Monday Morning Coffee

Recently, I finished reading the book Designing Virtual Worlds by Richard Bartle. Made by the creator of MUD (widely considered to be the first MMO), it goes over best practices for creating a persistent, multiplayer experience. One thing I noticed about DVW right out the gate, however, is that it’s pretty old — so old, in fact, that the book came out just one year (!) before World of Warcraft, the game now considered to be the ultimate template in MMO-crafting. This antiquity made me curious… just how much have MMOs changed?

The humanities are a complicated subject. They are much more vague than the sciences, relying more on notions of what things ought to be rather than how things actually are. Because of this, they’ve always been a sore spot in traditional modes of learning. Is there a way of improving it?

For the past few years, all of my working schedule has revolved around five activities. In this post, I’ll go over these concepts — read, think, make, share, and monetize — and explain why I think they’re vital for any entrepreneur’s success.

I’ve always had trouble with the traditional methods of learning: classroom approaches, study groups, and intensive memorization never really did much for me. But now I feel like I’m beginning to settle into a method that may work for me, and I’m interested in sharing it with all of you.

Many people seem to believe that science is an end-all be-all when it comes to discerning fact from fiction. But is our current theory of the experimental method really that powerful, or does it come with its own imperfections?

You’d think at first glance that being yourself is an easy topic that all of us could master. The truth is a little bit more complicated.

In continuation of my “easy win” posts in order to catch up for the new year, I thought it might be interesting to some to see what my daily schedule is, and how it might compare to the average person.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two types of people in this world, two that are often ignorant of the other’s existence. They are the structure-seeking, and the structure-averse — those who make, and those who work.

Prestige is something that tempts us all. A good job, a good house, a good car — they are signals, signals to others that we’ve seen success and we know what we’re doing. But how did they originate, and why have we become so addicted to them?

After going back and forth with it for some time, I recently got back into taking cold showers in the morning. On one hand, they’re unpleasant. On the other, they have a variety of health benefits, both physical and mental. But perhaps no benefit of cold showers I find bigger than that of momentum.

Honor and glory are seen now as archaic concepts from history. But if honor and glory still exists now, what does it look like?

My number one prediction for the 2020s is that education will end. Not education in general, of course, but certainly education as we know it.

There are some people that I hear on videos or otherwise read about, and think Why the hell did they get so dumb? What happened?. These aren’t the traditional morons, no — these are the people who made sweeping, revolutionary changes in their industry or are otherwise considered geniuses of their craft, who have gone on to a different venture only to sod the whole thing up. This event is what I’d like to call the Ben Carson effect.

Most of us know how biological evolution works; good old Darwinian science, natural selection, etc. etc. But, in the modern age, our societies transform and evolve at a much faster rate than any possible mutation. So, why is that?

When we think of productivity, we typically think about machines, or automation, or efficiency planning. But can you get to a higher level of productivity using nothing but people?

When we want to understand the success of a product launch, we use KPIs — key performance indicators — to figure out what went right and what went wrong. But, what if we want to understand the success of our lives? What indicators do we use?

If you’re in the business of business, you’ve probably been knocked on the head at least a thousand times about how networking is vital for your career. Well, I’ve got bad news: you’ve been lied to. Networking doesn’t work.

So this is not the sort of topic I dive into often. Perhaps some of my blog posts wax on the philosophical, but I try to stay away from the large abstractions that philosophy can create. So, why am I choosing now to talk about relative morality?

There are many different structures to art, whether it be music, film, games, or otherwise. But to an artist, each art form can have its own use — either as inspiration, or as education.

A while back I was checking out some models that free to play games used to gain revenue. I realized that, to an extent, virtually all these models could be used for apps — but no one was trying it.

In the internet age, widespread witch hunting and social media monitoring makes it less and less likely to recover from even a simple mistake. Or does it?

Technology tends to have a remarkably short half-life. New innovations are made almost on a daily basis. So how do you protect yourself against the time decay of tech? Well, you focus on something else — taste.

In this post, I’ll be talking about immortality. No, not biological immortality — but something I believe to be just as good, if not better.

A surprising amount of success can be chalked up to showing up, each and every day. So why do we not acknowledge it?

The author Nassim Taleb describes the narrative fallacy as a belief that there is a story in everything, even though there is not. While the narrative fallacy can hurt you in some cases, it can also be used to your advantage.

We talk a lot about what mental models work. But what about which ones don’t?

A lot of people in this world are off, in some way. On the internet, we see them pass by in comment sections and social media posts. But who are they, and what becomes of them?

In this post, I’m going to talk about death. More specifically, I’m going to talk about how death has changed — how death influenced the way we see online, and how online has influenced the way we see death.

As the mental health crisis continues to loom over our heads, we’ve noticed an astonishing pattern emerge: diagnoses of anxiety disorders, particular social anxiety, are skyrocketing. Now the question is: why?

When people start creating, they believe in a reality that people will listen to them right out of the gate. But in order to last, you have to build a mindset to create simply for one person: yourself.

We live in a world where widespread scrutiny exists over actions and everything is naked through the internet. The wide majority of people who have been ‘cancelled’ now likely didn’t expect their actions to give them persecution when they were first made. So, what are the chances it will happen to you?

I once overheard a saying from an old proprietor of some local store in rural Arizona: “Sometimes, life takes you up Shit Creek.”

If there was one thing that was vitally important for you to learn, it would be communication. There's little we do in the modern world that doesn't at least somewhat relate to communicating with others. Often, we are trying to get others to agree with us -- to see our view on why we should have a job, or a relationship, or even the last piece of cake in the fridge. Here are five tips that will allow for your success on all those occasions!

Now that I’ve passed into the career stage of my life, I’ve done a fair bit of thinking as to what I would have done differently. Here are my lessons learned.

In the business cycle, companies grow and stagnate. Similarly, on a macro-level, they aggregate and decouple.

There are many different theories of management, and real life takes bits and pieces from each one. But few of them revolve specifically around the people who you’re working with — so, this theory serves to add on a social factor as well.

Evolution means the constant splitting of genes and species into bigger and better forms. Humans came out of a split from the chimpanzees. But what will happen when a genetically better race of humans comes into existence?

There’s a lot of debate in the business world on whether every customer should be a sought after one. I take a different approach — I say the customer takes care of itself.

Everything you do sucks. So why worry so much about it?

In order for startups to thrive, they must quickly accumulate monopoly positions in massive emerging markets. But what if you aren’t a startup? What if… you’re just a person?

Most of life is inherently uncertain. How can we predict these events — and should we even bother trying?

We all know money is relative. A thousand dollars in Montana is going to do you a lot better than a thousand dollars in Manhattan. But here’s a question: is it not just relative location-wise, but emotion-wise as well?

Original blog post: https://jacob-robinson.com/2020/12/07/emotional-equivalent-salary/ 

I have a set of principles. One of the big ones is to ‘always forgive someone the first time they make a mistake’. In this post, I want to elaborate on this, as well as give some thoughts on punishment and forgiveness more generally.

After I started my company and began building products, a curious thought appeared in my mind. Is building a startup while having high anxiety even possible?

Original blog post: https://jacob-robinson.com/2020/12/21/building-a-startup-with-anxiety/