October Reading Roundup
What I’m Reading:
Marc Andreessen On Productivity, Scheduling, Reading Habits, Work, and More
a16z.com/2020/09/07/on-productivity-scheduling-reading-habits-marc-andreessen/
We had decided one of the values of the firm is respect for the people we work with. And part of that respect is — we don’t drop balls. We respond quickly and we have SLAs on getting back to people in a specific period of time. We use the old JP Morgan saying of “first class business in a first class way”. If you contact us, you’re going to get a response. If we commit to doing something, we’re going to do that thing.
Full calendar vs open time:
Executives who have full calendars have no room to adjust for changing circumstances.
Link to Whiplash: Resilience vs Strength: A fully planned out calendar might appear strong however as soon as something needs to change the inability to reschedule without causing havoc means the systems breaks down. Strong oak tree is initially strong compared to dune grass which bends and then straightens out again.
So basically, there’s two kinds of projects. Apple has this concept they call the directly responsible individual, the D.R.I. For any project, I’ve tried to identify the DRI. Who is the person responsible for delivering the project? If that’s me, then the project itself gets on my calendar. If it doesn’t go on the calendar, it is not getting done. The weekly check in is for all the projects other people are responsible for.
I would never be a professional gambler but one of the things you find about professional gamblers — they may play poker at night but what they do during the day is they hang out together and they make side bets for large amounts of money. And it’s literally a side bet of sitting in a diner and betting on whether there are going to be more red cars than blue cars passing by. What they’re doing is “steeling” their own psychology to be able to pull the trigger on bets like that with a purely mathematical lens and with no emotion whatsoever. They’re trying to steel themselves to be able to be completely clinical.And so as contrast, what they then hope for that night when they sit across the table from someone is to hope they’re dealing with somebody who’s super emotional. Because the clinical person is going to just slaughter the emotional person.
It’s this weird thing where it’s the kind of activity that should result in these wild highs and lows but the true pros are just indifferent. They don’t care because it’s a probabilistic outcome.
The thing I’ve tried to do the last few years is really “barbell” the inputs. I basically read things that are either up to this minute or things that are timeless–
I am a deep believer in — after learning a lot over the years about economic history and of cultural history — that technology really is the driver. There were basically millennia of just subsistence farming industry and all of a sudden, there was this vertical takeoff a few hundred years ago. And quality of life exploded around the world. Not evenly but starting in Europe and expanding out. It’s basically all technology. It’s always the printing press, it’s the internet and on and on. And you get this incredible upward trajectory. We have the potential over the course of the next century or over the next few centuries to really dramatically advance and have life be better for virtually everybody. Technology is quite literally the lever for being able to take natural resources and able to make something better out of them.