Morfternight #41: Vegas Baby!

We discuss doing things with moderation, team management tips, and science with Richard Feynman.

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👋 Good Morfternight!

We had a couple of hot weeks in Vienna.

The photo above is from last year, but this summer is just the same. To put the Vienna summer into perspective, I will spend a few days in the Nevada desert. As I write this, I just finished packing my Rimowa, ready for a few hours of sleep, followed by a long flight from Vienna to Los Angeles.

I’ll spend the night there before driving through Death Valley, to Las Vegas, with my friend Luca.

We’ll meet our coworkers for some great in-person work time and some fun.

This is distributed work done right: most of the year, we work from wherever we are, then every few months, we meet to spend quality time together.

🌍 The Dose-response relationship at work

I have been participating in the Small Bets community lately and following Daniel Vassallo’s highly interesting courses.

Today he started an intriguing reflection on the notion of dose-response relationship. I agree that most things that are good at a specific dosage and frequency become irrelevant in insufficient quantities and can become negative above a certain threshold.

I think this is one of the main secrets behind the success of distributed work.

Spending most of our working time on our own, then meeting a few weeks every year, makes extraordinary moments of those meetings, creating much tighter bonds across teams than spending every single day together.

🪩 Sounds interesting might read the book later

There are many, and by many, I mean an awful lot, people online explaining how to do things.

Here’s the problem: youtube videos about changing your faucet and recipes for a Pavlova are fine. Most of the time, in those situations, you can put yourself in conditions very similar to the ones described and achieve similar results.

Things become much more complex in more abstract domains when you have little to no control over the conditions of the experiment; therefore, plain recipes become irrelevant. Most of the literature around leadership and management must be cautiously manipulated.

It is ok to be informed by it, but one shouldn’t become driven.

Once in a while, an article stands out from the crowd.

In this case, “Stop Overcomplicating It: The Simple Guidebook to Upping Your Management Game” is the review of “When They Win, You Win,” the book recently published by Russ Laraway.

I haven’t read the book yet, but I have added it to my reading list, and I strongly recommend the article if you seek guidance as a newly appointed manager or even with some experience.

It seems to strike a rare balance between being generic and specific that makes its content actionable.

🫧 It’s a sort of stored Sun that’s coming out when you burn a log.

Remember your high-school physics and chemistry classes?

You are not alone.

I find it dramatic to think about how much middle and high school is forgotten in the areas one doesn’t continue practicing in University and later in their professional life.

This is a BBC series of 6 short episodes in which Richard Feynman talks about science. Altogether, just over one hour. Watch it, or listen to it, then think what school could have been if each hour spent there had been like that.