John Biesnecker
I am a mobile/web product designer living in Shanghai.
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We now return to our regularly scheduled programming. 18 days in Austin were fantastic, and now I'm back in Shanghai making plans.
Cardinals 9, Nationals 7. The Cardinals win their NLDS series in the same way they've won over the last two years — at the last minute, in the most dramatic fashion possible. My oh my do I love baseball.
Personal MBA: Deep Survival. Survival (both physical survival and survival in your endeavors) adapting your mental models to reality, having contingency plans, and knowing how to act when the worst happens.
The worries of parenting with technology. As a parent, I worry about how my kids interact with technology, and how I can help them navigate the world in which they live without letting them give up too much of the natural childhood experiences that past generations enjoyed.
Personal MBA: Driven. Four fundamental drives — to acquire, to bond, to learn, and to defend — are what make us human.
2012 in books (part 7). After a couple of weeks of serious reading, I hit my goal. Huzzah! Almost a full quarter early, too.
Personal MBA: Brain Rules. Twelve simple rules about how the three-pound lump of meat behind your eyes works, and how you can use your knowledge of these rules to improve your life (and maybe the rest of the world while you're at it).
Personal MBA: Thinking, Fast and Slow. Modern cognitive psychology might be a total mindfuck, but at least it's a ridiculously interesting one.
Making goals reality. A simple approach to stop the rampant ๅ้่ๅบism I've been struggling with for years, and accomplish the goals I've set for myself.
Today I learned. I learn little things every day, and it seems like it might be fun to keep track of those things so I can look back at them later.
Personal MBA: Bargaining for Advantage. Turns out that bargaining is a lot more interesting than it seemed.
Personal MBA: Thinking Statistically. Statistics are used constantly to explain, prove, and apologize, mostly (I think) because so few people know how to handle them correctly. This tiny little book aims to correct that.
Personal MBA: Go It Alone!. Technology has made it easier than ever for a solo entrepreneur to create, maintain, and build a profitable business without taking on significant debt or working himself to death.
Personal MBA: The Power of Less. In an age of material wealth and incredible efficiency, it's easy to get lost in accumulation, when in reality what we all really long for is less, but with more meaning and quality.
Personal MBA: 48 Laws of Power. The power struggles that defined noble courts may have changed form (the boardroom doesn't involve nearly so many summary executions), but the value of learning how to gain, maintain, and wield power hasn't diminished.
Personal MBA: Thinking in Systems. The universe is a collection of complex, non-linear, deeply interconnected systems with which our mental models have a really hard time dealing. That makes figuring out how to make things better a little bit tricky.
How to read more. Reading more is one of the best things I've done in the last few years. Even for someone that likes reading like I do, there are some tricks that can make becoming a voracious reader a lot easier to accomplish.
Embarking on the Personal MBA. Business school sounds like fun, but it's just not practical for me right now. This looks like the next best thing.
Product design for chimps. A presentation on human-enhancing product design given at Barcamp Shanghai Fall 2012.
Anything worse. A little perspective and levity never hurt anyone.
Beijing, and thoughts on the permanent (mobile) revolution. Vacations force you out of your device comfort zone, and give you a chance to reexamine that zone from the outside.
My Barcamp Shanghai Clojure presentation. A (very) short introduction to Clojure given at Barcamp Shanghai Spring 2012.
Solving Pell's equations with the Chakravala method and Clojure. In which we implement a thousand year old algorithm in Clojure to solve a Project Euler problem.