Building Principles:

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Building a Personal Monopoly: (thread)

How to combine competence, curiosity, and character to create a category of one.

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1/ Competence

If we want anyone to spend their time, attention or money on anything of ours, we must first be competent.

Lots of people are competent, so there's lots of competition here.

Let's say this is "school teachers"

2/ Competence + Curiosity

If we add curiosity to the mix, competition starts to thin.

This separates the generalist practitioners from the irrationally passionate.

Let's say this is "school teachers who are curious about learning innovation"

3/ Competence + Curiosity + Character

Now combinatorics put us in category of one territory.

Let's say this is "school teachers who are curious about learning innovation, building a gamified school inspired by SpaceX's Ad Astra." (real example: @anafabrega11)

4/ Making it Tangible

All this is great until it comes to communicating it to the rest of the world.

Which is why bad packaging kills amazing ideas.

Writing, design, marketing — our job here is to lose as little as possible in translation from the intangible to the tangible.

Hindsight in 2020: (10 thoughts)

Relationships > everything:

My relationship with @celiapreihs is the foundation of all the good things in my life, and has amplified the quality of hundreds of relationships with people I've got to know and learn from this year.

Shiny objects make us duller:

The grass is always greener until you're standing on it. "No" is still the highest ROI word in my vocabulary.

The internet is very, very big:

Make something work for one person (could also be yourself), then work on distribution.

Scale is seductive but you can't get it if you don't have something people want.

You can't please everyone:

If you could, there would be no point anyway - it's tough when someone doesn't love your work but it's how markets function.

The blows hit harder in the early rounds, just keep getting up.

10 ideas that changed my life: (thread)

Illustrations by @visualizevalue.

1/ Get more done by doing less.

2/ You can't get better unless you get started.

3/ Zoom out. It's getting better. (IP via @behaviorgap)

4/ 'Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.' — Charles Addams

Circle of Competence 101:

@SahilBloom x @jackbutcher

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1/

A Circle of Competence is the set of topic areas that align with a person's expertise.

If the entire world of information were to be expressed in a circle, an individual's Circle of Competence is the small sub-circle that represents their expertise.

2/

The idea surfaced in the 1996 BH annual letter.

"You don’t have to be an expert on every company...you only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital."

3/

A Circle of Competence is built over time.

It is built through experience, reading, dedicated study, and effort.

It is dynamic, not static.

It can expand as you deepen your knowledge in new areas. It can contract if you fail to nurture your existing areas of expertise.

4/

To engage this mental model in your life, there are two key processes to go through:

(1) Identify what falls within your circle
(2) Identify the boundaries of your circle

(1) is all about figuring out what you know, while (2) is about humbly admitting what you don’t.

Why you need to be selfish: (thread)

I have had countless conversations with people looking for a way to build a brand/audience/community online.

Here's the one thing I think everyone asking that question should be thinking about.

You need to be selfish.

Why?

Because (at a high level) if it helps you, it will eventually help others.

At a tactical level, it's provides the motivation to keep going.

The lack of instant feedback on what we share publically is enough to extinguish most projects before they even get moving.

But allow me to reframe the idea:

You need to do things that benefit you even if no one sees them.

Did posting @visualizevalue images into a void 18 months ago do anything for my career as a designer?

Yes.

Would I have kept going if there wasn't some selfish drive to be more competent? (and make more money, work with better clients, etc)

No.

If you missed @clare_liguori's Continuous Delivery session this week (like I did) then good news, it's available on-demand now 🎊

https://t.co/78b8sI2hHs

And here's my play-by-play for the session

🧵...

This is a typical CD pipeline in AWS.

This is far more complex than the most complex CD pipeline I have ever had! Just cos it's complex, doesn't mean it's over-engineered though. Given the blast radius, I'm glad they do releases carefully and safely.

If you look closely, beyond all the alpha, beta, gamma environments, it's one-box in a region first then the rest of the region, I assume starting with the least risky regions first.

For anyone thinking about going multi-region (after the recent Kinesis outage), this is one of the complexities you need to consider. To do multi-region right and deploy safely (minimize blast radius), this is one of the complexities you have to factor in.

This "deploy small at first then more broadly" principle applies to #serverless apps too, though you can't "deploy to one box". You can do it with canary deployments instead, CodeDeploy supports this practice for Lambda (using weighted aliases) out-of-the-box.

Facebook -- having taken out full-page ads in the NYT, Washington Post, and WSJ -- is generally seen as the primary victim of the new app privacy controls coming in iOS14. But Google is perhaps even more vulnerable to ATT. Why has Google remained silent? (1/X)

2/ First, background: here's a high-level overview of how ATT / IDFA deprecation impacts advertisers and ad networks, and why this whole ordeal has put advertisers and ad networks into a state of panic:

3/ Google is equally as susceptible to harm from ATT as Facebook. Google's UAC product -- esp its tROAS and tCPA campaign objectives -- relies as much on IDFA-indexed monetization and engagement data as FB's mobile product does. But Google has one big weakness wrt ATT: YouTube

4/ Broadly, view-through attribution accounts for a disproportionate % of conversions from YouTube app install impressions. This means: user sees the YT ad, doesnt click, downloads app later, & Google is able to claim it by reconciling IDFA seen at impression to IDFA seen in app

5/ View-through attribution is nonexistent in the ATT paradigm as it relies on the IDFA; some significant portion of YT's attributed conversions will evaporate. So why isnt Google vocally opposing ATT? Two reasons: consumer optics and its duality as ad network / mobile platform

Infrastructure review #rc3

There were only 18 heralds for all the talks. It was really hard to pull off, this conference also started a news show. #rc3

Next is the heaven team. 1487 total angels volunteered of which 710 arrived. 76 weeks worth of work hours were done by the angels. They prepared a few goodies for the RC3 world. Badges were given to show angels. Tried to keep traditions from the conference on RC3 world. #rc3

Huge thanks to all the angels who volunteered. This conference would not be possible with the help of everyone. #rc3

Next team is the signal angels, this is the first time that people had to do remote Q&A. The procedure was quite different to the in person event. There were 157 shifts filled by 61 angels. There were 5 unfilled shifts. #rc3

1. in the beginning, browsers didn't have download statusbars
2. firefox got a browser statusbar extension. it was configurable and worked well
3. chrome cloned it without options and it didn't work as well

4. firefox realized chrome was faster and more secure at everything and therefore dropped extensions
5. now firefox doesn't have a download statusbar either

6. someone reimplements download statusbars in firefox's new web-extensions format. it's terrible because of the inherent limitations of the significantly less flexible and powerful extension format

7. CHROME WINS! (with its terrible download statusbar implementation which can't be fixed by users, because No Options and No Skins and No Extensions)

this is where we are now