Timeless Wisdom / How to Speak
I'm ignoring the SBF/Crypto and Twitter turmoil
Can you recognize a hype cycle? A media-driven “tizzy”? I love shiny objects as much as the next strategist, but I’ve been working hard to look away from the recent FTX/SBF/Crypto meltdown. And, who doesn’t enjoy a little schadenfreude every once in a while? But I’m skipping the the Twitter/Musk doom watch. I am trying to point what’s left of my post-covid brain at the stuff that really matters.
In the end, our attention and focus are all that we have and I’ve given too much of it away over the years.
Timeless Wisdom Collection
10 years from now, my kids are not going to be talking about Musk’s first month as owner of Twitter. They will talk about FTX the way X’ers talk about Enron, but SBF might be remembered only by those that lost a boatload of money (quick: can you name the CEO of Enron).
Culture will move on and another grifter will take center stage. If we’re lucky, the lessons will stick, even if the details don’t.
As active participants in online culture we’re getting bathed in hot-takes, snark and half-formed thoughts. As a bulwark, I’ve started to collect links to videos, essays, and stories that are keepers, the ones that might pass the test of time.
How to Speak
Got an hour? Ever wish you could go to an MIT lecture? Here’s your chance. Patrick Winston was an institution at MIT, a place where a Computer Science professor could become a legend. This is a supremely confident talk given by a rare, actual expert in his field but it’s about the most basic thing we all do: Talk and speak, sometimes in front of a room.
What strikes me here is the simplicity and clarity that only comes from experience and repetition and careful attention to craft. Its one of those rare video artifacts that masterfully demonstrates the ideas contained inside.
The part on “getting famous” is especially useful (hint, it’s not really about getting famous).
Ultimately, this talk is really about caring, about putting effort and love into what you’re doing. This is about quality and integrity.
This one goes into my library of stuff I’ll go back to again and again, especially when I’m trying to step out of the latest hype cycle.
sort of related… I go back to this Whitman poem often, when I’m feeling a little overwhelmed by the BS of business, tech, culture etc. Sometimes you just need to get outside.
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.