Friday’s Finds

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@Tom_Peters: “Average unicorn coder’s goal today: Destroy my privacy to sell me more crap so that founders can add another billion to their net worth … Make no mistake: Google’s animating goal is to destroy my privacy by knowing more about me than I do. The rest is details.”

@dria: “Search results are decreasingly reliable because of SEO polluting top results with junk. I’m going directly to known-good sites more & more.”

Why Theater Majors Are Vital in the Digital Age via @CreatvEmergence

“The aptitude called ‘foresight’, which is the talent to envision many possible outcomes or possibilities, was present in all theater workers (playwrights, directors, designers, actors). When actors try out various line readings or interpretations of a scene, when they improvise or create backstory, they are using foresight … But foresight would be impossible without empathy. The actor’s ability to envision multiple outcomes or motivations in a play must be based on the character’s circumstances, not the actor’s.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.” ― Leonardo da Vinci, via @gfbertini

“Millennials: the landless peasants the founders warned each other would happen.” – @girlziplocked

“Blessed are the weird people …  for they teach us to see the world through different eyes.” – @JacobNorby

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@Goonth – “Our so-called leaders will not create our futures for us. That is entirely up to us. Nothing to concede.”

8 Symptoms Of Organizations On The Cusp Of Change by @MarkRaheja

“In theory, organizations are meant to enable us — to make us faster, stronger and more effective than we’d be on our own. And yet today, in listening to my clients, it feels as if the exact opposite is true — as if the organization is actually getting in their way. The symptoms of this are many and may sound familiar: Siloed teams with misaligned incentives; bureaucratic processes governed by inflexible policies; paralyzed decision-making strewn across way too many meetings. The list goes on.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@girlziplocked – “The current economy has no place for intellectuals and is desperate to make entrepreneurs the socially recognized genius.”

@matthewsyed – “It is partly because we are so willing to blame others for their mistakes that we are so keen to conceal our own.”

@atduskgreg – “Machine learning is automated bureaucracy. It spits back the systemic biases we feed it in feature vectors, training sets, reward functions.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” – John F. Kennedy – via @AdriaanG_LP

@Tom_Peters: “Presidents rarely get good advice. Every “presenter” presents a totally biased solution–often suppressing competing evidence.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“We should discriminate in the sharpest way between fortunes well won and fortunes ill won; between those gained as an incident to performing great services to the community as a whole and those gained in evil fashion by keeping just within the limits of mere law honesty. Of course, no amount of charity in spending such fortunes in any way compensates for misconduct in making them.” – Theodore Roosevelt, 1906

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@kasthomas – “You have to wonder what happens to ‘official’ unemployment numbers when everyone has two jobs. Do they go negative?”

@kerihw – “How department names change over time: Personnel > Human Resources > Sentient Assets > Flesh Liabilities”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” – Henry David Thoreau – via @dennisdenktmee

@hvaelama – “get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction.”

@monkchips – “holacracy is Greek for bullshit, right?”

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Every second Friday I review what I’ve noted on social media and post a wrap-up of what caught my eye. I do this as a reflective thinking process and to put what I’ve learned on a platform I control: this blog. Here are what I consider the best of Friday’s Finds for 2015.

Quotes

“All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” – Friedrich Nietzsche – via @surreallyno

@ericgarland – “Humility is often painful, but arrogance is always fatal.”

@willrich45 – Engagement: “Not a metric for learning. A prerequisite.”

“I think it’s a discovery all artists make: the most interesting and bravest work is likely the hardest to make a living from.” – @berkun

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”  — Upton Sinclair – via @jerrymichalski

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Mastery is not referred to the use of any tool. It is a state of the person. And then it permeates the use of *any* tool.” – Stelio Verzera

How You Record Ideas May Impact Creativity, via @madelynblair

“As one of our architect users put it in an interview we conducted recently on the value of drawing in the digital age, “When you build a lot of buildings, and you go and visit them, you always think back on that first sketch. Those first few sketches are where the big idea came through.” We found over and over that the act of using sketching as “conversational as opposed to representational,” in the words of another architect, was the key to discovery—when the act of drawing is a means to an end, not the end in and of itself. Through sketching, you locate the idea. Uninhibited sketching is Beethoven’s long walk.”

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