tranchms

Fantastic lite weight client. Perfect for travel and spotty reception/ low bandwidth. Cool interface too.

I wish we could sit down and have a few beers and talk about it. There's a fascinating history and its one of my favorite topics.

We are rediscovering Cybernetics

Love this! Also Big fan of Ben Thompson. Super helpful research tool!

And Energy prices are at an all time high— go figure!

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SEHF01

Matt Prince is a petty little man child.

Email me and I’ll tell you everything you want to know. I’ll share my experiences, all the books, history, biographies, and industry nuances.

I live in Excel. This video was basic. I was hoping for more sophisticated instruction. But from reading the comments, it’s clear I need to learn a data analysis language.

What would you recommend? Python?

I mean, this is not a very convincing study.

State dependent learning is a legitimate phenomenon.

This study didn’t test those who regularly took cognitive enhancers It just looked at people who were not ADHD and then gave them a drug No time to adjust or adapt Would have liked to see four populations tested.

1. unmedicated ADHD 2. medicated ADHD 3. Unmedicated non-ADHD 4. Medicated Non-ADHD

Then do the tests with placebos and cognitive enhancers

If you study for a test on medication you better take the test on medication.

And if you study unmedicated, you better take the test unmedicated I think they should find “non-ADHD” populations who happen to routinely take cognitive enhancers and then perform the same test.

Would be willing to bet that there is an improvement over placebo group vs medicated group in this population

If coffee and nicotine are effective cognitive enhancers for general populations, regardless of ADHD or not, it’s silly to think that stimulants like amphetamines are ineffective

So the research conclusions are flimsy and incomplete

Epstein didn’t kill himself.

Just curious, Do you have kids?

Marry someone you enjoy doing activities with and generally like and respect and admire.

Have lots of kids.

Treat others with kindness and be generous.

$100,000 a month is nothing. That’s like 1-3 full time consultants, at like a $200-600 bill rate.

My current client is spending $300M+ a year on an implementation program, and they are going on their third year with 2-3 more to go.

When I say pay little, they need more people and/or more experienced people to actually get the job done right. But they end up off shoring to teams in India or green consultants with zero industry background and limited experience.

They choose the firm with the most compelling economics, but severely overlook quality. They forget that these are organizational changes that impact humans. That outsourcing to lower skilled or different cultural regions will impact communication and team dynamics and overall ability to get things done properly.

The big consulting firm runs a program/project to deliver a result. Perhaps implement a new business system or technology or integration, optimize or implement a new process, perform some organizational change in the way things are done, etc.

Companies don’t have the skills or experience or expertise or resources or time in-house to do it themselves, so they essentially outsource the initiative or objective to a consulting firm.

It’s seen as less risky to go with name brand big consulting firm. But companies think they can pay little and get a quality delivery team, and the big consulting firms usually find a way to make a profit at the expense of quality by leveraging inexperienced consultants or consultants overseas with no real world experience.

It’s true.

I work as a Client Partner for a $1B+ consulting firm that comes in and cleans up after these situations. We bring in seasoned, experienced consultants with the functional knowledge that these big consulting firms don’t have. And even though our consultants are more costly on a per head basis, we’re more cost effective overall, because we do more with less.

I always admired the big consulting firms until I realized how consistently they fail to deliver. It’s hard for the clients to fix it because they genuinely think they are getting the best. It’s sad and laughable. Eventually they figure it out. Usually when a firm like us comes in and exposes the dysfunction by getting a few consultants in there that know what they are doing and running things like it should. And it generally comes down to a lack of leadership— by both the client and the big consulting firm. They point the finger at each other. But also it’s just a lack of experience by those running/implementing the program. Staffed by consultants who read all the books and go to the trainings and classes but have never been in industry and been in the clients shoes.

I have ADHD.

Compared to my peers, I am one of the most productive humans. (I know this because my career track, quarterly and annual performance ratings, manager feedback, KPIs and metrics against peers or industry standards)

I attribute this to my ability to convince reptilian brain that if I don’t successfully execute tasks and accomplish goals, that I will die.

I operate as if I have a gun pointed at my head. And at the head of everyone I love and cherish.

This allows me to fully engage all my faculties as if my life depended upon it. Hyperfocus.

The downside is stress.

I mostly operate in a flow state, but depending on the day/task/objective, my body has trouble disengaging this feeling that I will die if I don’t execute, so it can negatively affect sleep, as well as life outside of work, because I am always thinking about how to accomplish the goal.

But the ability to trigger my amygdala into this “fight” mode stimulates a daily adrenal response that allows me to perform with exponential productivity. I am often astonished at what I am able to accomplish over a period of time.

All this requires me believing in what I’m doing to some degree, but not always. For example, I just want the biggest bonus in the company history, and if I don’t get it, I will die. So this allows me to have some purpose.

I also need to believe that I’m good at what I’m doing, because that enables me to execute confidently and without hesitation from one task/goal to the next and enjoy the process.

I’m supporting a $30B companies ERP migration to S4 as a Client Partner providing project support and this resonates. Two years in, the program is so f’ed, morale is so low, the project plan and execution is so terrible, it’s inconceivable how a company can exist with so much pervasive dysfunction.

Go live is May. No chance that will happen. So many defects they can’t keep track. No business processing mapping or desktop procedures beyond L1. No data mapping. No requirements were ever submitted. Still processing change requests in UAT. Controls are laughable and do not meet PCAOBs criteria for completeness and accuracy. Still missing and adding reports. And a dozen other concurrent technology implementations happening in parallel with interdependent integrations that depend on this go-live, with the legacy platforms discontinuing by end of 2023 that will leave the business incapable of performing critical business processes.

None of my consultants want to be on the project. They think it’s professional suicide to be apart of a train headed off the cliff. I am still in disbelief and am hoping that somehow I will gain a unique wisdom by sticking it out and watching them pull this off. Or it will be a spectacular apocalyptic disaster that will make for a great story.

Upsmith aims to change this!

https://upsmith.com/

Epstein didn’t kill himself.

Jim Carrey said:

“People talk about depression all the time. The difference between depression and sadness is sadness is just from happenstance — whatever happened or didn’t happen for you, or grief, or whatever it is. Depression is your body saying f*ck you, I don’t want to be this character anymore, I don’t want to hold up this avatar that you’ve created in the world. It’s too much for me.

You should think of the word ‘depressed’ as ‘deep rest.’ Your body needs to be depressed. It needs deep rest from the character that you’ve been trying to play.”

Alltrails, anyone?

Reach out to a consulting or Staffing firm that specializes in software development, IT, or whatever your forte is. Tons of demand for talent right now.

Read Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

Netflix has pretty terrible original content. It’s gotten worse over time tbh. It’s like cheap television. There are better streaming services with highly quality content. Amazon, HBO, Disney, to name a few.

Try LSD or mushrooms. Will change your mind.

Rhetoric may well find its place as an esteemed study once again.

Hume laid the philosophical foundations of empiricism for Laplace.

The log flatlined. What does that tell us?

Plato said, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

The etymology of invention is “to find out, discovery”.

There is your answer.

When your life must necessarily depend on learning the thing, you will learn it.

Convince yourself that your life depends upon it.

Don’t treat it as a trivial thing.

Fully integrate the goal of learning with survival, with maintaining your well being.

Whenever I feel that my life depends on knowing and understanding a thing, I am fully absorbed, engaged, consumed with focused attention.

This takes some psychological work. It requires imagining your death, physical or ego death, imagining the shame, imagining the failure of embarrassment of not knowing this thing.

It takes practice, but once you learn to integrate the goal of learning with this feeling of existential annihilation, you can tap into endless sustained energy for motivated focus.

See Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on learning, specifically flow states.

With the right resistance, with the right existential threat, the right challenge, your entire faculties will rise to the occasion and learn the thing.

“We could not automate that which we did not know how to do by hand.”