jevanish

So what did you end up doing? Sounds like you eventually figured things out...what would you tell the past version of yourself?

I'm glad you've had good experiences with managers. I know a lot of people who have really suffered under bad managers multiple times across their careers, especially in startups.

I think if you look at the language someone uses, you can tell a lot about their quality as a manager...it's about we and they when it's good and I when it's bad.

Look at pro athletes; the best leaders on those teams generally are the ones that give all the credit around in wins and take ownership of losses. Peyton Manning used to throw his lineman under the bus in playoff losses and now he's all team as the Broncos are in the Super Bowl. Obviously there's other factors at play, but think about how a good leader is going to motivate his team through the human element things I talked about: people love to be recognized for things they worked hard on and it means a lot when people show they care about them. Who do you go out of the way to help on your team?

You can also learn a lot by talking to people they've worked with before re: management. I love an interview tactic I heard before where you ask someone to rank them on a scale of 1 to 10 on something. If they don't say 10 on something, you can then ask what made them not a 10 and usually get some good answers.

Depends on the company and the culture.

Do you have ideas on how to recognize and praise great managers?

I totally agree. My goal was to get some people to sign up I could do some customer development around an idea I have. Maybe I needed a little more detail.

I think the human aspect can go a long way and there are still a lot of elements as you suggest that work against you. Thing is, if you do protect your team (I've heard it called "the shit umbrella") and care about them, you can do a lot to make them happier and more successful even if you're dealing with a lot of crap yourself as the manager/leader.

Soft skills are hard to measure. I'm not sure we ever will, and my hope was to make the point that the pure measurement of results often does nothing to distinguish or incentivize good from bad management.

Thom,

You're absolutely right. I wrote the post with the hope of getting to do some customer development interviews with those interested in what I wrote about.

Soft skills are a funny thing; to succeed as a leader/manager you need them, but it's hard to quantify strength and weakness in them.

I have some ideas for a product but didn't want to make the post about the solution.

Have you considered what books you choose and the efforts you make to apply what you learn from it?

I can't begin to quantify what I've learned (note: I wrote the post) and much of it is because of what books I chose and the effort to apply what I read.

Did you do anything to remember these things or did that come naturally and you didn't need to record it anywhere?

Thanks for all the book tips. I curious to both of you that responded...do either of you do anything to personally connect with each team member? Do you keep track of each team member's progress and maybe some personal info (like birthday, meaningful events, etc) in any way like in an evernote or personal CRM?

If they can cheaply and quickly add it (by leveraging someone else's hardware or software) it could be worth it, but certainly not suggesting you change the design you sent to a contract manufacturer or anything like that.

That makes a lot of sense. I think you don't really totally know what you're looking for until you have one in some cases. I know I bought a Solidoodle because it was cheaper and readily available. Now that I've used it a bit, I see the value in paying for a more reliable printer with a larger build size that is at a higher price point. If I had bought a Kickstarter printer first, it would have taken much longer to get to that point simply due to the wait. And while some of the issues plague all printers, I meant to allude to the fact that those issues compound when you add in Kickstarter- specific problems.

I totally agree with you to expect delays from estimates, but I also think many people either A) won't do the same or B) It's just hard to comprehend how different things might be in the market when you finally get it 6-12 months after you "ordered" it.

If you watch the videos in the kickstarter and on his site, you'll see he removed a ton of parts every other printer has to have. For example, the Z axis is now water...that's a lot cheaper than all the parts you need for a bed and the precision motors to normally raise/lower a platform. He did this in quite a few areas, which quickly plummets the price.

I've heard the resin resultant objects are pretty brittle at least on the Form1, so I'm not sure it could do what you're hoping.

You would be better served with an FDM printer if you want to be able to use it as you describe, but then you need to be careful of the direction of the grain (or rather, the layers) so that they're opposite the direction of stress if there's specific ways it will take stress.

Interestingly enough, ESPN has been getting into trouble for "hoarding" such content as they own so much of it in big contracts they can't air all of it, but it boxes out others from showing it.

Do you have a source for that? I tried googling and couldn't find a solid number on Taxi revenues by city.

Joint venture? They both have what the other needs. And $125Million in revenue says Uber is taking off in more than SF.

and who has the logistics technology and user base to power that? Uber.

Do you have UberX in your city? They slashed prices on UberX in SF in June and it made it cheaper than a cab.

What is Elon going to do? If you're talking about the Hyperloop, you're deluding yourself if you think that's going to be wide spread in 5 years. It'll take at least 10 for a functional scale prototype and then decades of NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) battles to get them built around the country. Even after that, it'll be like an airport. You can't have a hyperloop with 37 stops...it'll only be so fast and easy if it has a minimum amount of stops. At which point, Uber can help close the loop from hyperloop stop to your home or office.

You're right, but it puts them further out in front of any competition they're facing. I expect they'll be raising more rounds but at similar friendly terms as well as being able to self-fund continued expansion from profits in other cities. Remember, they're still seeing double digit growth every month (I think Travis said 18% M.o.M.)...that's a lot of cash to reinvest in even more growth.

Elon Musk is 100% in a class of his own. He isn't just disrupting markets (Tesla), he's creating new ones by advancing civilization (SpaceX and possibly the Hyperloop).

Still, my point with the piece is that they stand to destroy cabs in major cities around the world. That's a lot of power in the transportation industry if they can pull it off as I believe, especially when you think about how much that consolidates that power from city by city medallion owners.

There have been a couple other good HackerNews threads on Burnout you can find here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2025655

I definitely think long form reading (aka-books) is a great way to go (I read about 20 books/yr). I definitely should work in more fiction to my life, but as of yet I have focused on adding and building skills.

I think reading fiction has a lot of value. If you want to enhance your creativity and be inspired you can get a lot from great fiction. It will also make you a better writer. It can be act as a break from your day to day as well (recharging is important).

In the end, my hope was to pose the question and have people consider what it means for themselves. Being more purpose driven, or at least knowing why you do something, can never hurt. We only get 24 hours in the day, so choosing wisely how to spend it is important. If you're thoughtful about how much and what you choose to read, it can pay off in many ways.

I agree with you. Self awareness is really hard and it is a day-in-day-out struggle. I honestly had been sitting on this post in a draft and felt something was off but a friend encouraged me to get it out there.

The hardest part about the post was the balance between being instructional (you and we pronouns) and when/how much to talk about my own stuff (I). I don't think I nailed it by any stretch, but done beats perfect.

The problem with this is that we're all in the business of making money. You want to put constraints on your customers to give them urgency to complete their trial, so they can then become paying customers...thus keeping you in business.

With any business that requires configuration (like setting up tracking on your site or entering candidates in a CRM), you need to push your users to get over that initial hurdle. A short time constraint forces them to act quickly to try to get value out of your product. They can always sign up for the trial at another time if they're not ready to really commit to setting it up and using it right now.

The added benefit of all of this is your sales team then works with more qualified leads and spends less time talking to people that would fit into your "paused" category, which can often become a deadpool of unactivated users.

I think everyone is assuming that the side projects are for after-hours. I think we can all agree that you should focus on your job at work.

Every A Player I've ever worked with has brought full attention, quality and focus regardless of other priorities in their life (barring major, extenuating circumstances like a death). What they do in their non-work time has little impact on their work productivity unless it starts causing too much sleep deprivation.

Most people I've met can handle thinking about more than one thing in a given day or week and to be a productive human you have to. Whether it's reading a bed time story to your child, remembering what groceries to buy on the way home or checking the code a friend committed to your side project, you have to think about other things besides work every day to be a normal, functional human.

Life is too short to do something you hate. Do whatever you need to to find out what you're passionate about. Building a career around that will be 100X more fulfilling.

As Steve Jobs said, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."

Have you thought about trying to find the intersection of the two? Is there a company or something you can work on that takes advantage of both skillsets?

I think the real challenge in life is to get heart and head in alignment. It's not easy, but who said it would be?