Be Usefully Interesting

This was originally published in my free weekly newsletter, How It Actually Works.

Some career & life advice: be usefully interesting.

If you’re a CPA you’ll be useful, but no one will care and your upside will be limited.

If you’re in a decent band you’ll be interesting, but your likelihood of failure will be high.

The examples of people I know who are usefully interesting have all these cool stories about industries that I know nothing about.

(A decent example of my own that I’ve mentioned before: the most popular English translation of the Bible is owned by Rupert Murdoch and News Corp.)

Sure, that specific fact may not be useful. But people who show a pattern of knowing this style of information are sure to have more of it, and some of it is bound to be of use.

The Links

Facebook Ads creator on asymmetric information (twitter, tweetstorm)

A long-term personal question is how can one reasonably criticize e.g. the president, who clearly has 10,000x more information on a given situation than I do.

The same principle applies to companies like Facebook:

“Imagine you left your post at whatever outlet, and actually got a job as PM at Facebook, leading a team whose work you've covered. Suddenly, you've got access to all the dashboards and information flow of insiders. Your eyes will be opened to what was once dimly perceived.

“You'll feel like a fool as you realize how much you missed seeing from the outside, and how partial your view once was.”

Magnus Carlsen livestreams himself playing an online bullet chess tournament (youtube)

Greatest chess player in the world playing 1 minute games, fun to watch a few and hear his live comments.

Fantastic story about the worst office mistake of all time (twitter, tweet storm)

“Gather round, Gentle Readers. It is time I tell the story of the worst decision I ever made in an office. Some of you have heard this. Some have not. Whatever you do in your office today, this week, the rest of this year, you can console yourself by recalling this tale.”

This was originally published in my weekly newsletter, How It Actually Works.