

Real-time may be nice for search engines, but what about personal lives? - mathewi
http://gigaom.com/2010/07/19/real-time-may-be-nice-for-search-engines-but-what-about-personal-lives/

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nostrademons
There was one sentence in the article where I thought the author was onto
something, and then he moved on:

"Responding to those things is something that your company likely doesn’t have
much choice about — it has to do so, in real time (or something close to it),
or it will lose a competitive edge."

What if you're willing to lose that competitive edge? Just say "Fuck it.
You're quite welcome to be better than me at that." Just Say No to the
pressure cooker of the American working world.

Sounds crazy, right? But it seems to work awfully well for an awful lot of
companies. Steve Jobs is famous for deciding that a feature's just not worth
including, and yet Apple has some of best-designed products on the planet.
37signals has been touting the "Simplify, simplify, simplify" mantra for
years, and it seems to be working for them. Warren Buffett famously chooses
not to invest in anything he doesn't understand, and eschews modern portfolio
theory and sophisticated quant models and all the other stuff that financiers
_have to_ know now. Hasn't seemed to have hurt Berkshire.

The act of consciously choosing what your competitive advantage is, as opposed
to trying to compete on everything, _is_ a competitive advantage.

I'd actually go one further, and say that you should start from zero and then
build up to what you want your life to look like, instead of starting from
infinity and then trying to prune all the things that aren't important out.
Assume that you're dead. Now imagine that you've just been given life. What's
your first priority? Most people will answer food, shelter, and the
necessities of life - now assume that you have those taken care of. What do
you choose to do now?

Ultimately, it's trivially easy to actually _be_ dead, so you know you'll
always have that option. If you start from that baseline, then assume that
you're gifted with X amount of time, it's much easier to allocate that time
than if you start from "I must have that prestigious six-figure job and the
trophy wife and the gleaming McMansion and the suburbs and 3.5 kids that all
go to soccer and ballet and gymnastics" and then try to decide what you have
to give up.

