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10-Mar10


Failure is success if we learn from it.

- Malcolm S. Forbes
11:47 pm, by abeshafi
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10-Mar10

“Failure” is a dirty word

but that’s because we don’t see it as a way station on the path to success.

- In his 2005 book, “Born Losers: A History of Failure in America,” the historian Scott Sandage offers an account of 19th-century economic hardships and the pitiable archetype they gave birth to: the dismal “plodder,” the man who was a “failure.”  To make the loser feel even worse about himself, his glorious antithesis — the striver, the up-and-comer — was being defined at the same time. Writers promoting the secrets of success in the rough game of industrial capitalism rendered a verdict on economic failure that still endures: it’s never an accident. The success people have is determined by who they are — or rather, by who they aren’t — and not by circumstances.  More Than a Numbers Game, By Walter Kirn, NY Times Magazine, 10 May2009

11:41 pm, by abeshafi
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10-Mar10


hiten:

Slides from my talk at Steve Blank and Eric Ries’s Customer and Business Development MBA Class at Berkeley - Metrics for Startup Success and Failure

5:36 pm, reblogged by abeshafi
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09-Mar10


Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in our marching onward.

- Henry Ford (via hiten)
10:41 pm, reblogged by abeshafi
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09-Mar10

7:09 pm, reblogged by abeshafi
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09-Mar10

The Psychology of the Taboo Tradeoff: Surprising insights into “sacred values” and what they mean for negotiation (Scientific American)

psychotherapy:

What truly distinguishes sacred values from secular ones is how people behave when asked to compromise them. When people are asked to trade their sacred values for values considered to be secular—what psychologist Philip Tetlock refers to as a “taboo tradeoff”—they exhibit moral outrage, express anger and disgust, become increasingly inflexible in negotiations, and display an insensitivity to a strict cost-benefit analysis of the exchange. What’s more, when people receive monetary offers for relinquishing a sacred value, they display a particularly striking irrationality. Not only are people unwilling to compromise sacred values for money—contrary to classic economic theory’s assumption that financial incentives motivate behavior—but the inclusion of money in an offer produces a backfire effect such that people become even less likely to give up their sacred values compared to when an offer does not include money. People consider trading sacred values for money so morally reprehensible that they recoil at such proposals…

4:05 pm, reblogged by abeshafi
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09-Mar10

Be Sad and Succeed

psychotherapy:

Next time you find yourself in a bad mood, don’t try to put on a happy face—instead tackle a project that has been stymieing you. Melancholy might just help you hit peak performance, reports Joseph Forgas, a professor of psychology at the University of New South Wales, in the journal Australasian Science. Forgas reviewed several of his studies in which researchers induced either a good or bad mood in volunteers. Each study found that people in a bad mood performed tasks better than those in a good mood. Grumpy people paid closer attention to details, showed less gullibility, were less prone to errors of judgment and formed higher-quality, persuasive arguments than their happy counterparts. One study even supports the notion that those who show signs of either fear, anger, disgust or sadness—the four basic negative emotions—achieve stronger eyewitness recall while virtually eliminating the effect of misinformation…

2:56 pm, reblogged by abeshafi
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09-Mar10


The Internet is no topic like cellphones or videogame platforms or artificial intelligence; it’s a topic like education. It’s that big. Therefore beware: to become a teacher, master some topic you can teach; don’t go to Education School and master nothing. To work on the Internet, master some part of the Internet: engineering, software, computer science, communication theory; economics or business; literature or design. Don’t go to Internet School and master nothing. There are brilliant, admirable people at Internet institutes. But if these institutes have the same effect on the Internet that education schools have had on education, they will be a disaster.

- TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY- David Gelernter
12:36 pm, by abeshafi
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09-Mar10


If we think of time as orthogonal to space, a stream-based, time-based Cybersphere is the traditional Internet flipped on its side in digital space-time.

- TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY- David Gelernter
12:24 pm, by abeshafi
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09-Mar10


There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it’s obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order — putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it’s easy to blend any group of streams, it’s easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for “snow” means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn’t deal with snow. Subtracting the “not snow” stream from the mainstream yields a “snow” stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.

- TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY- David Gelernter
12:22 pm, by abeshafi
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