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- 2015.10.05 - One of the interesting things I'm noticing about working remotely every day is that it's giving me practice at being productive without having the normal cues around me (like having my boss right next to me). This is making me wonder if the kind of freelancing that Ev Williams was doing before / while he started Blogger gave him some useful training that helped him be productive once he was on his own.
- You're going to have to be good at what you're doing, but you may not have to be a world-class expert [although that certainly seems to help a lot]. You may be able to find others who are really good at things that you are just OK at.
Examples:
- Mark Zuckerberg was a good programmer but not a world-class expert.
- Eminem was probably a good rapper before he teamed up with the Bass brothers but I have a feeling they may have contributed a lot to his style.
- George Lucas was a good director when he started making Star Wars but the final product was largely a result of the amazing team he had assembled.
- Stephen Bax, who seems to have made great progress decoding the Voynich Manuscript (a mysterious book written in an unknown language) had obviously spent many years learning many different languages and the history of different civilizations before he was able to solve the problem of decoding the manuscript. Watch his presentation and think about what kind of background knowledge he would have needed to make the intellectual leaps he makes:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpZD_3D8_WQ. For example, he knew how Hieroglyphics and Linear B had been decoded, and he knew that many ancient languages had very similar ways of saying the same word (like the names of plants), and he knew about the research that other academics had done on the book, like identifying the different plants it showed. That kind of knowledge takes years of work.
- Henry Ford:
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