Venkatesh Rao on Dan Pink's book Drive about Extrinsic vs Intrinsic Motivation. I do wish though, that the book had dived into the why more deeply. The “Seven Deadly Flaws,” like I said, are merely a succinct restatement of the empirical results. They do not constitute an analysis. Neither does the SDT (Self Determination Theory) idea (which seems vaguely like Maslow in a new package). The book moves a little too rapidly from diagnosis to prescription. The prescription is based on an extrapolation from “carrots and sticks are bad” to “goals are bad,” a stronger assertion that I happen to agree with. But the incomplete diagnosis leads to problems at this point: we get a prescription based on the idea of “Purpose,” a close cousin of “goal” which I don’t think gets us anywhere. Purposes are merely somewhat softer and more abstract goals that sound more lofty and noble and suggest a hint of religion (as in the Christian bestseller, “The Purpose-Driven Life”). It’s just holy carrots and sticks or “mission statements” and “values.”... My theory is that adult drive is nothing more than comprehensively hooked childish curiosity that has led play down an interesting rabbit hole (or a virtuous spiral), so we end up putting in Ten K Hours of Ericssonian Deliberate Practice and turning into driven adults, Passionate about chemistry or steam engines or whatever. This argument is present in the book, but buried and lost among many other narrative threads. It should have been front-and-center. (more)

Flemming Funch excerpts Kevin Kelly review of Art And Fear (ISBN:0961454733 ). the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. Worse Is Better to Jump Start/BootStrap an Iterative process. (more)

Patima Tantiprasut: The full stack product manager. There are probably two types of devs. Those who’ve worked with excellent Product Managers, and everyone else. (more)

Will Crichton: The Future of Notebooks: Lessons from JupyterCon (more)

cf Real-Time

One day pseudo-conference run by Pando.com. (more)

John Cutler: 4 Prioritization (Prioritize) Lessons (using Cost of Delay and CD3) Cost of Delay divided by the expected number of periods until completion.... Lesson #1: For the “most valuable stuff”, duration probably doesn’t matter as much as you think. Your focus should be on trying to incrementally exploit the opportunity. Don’t waste time prematurely converging on a design/plan for the purpose of providing a more accurate estimate. Experiment quickly to “prove out” that estimate of High Value. (more)

Mark Carranza has been keeping a list of his ideas since 1984 (PIM). His list has more than a million entries, with more than 7 million connections between entries... His program is DOS software, last updated in 1992. MX stands for memory experiment, but if you say these letters again and again you will notice another allusion (Memex). Any element in a list of thoughts can be associated with any other element. “I use it as a thought tool,” Mark says. http://quantifiedself.com/2009/09/the-social-memex/ (more)

If you can get 1000 fans to pay you $100/yr, then you make $100k/yr doing your art. The new Brand You? (more)

John Kelly and Camille François: This is what filter bubbles actually look like. In this Twitter map (below) of the US political landscape, accounts that follow one another are clustered together, and they are color-coded by the kinds of content they commonly share. At first glance, it might seem reassuring: although there are clear echo chambers, there is also an intertwined network of elected officials, the press, and political and policy professionals. There are extremes, but they are mediated through a robust middle. (more)

Chris Jones: Favorite Product Manager Interview Question vs 2017-03-21-CaganMyFavoritePmInterviewQuestion. (more)

chairman of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, and subsequently as the chief economist of the World Bank during the East Asian financial crisis... winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics (more)

see Chaos Theory

deals with the behavior of certain nonlinear Dynamical Systems that (under certain conditions) exhibit the phenomenon known as chaos, most famously characterised by sensitivity to initial conditions (see butterfly effect). (more)

Get a random pick of Oblique Strategies, from Brian Eno (more)

cf Thinking Tools

Piotr Wozniak's Super Memo program helps you practice/retain information you want to remember/learn at the optimal interval. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains. But for Wozniak, 46, helping people learn a foreign language fast is just the tiniest part of his goal. As we plan the days, weeks, even years of our lives, he would have us rely not merely on our traditional sources of self-knowledge - introspection, intuition, and conscious thought - but also on something new: predictions about ourselves encoded in machines... Given the chance to observe our behaviors (Life Streaming), computers can run Simulation-s, modeling different versions of our path through the world. By tuning these models for top performance, computers will give us rules to live by. They will be able to tell us when to wake, sleep, learn, and exercise; they will cue us to remember what we've read, help us track whom we've met, and remind us of our goals. Computers, in Wozniak's scheme, will increase our intellectual capacity and enhance our rational Self Control... "The people who criticize memorization - how happy would they be to spell out every letter of every word they read?" asks Robert Bjork, chair of UCLA's psychology department and one of the most eminent memory researchers. After all, Bjork notes, children learn to read whole words through intense practice, and every time we enter a new field we become children again. "You can't escape memorization," he says. "There is an initial process of learning the names of things. That's a stage we all go through. It's all the more important to go through it rapidly." The human brain is a marvel of Associative processing, but in order to make associations, data must be loaded into memory. Personal Development (more)

Ethan Bernstein: Collaborate on complex problems, but only intermittently (more)

John Cutler: Not Leadership “Material”... Sound familiar? We need our people to be brave! We need leaders, not followers! (more)

Ian Mitchell on Projects and Products in Scrum. Agile coaching is a journey into irony. One of the chief discoveries you can make on this voyage is that the more experienced you become, the worse at the job others often think you get. (Agile Product Development) (more)