10 Bullets. By Tom Sachs (by tomsachsmovies & via percolate)

this week has been a pretty good example of what happens to society when the frameworks & rules we have in place come undone.  standard operating procedures evolve & change.  folks who aren’t prepared, usually, suffer.

please don’t take this as me discounting anything - this storm has left me feeling very helpless and very fortunate.  at the same time, i’m wired to find these types of connections.  the rules & methods in 10 Bullets don’t just personify a lot of core beliefs i share but explain and help extrapolate a lot of “issues” that modern business might be facing.  you have to mine to find gold, right?

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as evidence in the video, tom runs his studio like a well-oiled machine & looks for people who have different contexts in their experience.

The only prerequisite for working here is you have to have been a dishwasher or a waiter, just to know how bad it can be. Dishwashing is the most disgusting job that a lot of people you or I know have done at one time or another. And being a waiter is one of the most demanding, humiliating jobs that a lot of people have done.

back to “modern business.”  there is lots of discussion around how to address & cultivate ‘culture,’ manage ‘millennials’ or ‘creatives,’ etc.  in my personal & professional life, the value of hard & honest work was taught to me by my family.  in more formative years, i supported two cousins who are masters in their field, one a pharmacist & the other a carpenter.  working with & for them taught me a lot of the values expressed in 10 Bullets.  i carry these values with me today and, undoubtedly, i’m successful because of them.  i try to institute & share them with people i work & have worked with to varying degrees of success.  regardless, i will never lose them and live by them - even if i don’t (or never will) work in a studio like this.  you can very easily extrapolate this framework to whatever you do.  the logic is present:  it’s not viewed as totalitarian but as cultivation.  tom goes on:

The artist’s creative process is a very fragile thing. Nowhere else do you find people who are as brilliant and self-motivated as in the arts and yet as fragile and insecure. Working with 15 people is very difficult. We’re trying to cultivate the indulgences of the creative process and, at the same time, eliminate creativity as a capricious gesture. In other words, a little creativity goes a long way. It’s like chili pepper. A lot of artists are filled with caprice and silliness. Finding that balance is the key to everything.

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my first alarm each weekday morning is set for 4:15a.  ::insert incredulous look on your face now::  don’t worry, it happens to me a lot.  in casual/social conversation about personal habits, people look at me like i’m a fool.  that’s fine, maybe i am - but it’s how i like to work.  i like to start my day early and take my time preparing for the day ahead.  i read a lot, i catch-up on information shared while i was asleep.  i’ll eat a good breakfast and go to the gym.  i won’t be rushed getting dressed.  i’ll be on time.  after work, in the evenings, i decompress & relax.  i’ve spent the entire day processing information and then producing something of it.  the morning hours are my preparation for what lay ahead and the evening hours are spent releasing my mind.

the morning hours will come and preparation will begin again.

Source: youtube.com

One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing, etcetera. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
Alain de Botton, of course (via wearethedigitalkids)
Our 20s are the defining decade of adulthood. 80% of life’s most defining moments take place by about age 35. 2/3 of lifetime wage growth happens during the first ten years of a career. More than half of Americans are married or are dating or living with their future partner by age 30. Personality can change more during our 20s than at any other decade in life. Female fertility peaks at 28. The brain caps off its last major growth spurt. When it comes to adult development, 30 is not the new 20. Even if you do nothing, not making choices is a choice all the same. Don’t be defined by what you didn’t know or didn’t do.

Thirty Is Not The New Twenty: Why Your 20s Matter | Experts’ Corner | Big Think

whoa.

(via peterwknox)

if anyone asks me, “how’s it going?”  i now have an answer.

(via peterwknox)

Sunk costs

In traditional microeconomic theory, only prospective (future) costs are relevant to an investment decision. Traditional economics proposes that an economic actor not let sunk costs influence one’s decisions, because doing so would not be rationally assessing a decision exclusively on its own merits. The decision-maker may make rational decisions according to their own incentives; these incentives may dictate different decisions than would be dictated by efficiency or profitability, and this is considered an incentive problem and distinct from a sunk cost problem.

Evidence from behavioral economics suggests this theory fails to predict real-world behavior. Sunk costs do, in fact, influence actors’ decisions because humans are prone to loss-averse and framing effects, and in light of such cognitive quirks, it is unsurprising that people frequently fail to behave in ways that economists would deem “rational.”

10/15/04 - 9/1/12.