They can’t kill you if you’re already dead

The Samurai had a guiding principle called Hagakure, which goes something like this:

Begin each day by pondering death as it’s climax. Each morning, with a calm mind, conjure images in your head of your last moments. See yourself…

Even pigs can fly in a hurricane

If the wind is strong enough, then even a fat pig that is not suited to flying at all, can take off and fly in the sky.

This is true about startups. And this is true about people.

Evolutionarily Stable Strategies

While explaining how genes tend to propagate and be naturally selected, Richard Dawkins describes the concept of Evolutionarily Stable Strategies (ESS), in his book, The Selfish Gene.

Creation and Acceleration

There are two kinds of product managers.

One kind unlocks new value by solving for an altogether unsolved need or by solving for a need in a new and novel way. This is the equivalent of going from Zero to One (as popularised by Peter Thiel).

Exceeding expectations

I’ve written before about how happiness is reality over expectations. In essence, that means exceeded expectations results in happiness.

I’ve been noticing yet another example of this, while I read articles.

The Third Place

Ben Horowitz, in The hard thing about hard things, writes about a person from a client he was dealing with during his time as CEO of LoudCloud, who asked for a connecting flight with the longest layover possible when LoudCloud was booking that person’s travel. Curious as to why someone would choose…

On Culture

Ben Horowitz has two incredible documents that I can keep going back to often to remind myself of how to think about these two topics. One is on Product Management, and is titled “Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager”. The other outlines what the culture of a company is.

Nuance

The samurai had to adhere to strict codes of conduct. However, the code itself understood nuance and outlined with great clarity the nuances with which the code ought to be considered.

Here is a mention of doing the right thing:

Immortality

I’ve been fascinated by the topic of Immortality ever since I was a little kid watching Dragonball Z, where two of the main characters wanted to gather the dragonballs in order to make a wish for achieving immortality.

Learn-it-all

Nobody likes a know-it-all, who is essentially a person that behaves as though they know everything.

Product Managers have to interact with a lot of stakeholders over the course of their days, and it is a natural tendency to move towards being a know-it-all.