Stever's blog

The romans had no real concept of “multiplication”. Reason being is that their roman numeral system was so inefficient, you had to be a friggin’ genius to multiply two numbers together. Only geniuses could do it. The incas/indians, had a much more efficient numerical system, and could multply only because their numerical systems made it easy. They weren’t necessarily any SMARTER, per se, they just had a formal system that fit well with the concept of multiplication. (Oddly enough, concepts like the wheel had yet to be invented in Incan culture, even though it was obvious to the Romans).

We think better by inventing different representations. it’s something that we computer scientists strive to do. Programming languages like Hakell, Ruby or Lisp (my current favorite) makes this easy to do.

Lately I’ve been intrigued with the concept of self-reference. The subject is covered quite well in a book called Godel, Escher, Bach (which is pure genius, in my opinion). The ramifications that self-reference has for logic and programming are immense. Anyway, here’s a clever xkcd comic:

Here’s a youtube video that further illustrates this concept:

A shoe factory sends two marketing scouts to a region of Africa to study the prospects for expanding business.
One reports back: “Situation hopeless. No one wears shoes.”
The other reports back: “Glorious business opportunity. . . they have no shoes!”

In life, a different perspective is everything.

Hey guys,

I just hired 50 people today. This is what they look like.

Question for any hackers reading this blog. . . does anyone have any other good crowdsourcing ideas? If so, please comment.

Crowdsourcing example

Holy fuck. . .

This picture is OLD SCHOOL!!!!

I just put a web page up for the Los Angeles internet cafe I’m setting up in North Hollywood. I’m starting with 2 terminals. Yeah, I know, not much of an internet center, but it’s a start at least. It’s more of an experiment, really. You see, my printing business is going south and trying to make money off of copies is a joke. The only thing that’s making money here are headshots. Maybe renting internet terminals could become profitable, who knows.

We’ll see how it goes I guess. I think the main reason I’m doing it is that it’s passive income; it doesn’t take much to service the customers. This gives me more time for my side projects.

Straight from my twitter:
steveeq1: By religious belief, shouldn’t ALL Christians who believe in Jesus’ teachings be unanimously against war?
dancremeans: @steveeq1 it depends on HOW you interpret Jesus’ teaching, and there are many.K
steveeq1: @dancremeans: Yeah, when Jesus said “Love your enemies”, I think he probably meant don’t kill them.

har har, owned!

One of the ways I judge the competence of a startup is finding out how many experiments it can do per dollar. Here’s a good quote from Gary Hamel, I couldn’t agree more:

Yet to outpace change, every organization is going to have to master the art of rapid prototyping. Here the goal is to maximize the ratio of learning over investment — to find the sweet spot of demand for a new product, or perfect a nascent business more rapidly and inexpensively than your competitors. Listen to Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, on this point: “Our goal is to have more at bats per unit of time and money than anyone else.” Your goal should be the same.

A good book I read recently was “A Drunkard’s Walk”:

Here’s another good quote about viewing entrepeneurship as a “possibility system”:

If Randomness Rules then your only defense is the so-called “law of large numbers”—that is, success follows from tryin’ enough stuff so that the odds of doin’ something right tilt your way; in my speeches I declare that the only thing I’ve truly learned “for sure” in the last 40 years is “Try more stuff than the other guy”—there is no poetic license here, I mean it.

The key is is to avoid big mistakes – so you can live long enough to try more things.

I work in a headshot printing/xerox place in the heart of NoHo. So I get tons of actors, actresses, agents, and producers walk into my store. Here is my advice to anyone who is trying to make it in the entertainment business in Los Angeles:

Good luck and bad luck are constantly swirling around you. But knowing how to use it is not luck!
I can never over-emphasize how much of a role luck plays in Hollywood. Being successful is often just being in the right place at the right time and not being the most beautiful or the most talented or whatever. So concentrate on putting yourself in a position to get lucky. Think of each social gathering/meeting/audition/whatever as a sort of a lottery. Each time you put yourself out there, it’s like scratching a lottery ticket. The more you scratch, the more likely you are to win, but most lottery tickets lose. So try to spread your bets across many projects instead of the one big jackpot. Make the cost of your failures cheap. You’re going to fail a lot at first, so get used to it.

Yes means maybe . . . no means maybe
See above rule. I got burned by this one myself. Things I thought were sure things ended up not panning out. Conversely, other things that I thought were disasters actually led to new and interesting things. Don’t necessarily think a “no” is a bad thing. It’s very hard to predict the future, so don’t try. Be aware of opportunities that come up when a “no” event happens.

You can learn more by studying Lindsay Lohan than you can by studying Grace Kelly
This is known as “survivorship bias”. People often pay too much attention to things that successful people did. That’s fine, but it’s also important to draw attention to things that the failures did wrong. Valuable data often lies in the misses, not the hits.

Opportunities are like buses. . . there’s always another one coming
This is actually a bit of business advice that a friend’s father gave me once, but it can be applied to acting. I’ve noticed this to be true in my own life as well.

Looking impressive vs being impressive.
I get a LOT of people that talk themselves up in my store. And the more I get to talking with them, the more I realize that the guy’s full of shit. People who excessively brag about themselves/accomplishments are generally overcompensating, I’ve noticed. The more you drill down, the more below average the person seems to be. General rule of thumb: the more expensive a guy’s sunglasses are, the more of a dipshit he is. Unfortunately, Hollywood is rampant with these assholes so beware.

Embrace failure!
Yeah, sounds paradoxical, I know, but it’s true. The word “failure”, has a negative connotation in the English language, and this has always bothered me. It kind of implies that you did something wrong and it’s something to be avoided. In my opinion, one of the biggest hindrances to success that people have is the need to avoid failure all the time. This is nonsense! Failure is not something that you should avoid, it should be something you embrace!

A good quote from Thomas Watson: If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate

Someone who is nice to you, but not nice to the waiter, is not a nice person
This rule never fails. Someone told this to me once and it’s resonated with me ever since. Remember this every time you have “lunch” with someone.

Hope this helps. Sometimes you can get the best advice from people who are OUTSIDE a given context, you get a different perspective.