On June 10, there was a bomb and gun threat at Roosevelt High School here locally in North Seattle. I don’t know much about it, but the folks at my gym were talking about it and saying it was called in from somebody within the school.

I joked about it being finals week (which, it was).

Andy, one of the trainer/owners of the gym then told us a story about the school he went to in the early 2000’s. He went to an American school in a foreign country (I don’t know which). There were 3 total bomb threats called in over a couple of weeks. This being just after September 11, the threats were taken seriously and the kids were evacuated and sent home each time.

The third time, however, the school required all the students to make-up the missed class on a Saturday.

No more bomb threats.

And that’s how incentives work.

I enjoyed this piece in The Atlantic by David Brooks. The idea that there is a whole class of people, who view their life as iterated experiments, may show lower success early in life, but do their life’s work as a “second act,” has great appeal to me, as that feels like the path I am on.

Finally, there are the people Galenson calls “the masters.” In his book
Old Masters and Young Geniuses, he writes about people like Cézanne or Alfred Hitchcock or Charles Darwin, who were not all that successful—and in some cases just not even very good at what they did—when they were young. This could have been discouraging, but they just kept improving.
These people don’t do as much advanced planning as the conceptual geniuses, but they regard their entire lives as experiments. They try something and learn, and then they try something else and learn more. Their focus is not on their finished work, which they often toss away haphazardly. Their focus is on the process of learning itself: 
Am I closer to understanding, to mastering? They live their lives as a long period of trial and error, trying this and trying that, a slow process of accumulation and elaboration, so the quality of their work peaks late in life.

“You Might be a Late Bloomer,” David Brooks

Another compelling line of thought in the article is that the people who earn the rewards of early success, who are rewarded extrinsically, have less opportunity to discover and develop the intrinsic motivation that the late bloomers find rewarding. “A 2009 London School of Economics study that looked at 51 corporate pay-for-performance plans found that financial incentives “can have a negative impact on overall performance.”

I once asked a group of students on their final day at their prestigious university what book had changed their life over the previous four years. A long, awkward silence followed. Finally a student said, “You have to understand, we don’t read like that. We only sample enough of each book to get through class.” These students were hurrying to be good enough to get their merit badges, but not getting deep enough into any subject to be transformed. They didn’t love the process of learning itself, which is what you need if you’re going to keep educating yourself decade after decade—which, in turn, is what you need to keep advancing when the world isn’t rewarding you with impressive grades and prizes.

Intrinsically motivated people, by contrast, are self-directed and often obsessed, burying themselves deep into some subject or task. They find learning about a subject or doing an activity to be their own reward, so they are less likely to cut corners. As Vincent van Gogh—a kind of early late bloomer, who struggled to find his way and didn’t create most of his signature works until the last two years of his life before dying at 37—wrote to his brother, “I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.”

“You Might be a Late Bloomer,” David Brooks

If— 

BY RUDYARD KIPLING

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Source: A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1943)

I love building my business every day. I like to think it i’s because you show up with that craftsman mindset and you get to work on something truly yours each day. Every decision and detail on how you prioritize your time is up to you, with no oversight. It’s at once totally liberating and a gigantic responsibility.

The bear case for Amazon has always been, “well now that they’ve slowed in X vertical,” growth will stall, and investors will run for the exit. It was like this when books were the only thing Amazon sold (we all loved that Amazon.bomb Barron’s article). It was like this when they saturated media sales and then had growing pains in physical retail. Then in soft goods. Now, it’s this way with AWS, advertising, etc. That case is always the same..

As someone who worked at Amazon for most of my career, I am happy to inform you that Amazon is very aware of where their internal growth risk lies and have been years ahead of the curve on it.

And now you have Jassy telling you exactly where that next leg will come from via the Financial Times.

You can’t pretend to be shocked.

When I was a literature major at UCSC, I liked to get up early, go surfing for an hour when the swell was reasonable, and then head up to campus and read at the Kresge Study Center on campus. Most of the time I was the first person into that study room. I’d kick on the heater and pull up a big reading chair next to large panels of glass facing right into a wooded ravine. Many mornings, there’d be mist obscuring the view beyond the first few trees. This would make it easy to lose yourself in whatever I was reading that week. As a literature major, that was always something new.

I’ve been looking for a good photo of that room as it’s been 25+ years since I’ve been there. Unfortunately, all I have found so far is this uninspiring photo from the campus website.

This photo completely fails to do the room justice (although the tie dye does seem spot-on). It looks like it’s been renovated and not necessarily in a way that heightens the natural attributes. Clearly, digital cameras weren’t a thing when I was going to school at UCSC, but I would love an image shot from my reading chair in that room where I’d sit there alone to start the day.

Do you have a special place? One that’s important to you but you haven’t seen in a while?

I would not have believed so much damage could be done in so little time.

Several years ago, I left Facebook and deleted all of my history on the site. That departure was the results of years of poor interactions and/or discoveries, largely from people I know. Deleting my profile and removing myself forever has been a positive experience.

Twitter, on the other hand, is something I have lovingly curated and really enjoyed until very recently. It’s a beautiful hub for the finance industry, in particular, and I have lists of important people that I read for investment and business insights. Not anymore. I removed the app on my phone and tablet. I removed the Twitter link from my business’s website. I’m not deleting my accounts because I think there’s still hope, and I don’t want my Twitter handles to go to any poachers, but I’m done for a while.

It’s clear that Elon has no idea how to manage a social site. Not content to leave well enough and learn, he’s been dedicated to rapidly (sometimes intra-day) implementation of diametrically opposed policies. The policies only make sense when you realize Elon’s creating permissions for people he agrees with and removing permissions for people who disagree with him. Elon’s policy is that “the policy is what I say it is.”

I hope to be back when things stabilize. Until then, I’m going to explore all other alternatives and watch where the smart folks land.