The Anthology of Balaji: A Guide to Technology, Truth, and Building the Future
by Eric Jorgenson
Hiring “hungry” people usually means finding people at the beginning of their careers. One thing I’m wired for, which isn’t common, is I’m almost anti-credential. I understand the value of credentials, but I’m actually most excited when I see a smart person who does not have credentials already, because that’s a good value. I can hire them, I can pay them reasonably well, and I can help them level up. I can give them the biggest opportunities they’ve had in their lives. Dashboards are better than newspapers. If you are in tech, the first thing you look at each work day may be a company dashboard with metrics, like sales. This is good. The first thing you look at personally each day shouldn’t be random stories someone else picked. It should be carefully selected metrics you want to improve, like your health or hobbies. A personal dashboard is a good path to disrupt newspapers.
I argue they’re actually both infotainment at the same end of the spectrum, and the other end is news-you-can-use and tutorials. The difference is whether a piece of information is directly relevant to your life. To identify at which end of the spectrum information belongs, consider: are you going to spend the effort to confirm and apply every line of this information?
Here’s a story: tech journalism is less diverse than tech. The technology industry is more diverse than the media outlets, who constantly challenge tech about their diversity. Oo Nwoye, executive director at TechCircle, tried to submit this story as an op-ed to a bunch of tech journalism outlets and couldn’t get it published.
Infotainment should be filtered out of your information diet. Returning to the analogy between your nutritional diet and your information diet…having a cookie from time to time is fine, but if you’re eating only cookies and you’re not eating healthy food, your health is going to be messed up. Your life is going to get worse.
Over the last fifty to sixty years, restaurant culture has become more and more mainstream. We’ve gone from having family-cooked meals, where the people who were our food providers were also our healthcare providers, to outsourcing all nutrition to capitalist entities who are not aligned with us.
I do meetings only one day a week. The rest of the week, I am totally free to work spontaneously. That’s my single biggest productivity hack: stack all meetings on (for example) Monday and Thursday. Then you are always no more than three days from a meeting, yet you get five focus days per week.
"Hiring “hungry” people usually means finding people at the beginning of their careers. One thing I’m wired for, which isn’t common, is I’m almost anti-credential. I understand the value of credentials, but I’m actually most excited when I see a smart person who does not have credentials already, because that’s a good value. I can hire them, I can pay them reasonably well, and I can help them level up. I can give them the biggest opportunities they’ve had in their lives."
"Dashboards are better than newspapers. If you are in tech, the first thing you look at each work day may be a company dashboard with metrics, like sales. This is good. The first thing you look at personally each day shouldn’t be random stories someone else picked. It should be carefully selected metrics you want to improve, like your health or hobbies. A personal dashboard is a good path to disrupt newspapers."
"I argue they’re actually both infotainment at the same end of the spectrum, and the other end is news-you-can-use and tutorials. The difference is whether a piece of information is directly relevant to your life. To identify at which end of the spectrum information belongs, consider: are you going to spend the effort to confirm and apply every line of this information?"
"Here’s a story: tech journalism is less diverse than tech. The technology industry is more diverse than the media outlets, who constantly challenge tech about their diversity. Oo Nwoye, executive director at TechCircle, tried to submit this story as an op-ed to a bunch of tech journalism outlets and couldn’t get it published."
"Infotainment should be filtered out of your information diet. Returning to the analogy between your nutritional diet and your information diet…having a cookie from time to time is fine, but if you’re eating only cookies and you’re not eating healthy food, your health is going to be messed up. Your life is going to get worse."
"Over the last fifty to sixty years, restaurant culture has become more and more mainstream. We’ve gone from having family-cooked meals, where the people who were our food providers were also our healthcare providers, to outsourcing all nutrition to capitalist entities who are not aligned with us."
"I do meetings only one day a week. The rest of the week, I am totally free to work spontaneously. That’s my single biggest productivity hack: stack all meetings on (for example) Monday and Thursday. Then you are always no more than three days from a meeting, yet you get five focus days per week."
- →I do meetings only one day a week. The rest of the week, I am totally free to work spontaneously. That’s my single biggest productivity hack: stack all meetings on (for example) Monday and Thursday. Then you are always no more than three days from a meeting, yet you get five focus days per week.
- →The overabundance of sugar is why people are so fat now. It’s why diabetes is such an epidemic. Sugar starts messing up your gut microbiome and causes other issues. It’s very difficult to escape, like secondhand smoke. It’s in almost everything. You have to really try to not eat sugar.
- →I’m not saying never have fun. But Twitter and other social media are like restaurants that have learned to secretly put sugar in their food. Social media and streaming services are optimized to consume as many minutes of your day as possible. They are literally addictive.
- →Computer science and stats are today what physics was to the early twentieth century. In the heyday of physics, physicists could go kick in the doors of any discipline and be like, “Hi, I’m gonna write down some equations and change your life.”
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