“If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.”
(via NYTimes: Happy Like God)
(via @Charlieok)
In the summer of 2006, Gordon Gould didn’t spend much time worrying about how to split ThisNext’s winnings with volunteer workers. Far more pressing was the need to lure thousands of volunteer workers to his new site. Here, like most free-labor entrepreneurs, he faced a chicken-or-egg dilemma: how to entice people to perform for a crowd that doesn’t yet exist? His answer was to create one. He and his team went out and interviewed a few hundred people—fashion designers, athletes, and activists—and then seeded ThisNext with their thoughts and recommendations. “When the first visitors came, there was a there there,” Gould says. The content on the site, he adds, had to be good. “If people come and see it’s lowbrow and ghetto, it’s going to stay that way.”
Seven steps of the full recruitment spectrum:
- anticipating the need for new hires
- specifying the job
- developing a pool of candidates
- assessing the candidates
- closing the deal
- integrating the newcomer
- reviewing the effectiveness of the hiring process
“I would like to tell you that the Internet has created such a level playing field that the long tail1 is absolutely the place to be—that there’s so much differentiation, there’s so much diversity, so many new voices. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. What really happens is something called a power law, with the property that a small number of things are very highly concentrated and most other things have relatively little volume. Virtually all of the new network markets follow this law.
So, while the tail is very interesting, the vast majority of revenue remains in the head. And this is a lesson that businesses have to learn. While you can have a long tail strategy, you better have a head, because that’s where all the revenue is.
And, in fact, it’s probable that the Internet will lead to larger blockbusters and more concentration of brands. Which, again, doesn’t make sense to most people, because it’s a larger distribution medium. But when you get everybody together they still like to have one superstar. It’s no longer a US superstar, it’s a global superstar. So that means global brands, global businesses, global sports figures, global celebrities, global scandals, global politicians.
So, we love the long tail, but we make most of our revenue in the head, because of the math of the power law. And you need both, by the way. You need the head and the tail to make the model work.”
“Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year.
Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.”
-The New Yorker: Most Likely to Succeed, by Malcolm Gladwell
“When the business-school professor Julie Logan surveyed a group of American small-business owners recently, she found that thirty-five per cent of them self-identified as dyslexic!
Paul Orfalea, the founder of the Kinko’s chain, was a D student who failed two grades, was expelled from four schools, and graduated at the bottom of his high-school class. “In third grade, the only word I could read was ‘the,’ ” he says. “I used to keep track of where the group was reading by following from one ‘the’ to the next.””
-The Uses of Adversity, by Malcolm Gladwell