Daniel's notes on The Tycoons

The Tycoons by Charles R. Morris

Their reading time 26 min

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Carnegie was no technologist, but rather a masterful consumer of invention. His plants were always the biggest, the most automated, the most focused on pushing prices down. He had the simplest of business mantras: cut costs, take share, gain scale. Profits would take care of themselves.

Daniel Nov 17, 2024

Daniel p. 7

Lincoln especially enjoyed patent cases, and once said that the most important discoveries advancing civilization were "writing, ... printing, the discovery of America, and the introduction of Patent Laws." It was typical of him that in a case involving reaper patents, he came armed with models of the machines, and gathered the jurors around on their knees to point out the critical details.

Daniel Nov 17, 2024

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Cold Start Problem 286 notes

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To improve our lives, we need to see the world as it is and learn to work with the principles that govern it. Having a diverse set of mental models that reflect how the world works is crucial for making better decisions and living a more meaningful life. Page 382

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The Great Mental Models, Volume 4 292 notes

Inspiration is a magical thing, a productivity multi-plier, a motivator. But it won't wait for you. Inspiration is a now thing. If it grabs you, grab it right back and put it to work. Page 271

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Rework 291 notes

Managing your defaults requires more than willpower. Defaults operate at our subconscious level, so overriding them requires harnessing equally powerful forces that pull your subconscious in the right direction: habits, rules, and environment. Page 246

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Clear Thinking 275 notes

Post-trial survey emails can improve your free-to-paid conversion rate if you trigger certain events based on user feedback. For instance, if a user says the product was too complex, you can have a customer success representative reach out to walk them through the product. As in bowling, if you don't get a strike in the first throw, you have another shot. So, why not use post-trial survey emails as a way to rekindle the opportunity and provide an incredible experience? After all, these same users were interested in using your product for a specific reason. Let's help them out. Page 280

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Product-Led Onboarding 249 notes

Evaluate the opportunities in terms of their impact on the stakeholders and their organizations, the availability of budget, the ur-gency, the alignment on value, the implementation potential, and the likelihood of you winning the market. You can use our template at leanb2b.co/opportunities for your analysis. Page 148

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Lean B2B 218 notes

Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham: Fire arguably made us human. This book talks about how the invention of fire allowed humans as species to outsource our metabolism to the fire and allocate more of our scarce calories to the brain. Fire relaxed an evolutionary constraint and made us smarter. We've been co-evolving with technology for a very, very long time, arguably for evolutionary timescales. Technology is actually what makes us human. It's what distinguishes man from animal. Page 271

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The Anthology Of Balaji 240 notes

Chapter 11 Summary: • In general, when we quit, we fear two things: that we've failed and that we've wasted our time, effort, or money. • Waste is a forward-looking problem, not a backward-looking one. Page 247

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In our lowest moments, we should remind ourselves of the truth of the dream: that life is not a story, but a game with no end. This means it isn't a final victory we should seek but simple, humble progress: the never-ending pleasure of moving in the right direction. Nobody wins the status game. They're not supposed to. The meaning of life is not to win, it's to play. Page 310

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The Status Game 194 notes

You're designing a set of experiences, interactions, and choices that help players feel powerful, competent, connected, and valued.

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Game Thinking 187 notes

Routine work: Work that can be reduced to a script, a spec sheet, a formula, or a set of instructions. External rewards can be effective in motivating routine tasks. But because such algorithmic, rule-based, left-brain work has become easier to send offshore and to automate, this type of work has become less valuable and less important in advanced economies. Page 211

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Drive 199 notes

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