Wrote
- Ideas are cheap, execution is dear (2019-01-14)
- Old Trails (2019-01-19)
Read
- Tanner Howard, Native American routes: the ancient trails hidden in Chicago’s grid system, The Guardian (2019-01-17). "The whole idea of imposing a grid on this land is from one point of view kind of laughable," said Henry Binford, a professor of urban history at Northwestern University. "The indigenous trail network made a lot more sense, at least in the beginning."
- Penelope Trunk, Will Jeff Bezos Get Half of MacKenzie Bezos’s Fortune in the Divorce?, blog.peneleopetrunk.com (2019-01-13). MacKenzie has always stood up for her contribution in the marriage. But it’s not so easy for most women. Most women did not work side by side with their spouse to start the most disruptive company in the world. Most women do their half of the team’s work and get very little credit for it. Because when it comes to spousal partnerships, society talks about the stay-at-home spouse like they are a freeloader, waiting to pick up their check in the divorce.
- Jeffrey Bigham, A Camera is Watching You in Your AirBnB: And, you consented to it., jeffreybigham.com (2019-01-14). I’ve received a lot of requests for interviews and such, but I’m not sure how much more I have to say. I’ve also heard from many guests and hosts. Many guests have similar stories (absent the viral blog post and nice resolution, apparently…). I’ve also heard from a lot of hosts who have indoor cameras because guests rent their home to have huge parties, trash them, and then have trouble recouping their costs. It’s hard to be a guest and a host, and wifi cameras are fuel on the fire. Finally, all of us need to think carefully about how we will live in an increasingly surveilled world. Just because it’s so easy to record everything now doesn’t mean we should.
Listened
- Samuel Beckett, In Our Time (2019-01-17). [42:34] Beckett's incredibly interested in systematic thinking, but it's always systems that are on the point of breaking down. So at one level there's a sense that systems create a kind of hyper-order, but that hyper-order is always tipping over into a kind of absurdity. It's the sort of glitches in the systems, I think, that Beckett's really interested in.
- #744 - It's No Joke: Prank Musical Greeting Card Earns $36,000/Month, Side Hustle School (2019-01-14). [09:50] Also, even though it was originally a pretty silly idea, the way he's been able to create longterm business value from it is through the execution of the idea. So it's not easy to build those relationships with vendors and make decisions about how many tens of thousands of cards to order. And then when disaster strikes, like that crazy experience with the battery's being duds, it's not a simple thing at all to figure out how to respond and recover. So that to me is where the value is, that is just as interesting as coming up with the initial idea. So if you hear this story and you think, "Oh, well, that's pretty cool but, you know, the whole trick was in the idea", I think the whole trick is in the execution of the idea.
- Episode 207: Herder on Art Appreciation (Part One), The Partially Examined Life (2019-01-14). [33:33] "Taste in one art roused taste in every other art; there was, so to speak, a harmonious atmosphere in which the similarly tuned strings of all the different instruments vibrated and resonated at a single touch." I think in a lot of this stuff he's really trying to combine all these different elements. I really like that section about how one art can affect another art and you have to be open to that sort of thing happening. [33:54] Yeah, you kind of picture New York City in certain periods where it's a hotbed of artistic expression, and it's not just music, and it's not just avant garde Andy Warhol stuff, it's, like, everything is influencing each other and all the barriers between the different arts go down.
Photo
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Upcoming
- 2019-01-24: INCOSE Midwest Gateway social event, Sports Cafe
- 2019-01-26/2019-01-29: INCOSE International Workshop, Torrance, California
- 2019-01-31: Leadership Perspectives: 6 executives. 60 ideas. 60 minutes., Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis
- 2019-02-13, 2019-02-27: Jack Kerouac's Haunted Life Discussion Series, University of Massachusetts-Lowell
There might be additional links that didn't make the cut at notes.kirkkittell.com