Issue #12 · March 7th, 2016 · View in your browser

Becoming a real expert at anything requires three things: excellent mentorship, unabashed support from family and most importantly, tenacious + deliberate practice. Practice is deliberate when you're consciously working on the unusual and when you're actively thinking about how to improve. Basically: practice itself does not make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect. [Harvard Business Review]

Listen to Timothy Leary on matters of youth, virtual reality and technology. He explains how it's young people who brought down the Berlin Wall and how they “don't want to work on Maggie's farm no more”. He was indeed a captivating mind. [YouTube]

Chat bots are the future of computing because they allow instant interaction. You're sitting in a stadium and want some beer without leaving your seat? Asking a bot is a 10x better experience than downloading the stadium's app. No account to create, no interface to learn. Instant interaction. I talk a lot about “conversational UI” on Sundry because I think it's a very interesting space with lots of opportunities. [Ted Livingston]

Should we let people take pills to get over breakups? More generally, should we allow medicine to cure desire? There's a real ethics debate here. If you are in an abusive relationship and counselling/therapy/everything else failed, why shouldn't you be able to take a pill? This essay discusses the ethical criteria for chemically meddling with love. [Aeon]

Google engineers have built a neural network that can determine the location of any image quite accurately. Even though we humans can use signs like the type of vegetation, the language on a signpost, the neural network performed better. Its name is PlaNet. [MIT Tech Review]

Designing for the average person will lead your product to failure. In the 40s, US Air Force planes kept crashing. The problem was in their design. They tried to make a plane with the dimensions of an average person. Then, Gilbert Daniels came and they invented adjustable seats. Fascinating. [The Star]

“People don't buy a quarter-inch drill, they buy a quarter-inch hole.” It's the basic idea behind the Job-To-Be-Done framework that you shall keep in mind when inventing products. More relevant than demographics, IMHO. People don't buy your product (lawnmower), they buy the outcome (beautifully cut grass). [A Founder's Notebook]

*Thanks and have a nice week, 

Ulysse*