marți, 31 mai 2016

Seth's Blog : Wasting our technology surplus



Wasting our technology surplus

When someone handed you a calculator for the first time, it meant that long division was never going to be required of you ever again. A huge savings in time, a decrease in the cognitive load of decision making.

Now what?

You can use that surplus to play video games and hang out.

Or you can use that surplus to go learn how to do something that can't be done by someone merely because she has a calculator.

Either way, your career as a long-divisionator was over.

Entire professions and industries are disrupted by the free work and shortcuts that are produced by the connection economy, by access to information, by robots. Significant parts of your job are almost certainly among them.

Now that we can get what you used to do really quickly and cheaply from someone else, you can either insist that you still get to do that for us at the same fee you used to charge, or you can move up the ladder and do something we can't do without you.

       

More Recent Articles

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

Don't want to get this email anymore? Click the link below to unsubscribe.



Email subscriptions powered by FeedBlitz, LLC, 365 Boston Post Rd, Suite 123, Sudbury, MA 01776, USA.

luni, 30 mai 2016

Seth's Blog : The possibility of optimism (the optimism of possibility)



The possibility of optimism (the optimism of possibility)

Is the glass half full or half empty?

The pessimist sees what's present today and can only imagine eventual decline. The glass is already half empty and it's only going to get worse.

The optimist understands that there's a difference between today and tomorrow. The glass is half full, with room for more. The vision is based on possibility, the future tense, not the present one.

Pessimists have trouble making room for possibility, and thus possibility has trouble finding room for pessimists.

As soon as we realize that there is a difference between right now and what might happen next, we can move ourselves to the posture of possibility, to the self-fulfilling engine of optimism.

       

More Recent Articles

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

Don't want to get this email anymore? Click the link below to unsubscribe.



Email subscriptions powered by FeedBlitz, LLC, 365 Boston Post Rd, Suite 123, Sudbury, MA 01776, USA.

duminică, 29 mai 2016

Seth's Blog : Problems



Problems

Avoiding a problem with foresight and good design is a cheap, highly leveraged way to do your work.

Extinguishing a problem before it gets expensive and difficult is almost as good, and far better than paying a premium when there's an emergency.

Fretting about an impending problem, worrying about it, imagining the implications of it... all of this is worthless.

The magic of slack (a little extra time in the chain, a few extra dollars in the bank) is that it gives you the resources to stop and avoid a problem or fix it when it's small. The over-optimized organization misunderstands the value of slack, so it always waits until something is a screaming emergency, because it doesn't think it has a moment to spare. Expensive.

Action is almost always cheaper now than it is later.

       

More Recent Articles

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

Don't want to get this email anymore? Click the link below to unsubscribe.



Email subscriptions powered by FeedBlitz, LLC, 365 Boston Post Rd, Suite 123, Sudbury, MA 01776, USA.