Letters Remain

Tag: entrepreneurship

  • Apple’s Strategy of Rejecting ‘Social Media’

    Apple’s ‘rejection’ of the practices pundits “always say you should do to succeed in the Internet economy” isn’t unique, but it does make for interesting reading: Apple doesn’t blog; it doesn’t Tweet; it does little on Facebook; it doesn’t engage with its customer base. It doesn’t ask the “community” for feedback or rapidly iterate based…

  • Sugar Ray Robinson and Self-Reliance

    In Intelligent Life‘s review of Sweet Thunder, a Sugar Ray Robinson biography, they discuss Sugar Ray’s entrepreneurial spirit and tenacity in keeping control over his own business and brand. Robinson was savvy. He was the first black athlete to own most of the rights to his fights and to negotiate broadcasting deals on radio and…

  • Fixed-Schedule Productivity: Fix the Schedule, Don’t Compromise

    In a guest post for I Will Teach You To Be Rich, Cal Newport of Study Hacks discusses fixed-schedule productivity: a productivity system whereby you set a schedule of work (and play) between certain hours and stick to it ruthlessly. Tim Ferriss aficionados will note that this system relies on a premise that Ferriss heavily depends…

  • Anti-Patterns

    I’ve written about design patterns a couple of times in the past, but today I discovered anti-patterns: design patterns that “may be commonly used but [are] ineffective and/or counterproductive in practice”. One of the “key elements present to formally distinguish an actual anti-pattern from a simple bad habit, bad practice, or bad idea”: Some repeated…

  • The 50th Law

    Power is greater than happiness, contends Robert Greene in an online discussion with Eliezer Yudkowsky about Fear, Power and Mortality (quality summary thereof), as happiness is fleeting and unremitting. Also discussed in this conversation is strategist Robert Greene’s latest book, The 50th Law: 10 Lessons in Fearlessness, which is the result of an unlikely collaboration with hip…

  • Overcoming Network Effects

    A network effect is “the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people”. When there is a positive network effect we say that the good or service in question increases in usefulness the more users there are, like the telephone or online social networks. Of course, being in…

  • Online Dating and OkCupid

    OkCupid, one of the biggest online dating websites around, has had a bit of an up and down history. Originally called SparkMatch, itself a by-product of the once popular TheSpark, the site was one of the first completely free dating websites that now abound online. Inc. Magazine looks at the history of OkCupid—it’s struggles and…

  • Entrepreneurial Reads and Annual Reads

    I’m a real sucker for book lists. Entrepreneurial Reads is a wiki list of suggested reading for entrepreneurs. The list contains books written specifically for entrepreneurs (e.g. The E-Myth Revisited) in addition to much fiction containing entrepreneurial lessons (e.g. The Fountainhead). That link came via What Books Are Worth Reading Once Per Year?–a post by…

  • The Five Whys

    Five Whys is “a question-asking method used to explore the cause/effect relationships underlying a particular problem. Ultimately, the goal of applying the 5 Whys method is to determine a root cause of a defect or problem”. Developed by Taiichi Ohno–one of the inventors of the Toyota Production System–the oft-cited example is as follows: My car…

  • Graduating into the Recession and What Next

    For recent graduates, those in their early 20’s and, well, almost everyone else, the job market at the moment is overwhelming bad. There’s hope, of course, and this interview between recent graduate and entrepreneur Alex J. Mann and Phila Lawyer discussing what it’s like graduating into one of the nastiest job markets in history is a good…