Words to work by

Company values and culture from Netflix:

Culture

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Brilliant perspective on investing

If you invest in a risky asset class like stocks, your portfolio will nearly always be worth less than it was at some point in the past.

(emphasis his)

Also:

He doesn’t seem remotely interested in the amount he has accumulated over the course of his 20 years at the WSJ: instead, he’s only interested in the difference between that amount and its mark-to-market value on a certain date chosen to make him feel as miserable as possible.

The whole thing.

Solve your problems as they appear

From an insightful blog post:

The problem is that we’re surrounded with information that confirms the threats we recognize. There are all those competitors that flubbed it because their engineers weren’t as smart. They got themselves Techcrunched and crashed under the pressure. Or they had some great feature but made it too hard to use.

The flaw in this sample, though, is its survivorship bias. The failures we hear about represent only failures big enough to get mentioned in the news. The more common failure might be the two guys in their garage that never manage to get out of their garage. Or the group of smart engineers that spend too much time working on the problems that are amenable to good code rather than the problems that end up being important to users. Or to the people who would have been users if you had actually done something they cared about!

Availability cascade

What an interesting concept, and a great name for it:

An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception of increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse. The driving mechanism involves a combination of informational and reputational motives: Individuals endorse the perception partly by learning from the apparent beliefs of others and partly by distorting their public responses in the interest of maintaining social acceptance. Availability entrepreneurs - activists who manipulate the content of public discourse - strive to trigger availability cascades likely to advance their agendas. Their availability campaigns may yield social benefits, but sometimes they bring harm, which suggests a need for safeguards. Focusing on the role of mass pressures in the regulation of risks associated with production, consumption, and the environment, Professor Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein analyze availability cascades and suggest reforms to alleviate their potential hazards. Their proposals include new governmental structures designed to give civil servants better insulation against mass demands for regulatory change and an easily accessible scientific database to reduce people's dependence on popular (mis)perceptions.

Source (yeah, I only read the abstract)

It's easy to call a bottom in the stock market...

... but what does that really mean?

Some days matter more than others

You've probably seen statements like "most of the gains on stocks in 2005 game on 4 days." No? Ok, then look here (it's in Part III). That's not the point of this post or that guy's post. Instead:

Guys, remember that time when you were 24 and you were on the subway, and you saw that girl with the glasses reading a book wearing a black leather coat, and you were obsessing over whether to go up to her or not but then your stop came, and you were like, screw it, she'll probably mace me, so you got off and went to the library to study for your chem exam?

You chose wrong.

Most days are like other days. A few days are different. Those days have the potential to be the best days of your life. You won't know when those days are coming, but after they happen, you'll recognize them. A chance encounter. A surprising conversation. Those few days can change your life, but you have to be ready for it. If you don't take chances, you won't take the chance that will change your life.

Is the panic over?

Maybe the panic is over, but...

"Do not confuse this moment of calm with a stock market bottom or a sign that a serious recession has been avoided."

"Put another way, we didn't just have a housing bubble and a corporate takeover bubble and a consumer credit bubble and a commodities bubble. In time, those asset bubbles led to the creation of a bubble economy, with too many airplanes and restaurant seats and hotel rooms, too many office buildings and shopping centers, too many investment banks and media outlets dependent on advertising revenue from car companies producing too many cars and home builders producing too many houses. Shrinking all that back to the right size is what the coming recession is all about."

source

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

Universities exist to make minds, not careers. At present, they can foster a sense of entitlement, insularity, and narrow-mindedness.
A quote:

Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it's almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it's even there.