Jay Marcyes

By Malcom Gladwell, if you are a fan of Outliers (which I am) then you will probably dig this. It is about how David's can take on, and beat, the Goliaths of the world. My favorite part of the article sums up the gist nicely:

Arreguín-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog
fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time underdogs didn’t
fight like David. 

[...] It makes no sense, unless you think back to
that Kentucky-L.S.U. game and to Lawrence’s long march across the
desert to Aqaba. It is easier to dress soldiers in bright uniforms and
have them march to the sound of a fife-and-drum corps than it is to
have them ride six hundred miles through the desert on the back of a
camel. It is easier to retreat and compose yourself after every score
than swarm about, arms flailing.

We tell ourselves that skill is the
precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way
around. Effort can trump ability [...] because relentless effort is in fact something rarer
than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor
coördination. [...] The prospect
of playing by David’s rules was too daunting. They would rather lose.

Coincidentally, this was one of the problems I had with a company I started with a couple people a few years ago. Everyone was excited when we started, but as time went on my partners decided that they would rather work as waiters or whatnot rather than put forth the effort to build a company from scratch.

When we got together they would talk a big game, about how committed they were, but no one ever executed. Schedules and deadlines were pushed back until even the meetings stopped.

Great article on how Amazon grew big, really big, despite losing serious money along the way.

interesting article from the LA Times about how smaller movies are getting made by investors outside the Studio's chokehold

Which is true, I am on the computer almost the whole day, and I agree with his idea that our mind set is different on the computer than when reading a book or watching TV. On the computer we expect to multi-task, not to focus.