Tim Molendijk

Shouldn’t you announce your goals, so friends can support you?

Isn’t it good networking to tell people about your upcoming projects?

Doesn’t the “law of attraction” mean you should state your intention, and visualize the goal as already yours?

Nope.

Tests done since 1933 show that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen.

(…)

Once you’ve told people of your intentions, it gives you a “premature sense of completeness.”

You have “identity symbols” in your brain that make your self-image. Since both actions and talk create symbols in your brain, talking satisfies the brain enough that it “neglects the pursuit of further symbols.”

From Shut up! Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them by Derek Sivers.

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On behalf of SmartPR, my software company, I am looking for freelance Python, Django and Linux ninjas for multiple projects during a longer period of time.

Check-out the original and more elaborate inquiry at the SmartPR blog (Dutch).

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Ever have the feeling that science is sort of ‘finished’? This is a nice indication of how little we know:

Quantum mechanics and relativity, our two best theories of how the world works, seem strangely at odds with the world as we experience it - and with each other

From Gravity mysteries: Will we ever have a quantum theory of gravity?

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To discover what comes next, maybe we should look upwards. Skylines provide the simplest test of what a society values, and where its surpluses are controlled. A few centuries ago the greatest buildings in the world’s cities were forts, churches and temples; then for a time they became palaces. Briefly in the 19th century civic buildings, railway stations and museums overshadowed them. And then in the late 20th century everywhere they were banks. Few believe that they will be for much longer. But what will come next—great leisure palaces and sports stadiums; universities and art galleries; water towers and hanging gardens; or perhaps biotech empires? We need to rekindle our capacity to imagine, and to see through the still-gathering storm to what lies beyond.

From After capitalism by Geoff Mulgan in Prospect Magazine.

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Part of what happened over the last 15, 20 years is that so much money was made in finance, that about 40% — I think — of our overall economic growth was in the financial sector. Well, now what we’re finding out is; a lot of that growth wasn’t real. It was paper money, paper profits on the books, but it could be easily wiped out. And what we need is a steady growth. We need young people, instead of [mumbles] a smart kid coming out of school, instead of wanting to be an investment banker, we need them to decide they wanna be an engineer, they wanna be a scientist, they wanna be a doctor or a teacher. And if we’re rewarding those kinds of things that actually contribute to making things and making people’s lives better, that’s gonna put our economy on solid footing. We won’t have this kind of bubble and bust economy that we’ve gotten so caught up in for the last several years.

Barack Obama on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno of March 19 of this year. Click here to see the video, quote starts at around 3:53.

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The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

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Google Street View has been released in The Netherlands. Or, at least some parts of it, including Amsterdam. Like anyone the first I did was checking out my home and my office (and the redlight district).

Turns out my bicycle is at two places at the same time.

Grotere kaart weergeven

Grotere kaart weergeven

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There is no rational way to value an early stage startup. The valuation reflects nothing more than the strength of the company’s bargaining position.

From How to Be an Angel Investor by Paul Graham, who is definitely one of my favorite authors. His writing is like good code: well structured, clear, concise, sober and effective.

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From A conversation with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google by Charlie Rose.

Charlie Rose:
I have a question.
[laughter]
It is this notion of — I was just thinking about this. Technology — are people in technology different?
[laughter]

Eric Schmidt:
Yes.

Charlie Rose:
They are? What is it?

Eric Schmidt:
Technologists as a group tend to be more analytical, more data driven, more personally liberal, more willing to tolerate the differences among people.

Charlie Rose:
Right.

Eric Schmidt:
More global in their focus. And I think that’s across all political parties. People in technology believe that you can create whole new businesses. In my dealings with other businesses, they often seem to be locked in a paradigm that was given to them by their grandfather. You know, this is the economic structure. This is the industrial structure. This is how it’s always been done. Technology as a group, believe that you can literally change the world from technology.

Transcript by TechCrunch.

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Paul Graham gives an intelligent analysis of why diplomas matter less than they used to, why they will even matter less in the coming future, and why this is a good thing. I could not agree more.

Before credentials, government positions were obtained mainly by family influence, if not outright bribery. It was a great step forward to judge people by their performance on a test. But by no means a perfect solution. When you judge people that way, you tend to get cram schools—which they did in Ming China and nineteenth century England just as much as in present day South Korea.

What cram schools are, in effect, is leaks in a seal. The use of credentials was an attempt to seal off the direct transmission of power between generations, and cram schools represent that power finding holes in the seal. Cram schools turn wealth in one generation into credentials in the next.

(…)

Let’s think about what credentials are for. What they are, functionally, is a way of predicting performance. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn’t need them.

So why did they even evolve? Why haven’t we just been measuring actual performance? Think about where credentialism first appeared: in selecting candidates for large organizations. Individual performance is hard to measure in large organizations, and the harder performance is to measure, the more important it is to predict it. If an organization could immediately and cheaply measure the performance of recruits, they wouldn’t need to examine their credentials. They could take everyone and keep just the good ones.

(…)

Credentials are a step beyond bribery and influence. But they’re not the final step. There’s an even better way to block the transmission of power between generations: to encourage the trend toward an economy made of more, smaller units. Then you can measure what credentials merely predict.

(…)

The era of credentials began to end when the power of large organizations peaked in the late twentieth century. Now we seem to be entering a new era based on measurement. The reason the new model has advanced so rapidly is that it works so much better. It shows no sign of slowing.

The full essay can be found here.

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