Muszkiewicz Reader

Researchers say there is an evolutionary rationale for the pressure this barrage puts on the brain. The lower-brain functions alert humans to danger, like a nearby lion, overriding goals like building a hut. In the modern world, the chime of incoming e-mail can override the goal of writing a business plan or playing catch with the children.

‘We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,’ Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008.

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There was one problem: Mr. Blumenthal, a Democrat now running for the United States Senate, never served in Vietnam. He obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war, according to records.

The deferments allowed Mr. Blumenthal to complete his studies at Harvard; pursue a graduate fellowship in England; serve as a special assistant to The Washington Post’s publisher, Katharine Graham; and ultimately take a job in the Nixon White House.

10 Commandments of the Intrapreneur:

1. Come to work each day willing to be fired.

2. Circumvent any orders aimed at stopping your dream.

3. Do any job needed to make your project work, regardless of your job description. (BC: Or, as Eric Reis puts it: “In any situation it is your responsibility, using your best judgment, to do what you think is in the best interests of the company. That’s it. Everything else [in your job description] is only marketing.”)

4. Find people to help you.

5. Follow your intuition about the people you choose, and work only with the best.

6. Work underground as long as you can - publicity triggers the corporate immune mechanism.

7. Never bet on a race unless you are running in it.

8. Remember it is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.

9. Be true to your goals, but be realistic about the ways to achieve them.

10. Honor your sponsors.

Truth is a difficult thing. Just a few centuries ago, the smartest humans alive were dead wrong about damn near everything.

They were wrong about gods. Wrong about astronomy. Wrong about disease. Wrong about heredity. Wrong about physics. Wrong about racism, sexism, nationalism, governance, and many other moral issues. Wrong about geology. Wrong about cosmology. Wrong about chemistry. Wrong about evolution. Wrong about nearly every subject imaginable.

WSJ: How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?

Cormac McCarthy: Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?

Cormac McCarthy: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

8. Start with Something Minimal

Lots of founders mentioned how important it was to launch with the simplest possible thing. By this point everyone knows you should release fast and iterate. It’s practically a mantra at YC. But even so a lot of people seem to have been burned by not doing it:

Build the absolute smallest thing that can be considered a complete application and ship it.

Why do people take too long on the first version? Pride, mostly. They hate to release something that could be better. They worry what people will say about them. But you have to overcome this:

Doing something “simple” at first glance does not mean you aren’t doing something meaningful, defensible, or valuable.

Don’t worry what people will say. If your first version is so impressive that trolls don’t make fun of it, you waited too long to launch. [3]

One founder said this should be your approach to all programming, not just startups, and I tend to agree.

Now, when coding, I try to think “How can I write this such that if people saw my code, they’d be amazed at how little there is and how little it does?”

Over-engineering is poison. It’s not like doing extra work for extra credit. It’s more like telling a lie that you then have to remember so you don’t contradict it.

[3] This is a variant of Reid Hoffman’s principle that if you aren’t embarrassed by what you launch with, you waited too long to launch.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

…

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.