge overpaid salary. You get bonuses. Do you think that CEO is going to screw around with fast, creative change? No. And the board of directors, the last thing they want is someone who's going to change things. Steve Jobs--he would bet the company, he wouldn't care. But there are very few people who run companies that way.

"You have to keep moving forward."

Everything has a trend to it; I don't care if it's appliances or engines. I always ask: What has a company done in the past five years that somebody's noticed?

"I'm a very proud micromanager."

If you don't care about the lapel or the buttons or the fit, then you are doing a disservice to the consumer. We're all inside the tunnel, speaking the language of business, but we need to speak the language of customers. How many companies actually talk about the product?

"You cannot copy high quality."

It takes a long time to get a reputation for quality. There are people in our industry, they're basically copiers. Look at the cars on the streets. They all look alike. But if you put quality into a product, then have it validated, you have huge credibility. It takes time to earn that.

"You can drown in data."

Data is very important, but you have to be good at reading the data in an emotional way. If you look at a selling report, there's an emotional trend to what's selling. What's a focus group? We ask, "What's going on in the stores?" You learn and then edit, edit, edit, because there's a lot of junk mail in your head.

"It's aggravating to be a public company."

People who own stocks could not care less about the long run. Everyone in the world has a quarterly report. Your owners and investors are looking for a result. [But] it takes 5 or 10 years to build a company.

"Simplicity is very difficult to achieve."

Try to ask someone to make a really good roast chicken.

WHAT COKE CONTAINS 

The Vons grocery store two miles from my home in Los Angeles, California sells 12 cans of Coca-Cola for $6.59 — 54 cents each. The tool chain that created this simple product is incomprehensibly complex.

Each can originated in a small town of 4,000 people on the Murray River in Western Australia called Pinjarra. Pinjarra is the site of the world’s largest bauxite mine. Bauxite is surface mined — basically scraped and dug from the top of the ground. The bauxite is crushed and washed with hot sodium hydroxide, which separates it into aluminum hydroxide and waste material called red mud. The aluminum hydroxide is cooled, then heated to over a thousand degrees celsius in a kiln, where it becomes aluminum oxide, or alumina. The alumina is dissolved in a molten substance called cryolite, a rare mineral first discovered in Greenland, and turned into pure aluminum using electricity in a process called electrolysis. The pure aluminum sinks to the bottom of the molten cryolite, is drained off and placed in a mold. It cools into the shape of a long cylindrical bar. The bar is transported west again, to the Port of Bunbury, and loaded onto a container ship bound for — in the case of Coke for sale in Los Angeles — Long Beach.

The bar is transported to Downey, California, where it is rolled flat in a rolling mill, and turned into aluminum sheets. The sheets are punched into circles and shaped into a cup by a mechanical process called drawing and ironing — this not only makes the can but also thins the aluminum. The transition from flat circle to something that resembles a can takes about a fifth of a second. The outside of the can is decorated using a base layer of urethane acrylate, then up to seven layers of colored acrylic paint and varnish that is cured using ultra violet light, and the inside of the can is painted too — with a complex chemical called a comestible polymeric coating that prevents any of the aluminum getting into the soda. So far, this vast tool chain has only produced an empty, open can with no lid. The next step is to fill it.

Coca-Cola is made from a syrup produced by the Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta. The main ingredient in the formula used in the United States is a sweetener called high-fructose corn syrup 55, so named because it is 55 per cent fructose or “fruit sugar” and 42 per cent glucose or “simple sugar” — the same ratio of fructose to glucose as natural honey. HFCS is made by grinding wet corn until it becomes cornstarch. The cornstarch is mixed with an enzyme secreted by a rod-shaped bacterium called Bacillus and an enzyme secreted by a mold called Aspergillus. This process creates the glucose. A third enzyme, also derived from bacteria, is then used to turn some of the glucose into fructose.

The second ingredient, caramel coloring, gives the drink its distinctive dark brown color. There are four types of caramel coloring — Coca Cola uses type E150d, which is made by heating sugars with sulfite and ammonia to create bitter brown liquid. The syrup’s other principal ingredient is phosphoric acid, which adds acidity and is made by diluting burnt phosphorus (created by heating phosphate rock in an arc-furnace) and processing it to remove arsenic.

A much smaller proportion of the syrup is flavors. These include vanilla, which is the fruit of a Mexican orchid that has been dried and cured for around three months; cinnamon, the inner bark of a Sri Lankan tree; coca-leaf which comes from South America and is processed in a unique US government authorized factory in New Jersey to remove its addictive stimulant cocaine; and kola nut, a red nut found on a tree which grows in the African Rain Forest (this may be the origin of Coca-Cola’s distinctive red logo).

The final ingredient is caffeine, a stimulating alkaloid that can be derived from the kola nut, coffee beans and other sources.

All these ingredients are combined and boiled down to a concentrate, then transported from the Coca-Cola Company factory in Atlanta to Downey where the concentrate is diluted with water infused with carbon dioxide. Some of the carbon dioxide turns to gas in the water, and these gas bubbles give it effervescence, also know as “fizz,” after its sound. 12 ounces of this mixture is poured into the can.

The top of the can is then added. This is carefully engineered: it is made from aluminum, but it has to be thicker and stronger to withstand the pressure of the carbon dioxide gas, and so it uses an alloy with more magnesium than the rest of the can. The lid is punched and scored so that a tab opening, also made of aluminum, can be installed. The finished lid is put on top of the filled can, and the edges of the can are folded over it and welded shut. 12 of these cans are then packaged into a painted paperboard box called a fridge pack, using a machine capable of producing 300 such packs a minute.

The finished product is transported by road to a distribution center and then to my local Vons. This tool chain, which spans bauxite bulldozers, refrigerators, urethane, bacteria and cocaine, produces 70 million cans of Coca-Cola each day, one of which can be purchased for about two quarters on most street corners, and each of which contains far more than something to drink. Like every other tool, a can of Coke is a product of our world entire and contains inventions that trace all the way back to the origins of our species.

The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all. Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space. Coca-Cola did not teach the world to sing, no matter what its commercials suggest, yet every can of Coke contains humanity’s choir.

BEN HOROWITZ ON PROGRAMMING YOUR CULTURE 

So what is culture? Does culture matter? If so, how much time should you spend on it?

Let’s start with the second question first. The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter. The second thing that any technology startup must do is to take the market. If it’s possible to do something 10x better, it’s also possible that you won’t be the only company to figure that out. Therefore, you must take the market before somebody else does. Very few products are 10x better than the competition, so unseating the new incumbent is much more difficult than unseating the old one.

If you fail to do both of those things, your culture won’t matter one bit. The world is full of bankrupt companies with world-class cultures. Culture does not make a company.

So, why bother with culture at all? Three reasons:

It matters to the extent that it can help you achieve the above goals.
As your company grows, culture can help you preserve your key values, make your company a better place to work and help it perform better in the future.
Perhaps most importantly, after you and your people go through the inhuman amount of work that it will take to build a successful company, it will be an epic tragedy if your company culture is such that even you don’t want to work there.
Creating A Company Culture
In this post, when I refer to company culture, I am not referring to other important activities like company values and employee satisfaction. Specifically, I am writing about designing a way of working that will:

Distinguish you from competitors
Ensure that critical operating values persist such as delighting customers or making beautiful products
Help you identify employees that fit with your mission
Culture means lots of other things in other contexts, but the above will be plenty to discuss here.

When you start implementing your culture, keep in mind that most of what will be retrospectively referred to as your company’s culture will not be designed in, but will evolve over time based on the behavior of you and your early employees. As a result, you will want to focus on a small number of cultural design points that will influence a large number of behaviors over a long period of time.

In Jim Collins’ massively successful book Built to Last, he wrote that one of the things that long lasting companies he studied have in common is a “cult-like culture.” I found this description to be confusing because it seems to imply that as long as your culture is weird enough and you are rabid enough about it, you will succeed on the cultural front. That’s related to the truth, but not actually true. In reality, Collins was right that a properly designed culture often ends up looking cult-like in retrospect, but that’s not the initial design principle. You needn’t think hard about how you can make your company seem bizarre to outsiders. However, you do need to think about how you can be provocative enough to change what people do every day.

Ideally, a cultural design point will be trivial to implement, but will have far-reaching behavioral consequences. Key to this kind of mechanism is shock value. If you put something into your culture that is so disturbing that it always creates a conversation, it will change behavior. As we learned in The Godfather, ask a Hollywood mogul to give someone a job and he might not respond. Put a horse’s head in his bed and unemployment will drop by one. Shock is a great mechanism for behavioral change.

APPLE VS GOOGLE 

Almost anything Apple does which involves the internet is a mess, save for their excellent web browser teams.

Meanwhile, Google, specifically Android, has been steadily improving its entire platform. To me, it still doesn’t have the same quality of polish and feel that Apple software does. However, it’s getting harder to argue that point, especially since their web services all tend to Just Work. Features like Google Now and near-instant voice commands are starting to give Android a serious leg up on iOS. Design is coming along as well. Android is still ugly, but it’s much less ugly than it was a few years ago. Google seems to be actively addressing this, and if Apple isn’t worried, they should be. Tom is the first friend I’ve had who has switched from iOS to Android, and he is unlikely to be the last.

FOLLOW A CAREER PASSION? LET IT FOLLOW YOU

By CAL NEWPORT

IN the spring of 2004, during my senior year of college, I faced a hard decision about my future career. I had a job offer from Microsoft and an acceptance letter from the computer science doctoral program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I had also just handed in the manuscript for my first nonfiction book, which opened the option of becoming a full-time writer. These are three strikingly different career paths, and I had to choose which one was right for me.

For many of my peers, this decision would have been fraught with anxiety. Growing up, we were told by guidance counselors, career advice books, the news media and others to “follow our passion.” This advice assumes that we all have a pre-existing passion waiting to be discovered. If we have the courage to discover this calling and to match it to our livelihood, the thinking goes, we’ll end up happy. If we lack this courage, we’ll end up bored and unfulfilled — or, worse, in law school.

To a small group of people, this advice makes sense, because they have a clear passion. Maybe they’ve always wanted to be doctors, writers, musicians and so on, and can’t imagine being anything else.

But this philosophy puts a lot of pressure on the rest of us — and demands long deliberation. If we’re not careful, it tells us, we may end up missing our true calling. And even after we make a choice, we’re still not free from its effects. Every time our work becomes hard, we are pushed toward an existential crisis, centered on what for many is an obnoxiously unanswerable question: “Is this what I’m really meant to be doing?” This constant doubt generates anxiety and chronic job-hopping.

As I considered my options during my senior year of college, I knew all about this Cult of Passion and its demands. But I chose to ignore it. The alternative career philosophy that drove me is based on this simple premise: The traits that lead people to love their work are general and have little to do with a job’s specifics. These traits include a sense of autonomy and the feeling that you’re good at what you do and are having an impact on the world. Decades of research on workplace motivation back this up. (Daniel Pink’s book “Drive” offers a nice summary of this literature.)

These traits can be found in many jobs, but they have to be earned. Building valuable skills is hard and takes time. For someone in a new position, the right question is not, “What is this job offering me?” but, instead, “What am I offering this job?”

RETURNING to my story, I decided after only minimal deliberation to go to M.I.T. True to my alternative career philosophy, I was confident that all three of my career options could be transformed into a source of passion, and this confidence freed me from worry about making a wrong choice. I ended up choosing M.I.T., mainly because of a slight preference for the East Coast, but I would have been equally content heading out to Microsoft’s headquarters near Seattle. Or, with the advance from my first book, I could have hunkered down in a quiet town to write.

During my initial years as a graduate student, I certainly didn’t enjoy an unshakable sense that I had found my true calling. The beginning of doctoral training can be rough. You’re not yet skilled enough to make contributions to the research literature, which can be frustrating. And at a place like M.I.T., you’re surrounded by brilliance, which can make you question whether you belong.

Had I subscribed to the “follow our passion” orthodoxy, I probably would have left during those first years, worried that I didn’t feel love for my work every day. But I knew that my sense of fulfillment would grow over time, as I became better at my job. So I worked hard, and, as my competence grew, so did my engagement.

Today, I’m a computer science professor at Georgetown University, and I love my job. The most important lesson I can draw from my experience is that this love has nothing to do with figuring out at an early age that I was meant to be a professor. There’s nothing special about my choosing this particular path. What mattered is what I did once I made my choice.

To other young people who constantly wonder if the grass might be greener on the other side of the occupational fence, I offer this advice: Passion is not something you follow. It’s something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world.

THE BEST METH ANYWHERE: COULD WALTER WHITE REALLY GAIN AN EDGE BY SELLING PREMIUM DRUGS?

My life used to be a shadow novel. It had plot, characters, sex scenes, action scenes. It had mood, atmosphere, texture. It was scary, it was weird, it was exciting. I had friends who were living out shadow movies, or creating shadow art, or initiating shadow industries. These were our addictions, and we worked them for all they were worth. There was only one problem: none of us was writing a real novel, or painting a real painting, or starting a real business. We were amateurs living in the past or dreaming of the future, while failing utterly to do the work necessary to progress in the present.

When you turn pro, your life gets very simple.

The Zen monk, the artist, the entrepreneur often lead lives so plain they’re practically invisible. Miyamoto Musashi’s dojo was smaller than my living room. Things became superfluous for him. In the end he didn’t even need a sword.

The amateur is an egotist. He takes the material of his personal pain and uses it to draw attention to himself. He creates a “life,” a “character,” a “personality.”

The artist and the professional, on the other hand, have turned a corner in their minds. They have grown so bored with themselves and so sick of their petty bullshit that they can manipulate those elements the way a HazMat technician handles weapons-grade plutonium.

They manipulate them for the good of others. What were once their shadow symphonies become real symphonies. The color and drama that were once outside now move inside.

Turning pro is an act of self-abnegation. Not Self with a capital-S, but little-s self. Ego. Distraction. Displacement. Addiction.

When we turn pro, the energy that once went into the Shadow Novel goes into the real novel. What we once thought was real - “the world,” including its epicenter, ourselves - turns out to be only a shadow. And what had seemed to be only a dream, now, the reality of our lives.

-Turning Pro

Startups are not magic. They don’t change the laws of wealth creation. They just represent a point at the far end of the curve. There is a conservation law at work here: if you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars’ worth of pain. For example, one way to make a million dollars would be to work for the Post Office your whole life, and save every penny of your salary. Imagine the stress of working for the Post Office for fifty years. In a startup you compress all this stress into three or four years. You do tend to get a certain bulk discount if you buy the economy-size pain, but you can’t evade the fundamental conservation law. If starting a startup were easy, everyone would do it.-Paul Graham on “How to Make Wealth”

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MONEY 

Let’s start with what money is used for. Modern economists typically define it by the three roles it plays in an economy: 


It’s a store of value, meaning that money allows you to defer consumption until a later date. 


It’s a unit of account, meaning that it allows you to assign a value to different goods without having to compare them. So instead of saying that a Rolex watch is worth six cows, you can just say it (or the cows) cost $10 000.


And it’s a medium of exchange—an easy and efficient way for you and me and others to trade goods and services with one another.


All of these roles have to do with buying and selling, and that’s how the modern world thinks of money—so much so that it seems peculiar to conceive of money in any other way. 


Yet in tribal and other “primitive” economies, money served a very different purpose—less a store of value or medium of exchange, much more a social lubricant. As the anthropologist David Graeber puts it in his recent book Debt: The First 5000 Years (Melville House, 2011), money in those societies was a way “to arrange marriages, establish the paternity of children, head off feuds, console mourners at funerals, seek forgiveness in the case of crimes, negotiate treaties, acquire followers.” Money, then, was not for buying and selling stuff but for helping to define the structure of social relations. 


How, then, did money become the basis of trade? By the time money makes its first appearance in written records, in Mesopotamia during the third millennium B.C.E., that society already had a sophisticated financial structure in place, and merchants were using silver as a standard of value to balance their accounts. But cash was still not widely used.


It’s really in the seventh century B.C.E., when the small kingdom of Lydia introduced the world’s first standardized metal coins, that you start to see money being used in a recognizable way. Located in what is now Turkey, Lydia sat on the cusp between the Mediterranean and the Near East, and commerce with foreign travelers was common. And that, it turns out, is just the kind of situation in which money is quite useful. 


To understand why, imagine doing a trade in the absence of money—that is, through barter. (Let’s leave aside the fact that no society has ever relied solely or even largely on barter; it’s still an instructive concept.) The chief problem with barter is what economist William Stanley Jevons called the “double coincidence of wants.” Say you have a bunch of bananas and would like a pair of shoes; it’s not enough to find someone who has some shoes or someone who wants some bananas. To make the trade, you need to find someone who has shoes he’s willing to trade and wants bananas. That’s a tough task. 


With a common currency, though, the task becomes easy: You just sell your bananas to someone in exchange for money, with which you then buy shoes from someone else. And if, as in Lydia, you have foreigners from whom you’d like to buy or to whom you’d like to sell, having a common medium of exchange is obviously valuable. That is, money is especially useful when dealing with people you don’t know and may never see again.


If we see something that’s new and we like it, we’ll take it. I don’t ever want to see a reinterpretation of anything, it doesn’t interest me. We buy very much on the front foot and that’s the way we have and always will buy.

It’s like anything - good things don’t just fall on your lap. We are curious enough to go out and search for what we sell and if people want to experience what we’ve got they are more than welcome but they need to put in a bit of effort in also.

-John Skelton, LN-CC

I realized why I need to start a new company. Not for the money. Not because I’m ‘bored’. But because a company is a laboratory to try your ideas.Derek Sivers on Why You Need Your Own Company

HOW TO FAIL BY MARK PINCUS →

I’m sometimes called a serial entrepreneur, but that’s only because, before Zynga (ZNGA), I failed to create a sustainable company. After starting two companies in the ’90s, I had a social networking startup, Tribe.net, in 2003. One of the things I try to instill at Zynga is to fail fast, look at the data, and move on, and at Tribe I failed to do that. We came up with ideas purely based on intuition, and it could take us three to six months to build it and launch. Those bullets were expensive, and many of them were not on target. Tribe reached the point where the investors literally gave up, resigned from the board, and walked away. It was just me, my team, and a creditor. We ended up selling the company to Cisco (CSCO) and paying back all that debt.

One thing I learned is that while your vision should never change, you should keep trying different strategies until one works. If you can fine-tune your instinct and have confidence in it, then you can keep taking different bites of the apple and keep approaching the problem in different ways until you get it right. I did that with Tribe, pursuing the social opportunity from multiple angles. I invested in Twitter and Facebook and bought a social networking patent in 2004.

I think failing is the best way to keep you grounded, curious, and humble. Success is dangerous because often you don’t understand why you succeeded. You almost always know why you’ve failed. You have a lot of time to think about it.