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

This is the blueprint I've followed to build my own business/income in ~4 years. This is how I learned to make websites + apps, learned SEO, learned how to write well, and how to grow my SaaS product.

👇

Get your time right by eliminating most entertainment and leisure.

Produce (work) more than you consume (watch/read/listen to entertainment).

Work intentionally, have fun intentionally, create a balance that you control. Free up a few (3-4) hours a day.

Use that new time to build new skills + knowledge by doing work for free for other people.

Do free work that helps save them time, make them money, or save them money (things that people will pay for).

Do a bit every day. Because it's free, there's less pressure to perform

Enhance learning by purchasing courses, reading books, and taking action to learn those skills by applying them to the free work you're doing.

Figure out what you like to do and what you don't like to do (do more of what you like to do and less of what you don't).

Figure out what works and what doesn't work (there's definitely a lot of advice out there that doesn't work or is contextual to the environment it works in).

There's a huge gap between what climate scientists are willing to say privately and what we're willing to say publicly, in terms of how dire a situation we're in. Colleagues, integrity demands we close this gap.

In the passion economy, the real risk is that your job has to earn a living and meet the needs of your soul.

Six questions to consider if you’re thinking of leaving your job to pursue your passion.

A thread 👇🏽

1/ Will you use this opportunity to grow and evolve or will you use it to beat yourself up?  

The best way to control your emotional capital is to fine tune your internal monologue and replace your hunger for approval with a desire to grow.

2/ How will you avoid insecurity work? 

Insecurity work doesn't move the ball forward, but you can do it multiple times a day without realizing.

Deep work requires being unencumbered by the day to day.

Your objective is to ride the waves of your business with serenity.

3/ Can you learn to enjoy the process as the end in itself?

You have to fight the temptation to strip the future of its surprises.

4/ Will you default to the norms of your industry, or will you be original? 

Your business exists in the context of a marketplace, but also in the context of your life.

You have to be willing to overcome the defaults and orient your business around the things that define you.

Tired of word clouds? Want to do better sentiment analysis? Not sure how to look at the words underneath your measures?

Our long overdue paper on generalized word shift graphs is finally here!
https://t.co/lIBXvbMJWX
https://t.co/vSL1REYT8V

So what are they?

1/n

If we have two texts, there are many ways we can compare them. Weighted averages are a particularly useful measure because they're flexible and interpretable

Proportions, Shannon entropy, the KLD, the JSD, and dictionary methods can all be written as weighted averages

2/n

But weighted avgs are also slippery. When we try to compress complex phenomena like happiness, surprise, divergence, or diversity into a single number, it can be unclear what we're measuring

If the measure goes up, what does that mean? Why did it do that? Can we trust it?

3/n

Very often, that's the end of the line and we're left with an uneasy feeling in the pit of our stomach that our weighted avg is actually picking up a data artifact or some other unintended peculiarity

Word shift graphs help us address those concerns

4/n

First, word shifts look under the hood of weighted averages to see what's going on

All weighted averages are a sum of contributions from individual words. We can pull out those words, and rank which ones contribute the most to the difference between two texts

5/n

Cancel culture is real.

But what distinguishes legitimate criticism from an illegitimate attempt to cancel someone?

@Jon_Rauch offers what is, to my mind, the best explanation anyone has come up with so far.

It should become the

There isn't a single characteristic that all attempts at cancelation share.

So instead of a litmus test, we need a checklist of warning signs. The more signs you see, the more certain you can be that you are looking at a cancel campaign.

Here are the six most important.

1) Punitiveness

Are people denouncing you to your employer or your social connections?

Are you being blacklisted from jobs and social opportunities?

Does what is being said to or about you have the goal—or foreseeable effect—of jeopardizing your livelihood?

A critical culture seeks to correct rather than punish. In science, the only penalty for being wrong is that you lose the argument.

Canceling, by contrast, seeks to punish rather than correct. The point is to make the errant suffer.

2) Deplatforming

Are campaigners attempting to prevent you from publishing your work, giving speeches or attending meetings?

Are they claiming that allowing you to be heard is violence against them or makes them unsafe?