Category: misc

the iron quadrangle

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

I was talking with a friend tonight about “The Iron Quadrangle” – my name for a concept that I’ve read about and pondered over the years.  Unfortunately, I can’t remember where I first saw it; happily, we agreed that this means I can restate it without attribution . . .

So here is the rule of the Iron Quadrangle:

Friends, family, work and health are the four most meaningful areas of pursuit in life.  The very best that most people can achieve is to be outstanding in two areas, mediocre in one, and barely tolerable in the last.

Be wary of any advice that rigidly proclaims to know which combination is best for everyone.  For example, a lot of well-meaning homilies put family and health above all other values.  But the Iron Quadrangle means that all four values are connected; activity in any one informs all of the others.

Keep in mind that health includes physical and mental health; and that work includes all vocation, whether in pursuit of profit or pursuit of a cause.  Meaningful and lasting friendships are a critical contributor to lifelong health.  Pursuit of your true calling in work should be both emotionally enriching and intellectually revitalizing.

So maximizing your pursuit of family and health, to the exclusion of full effort with friends and work, can limit your achievement in the areas you would want to advance the most.  Would you have given all that you could to your life partner and your children if you never tested your mettle with the greatest challenges at work, or failed to develop rich friendships outside of your family?

Some will try to argue for picking work and family, or friends and family, or health and friends.  Some would claim that the limitation to two outstanding areas is false.  But in my experience and observation, the Iron Quadrangle is pitiless and brooks very few exceptions – and what exceptions I have seen are more a result of extremely fortuitous circumstances than the result of thought and effort.

This isn’t a pessimistic message, but rather a reflection on avoiding regret.  Many high-achieving people in every area look upon their accomplishments with regret for the areas in which they did not excel.  I think regret is only appropriate where people made choices while lying to themselves about the consequences for the other areas.

faith and reason and startups

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

Faith is often mischaracterized as the opposite of reason, a belief held outside of rationality. But irrational belief is not faith, it’s just simpleminded credulity. And those who have no reasons other than reason are no less simple.

Faith and reason, properly understood, are intertwined sources of truth. The encyclical Fides et Ratio states this more elegantly:

Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth

In this light, I contemplated Fred Wilson’s note about investing on faith. The implication for some may be that this is investing without reason. However, Wilson’s leap of faith is no less legitimate than “pure” reason. Unlike religion, truth for startups has an ultimate arbiter in this plane of existence: return on investment. There are legions of startups that had all the reasons in the world to succeed – great idea, huge market, killer team – and yet they failed nonetheless. I’d bet that experienced startup investors have succeeded as many times on what Wilson calls faith as they have by stacking up reasons.

Coincidentally, the next day, Steve Blank posted on the startup transition from faith to facts. It might seem hard to argue with his view that startups begin on faith and must quickly move to facts to succeed. Again, I wouldn’t draw the divide that sharply. I’d say faith is a requirement throughout the journey, and so are facts. From day one, you must believe in what you’re doing, have faith informed by reason. And also from day one, you must engage with the facts; endlessly and relentlessly collect, examine and act on available facts with all your reason supported by your faith.

social media cheat sheet

~ ginsu ~ 2 Comments

I tweeted a friend’s WSJ post, and he asked me why the update didn’t show up on my Facebook status.  Damn, I was afraid someone would ask me that someday.  The reason is that I use extremely precise and entirely idiosyncratic rules for how I publish personal social media.  Here is a cheat sheet:

social site receives from publishes to primary purpose
Facebook FriendFeed no external publishing for both personal and professional contacts to get mostly personal updates from me
Twitter no external sources FriendFeed for me to broadcast updates to contacts as well as strangers
ginsudo blog Flickr FriendFeed, LinkedIn open publication of longer form pieces, often for blatant self-promotion
LinkedIn ginsudo blog no external publishing distributes professional info only, to professional contacts only
Flickr no external sources Facebook, FriendFeed, ginsudo blog photo sharing for contacts and strangers
FriendFeed Twitter, Flickr, ginsudo blog Facebook (thru FF app) for social media junkies to get as much public me as there is, without much personal detail
Google profile no external sources open publication in case someone Googling me searches for “gene yoon” instead of “ginsu yoon”
Picasa Picasa desktop private links only photo sharing for family and friends
private blog no external sources no open publication therapy notes, homemade platitudes, risqué pictures, cartoons, country music lyrics

To the untrained eye, this may seem somewhat insane – that’s ridiculous, it’s completely insane.

madness, I say, it's madness!

Updated 29 Apr 2010: Finally decided what I wanted to do since Facebook acquired FriendFeed.  Going to hook up blog, Flickr and Twitter directly to Facebook, disconnect FriendFeed app from Facebook.  This means that the things that I previously shared to siloed audiences, I now share to all audiences, and I share them through Facebook as a central sharing point.  Which of course, is exactly what Facebook wanted from the FriendFeed acquisition.

breaking the seal

~ ginsu ~ 1 Comment

Why bother?

Blogging’s dead, isn’t it?  Calcanis quit, hating the haters.  Arrington was pushed out by unreasonable expectations and expectoration.  The 250 have moved on to Twitter, where they are all already plotting to move off to the next big thing that you don’t know about.

So there’s no glory to gain here.  In fact, for me there’s only downside to exposure.  I’ve got a prominent role at a company that’s still climbing out of its hype cycle.  I’ll have to avoid some of the topics that I’m most familiar with, since I’m not going to say too much about my work.  And it’s not like I have a whole lot of interesting hobbies to fill the gap, notwithstanding a minor OCD compulsion to pick sentences out of The Great Gatsby.  This is just asking for ridicule.  So again:  Why bother?

The best answer I can give has to do with how I used to pick bars in New York.  This was more than a decade ago, but it’s probably still the same today:  When a hot new nightspot opens up in NYC, you can’t get in.  They put up the velvet ropes, celebs on the A-list get ushered past the line, the bouncers don’t let anyone in, so everyone else can only read the gossip rags about just how cool the place is.

But in less than a year or so, the hot new place isn’t so new or so hot anymore.  The A-list has moved on to the next place.  Now you can get in, but you probably don’t want to.  The place is stuffed with bridge-and-tunnel dorks, assorted Eurotrash, and other doofi who are overjoyed to stand where their favorite star stood just months ago, thrilled to wait in line to fight the crowd to catch the bartender to overpay for watery drinks.

I developed this fine theory Temple Bar, at Lafayette and Houston in NYC.
I developed this fine theory at Temple Bar, at Lafayette and Houston in NYC.

Ah but then, but then . . . in another year or so, the doofi have moved on.  And the place has some good bones:  the owners invested some coin in this place, and it shows.  Good location, swank interior, broad top-shelf selection, attractive service.  They’ve fired the bouncers, mothballed the velvet ropes, and lowered their prices.  The status-seekers and tourists wouldn’t be caught dead in this place.  The locals are starting to check the place out, some are becoming regulars, and they’re a friendly, interesting group.  Now it’s a good time to go.

And that’s how I think of blogging now.  Well past its coolest days, but man it’s easy to get to, everything’s clean and works well, and you sure can’t complain about the price.