The Hacker Way: How I taught my nephew to program
As kids, we are often instructed to “finish our food.” To be responsible for something we've taken up. To see things through. But does that strategy work for helping kids learn and get deeply interested in something?
Not quite.
Learning needs a fair amount of experimentation, iteration, and play. If you make the cost of dropping a book, a project, or a course too high for your kid, they will be wary of taking more things up in the future. They will fear the prospect of losing interest and yet being forced to complete what they had undertaken. They will begin to dislike learning.
But it is natural to lose interest and move on to other things. That's how you find where your sincere interests lie in. And that's what the author talks about in this essay, amongst other things.
Why do so many brands change their logos and look like everyone else?
"There’s nothing bad in wanting your logo to look simpler, better, mobile-ready, or universal enough to appeal to the broadest possible audience.
But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Shoot for simplicity and legibility, but keep your distinguishing features. Don’t throw away what the brand has been working on for decades.
Otherwise, you may end up in a situation where you could slap any logo on any product and hardly anyone would notice a difference."
Own the Demand
All tech products are a combination of multiple layers of technology and services coming together to provide you with a seamless experience. And the more layers you outsource to third-party vendors, the more control you give up around your product, the experience, and your profits.
“If somebody successfully inserts themselves between you and your customer, they can exercise tremendous control over you, including taking a big chunk of your profits or outright killing you.”
This is also something I've written about in the past as a part of my #100DaysofMBA series on LinkedIn.
Some Food for Thought
"We went through that stage at Apple where we went out and we thought,
“Oh we're gonna be a big company, let's hire professional management.”
We went out and hired a bunch of professional management. It didn't work at all. Most of them were bozos. They knew how to manage but they didn't know how to do anything! And so, well if you're a great person, why do you want to work for someone you can't learn anything from?
And you know what's interesting?
You know who the best managers are?
They are the great individual contributors who never ever want to be a manager but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them."
— Steve Jobs
Okay folks, that’s it for today! I’ll see you with another edition of the newsletter tomorrow morning. Till then, take care and enjoy your Sunday.
