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The sole reason I work out like I do isn’t to prepare for and win ultra races. I don’t have an athletic motive at all. It’s to prepare my mind for life itself. Life will always be the most grueling endurance sport, and when you train hard, get uncomfortable, and callous your mind, you will become a more versatile competitor, trained to find a way forward no matter what. Because there will be times when the shit life throws at you isn’t minor at all. Sometimes life hits you dead in the fucking heart.
Can't Hurt Me
David Goggins
The Working Backwards process is all about starting from the customer perspective and following a step-by-step process where you question assumptions relentlessly until you have a complete understanding of what you want to build. It’s about seeking truth. Sometimes the Working Backwards process can uncover some surprising truths. Some companies, in a rush to get a project to market, ignore that truth and keep building according to the original plan. In their attachment to the modest gains of that plan, they motivate the team to pursue it aggressively, only to realize much later that there was a much bigger gain to be had if they’d taken the time to question their own assumptions. The cost of changing course in the PR/FAQ writing stage is much lower than after you’ve launched and have an operating business to manage. The Working Backwards process tends to save you from the expensive proposition of making a significant course change after you’ve launched your product. One example that illustrates this point is an issue that came up with S3. In the FAQ there was a simple question that read something like, “How much does S3 cost?” One of the first versions of the answer was that S3 would be a tiered monthly subscription service based on average storage use, with a possible free tier for small amounts of data. Customers would choose a monthly subscription rate based on how much data they typically needed to store—Simple Storage Service with simple pricing. We hadn’t worked out the exact details of the tiers and the prices for each tier, but you don’t have to do that in early iterations of the Working Backwards process. The engineering team was ready to move on to the next question. Except that day we never got to the next question. We kept discussing this question. We really did not know how developers would use S3 when it launched. Would they store mostly large objects with low retrieval rates? Small objects with high retrieval rates? How often would updates happen versus reads? How many customers would need simple storage (can easily be re-created, stored in only one location, not a big deal if you lose it) and how many would need complex storage (bank records, stored in multiple locations, a very big deal if you lose it)? All those factors were unknown yet could meaningfully impact our costs. Since we didn’t know how developers would use S3, was there a way to structure our pricing so that no matter how it was used, we could ensure that it would be affordable to our customers and to Amazon? Thus, the discussion moved away from a tiered subscription pricing strategy and toward a cost-following strategy. “Cost following” means that your pricing model is driven primarily by your costs, which are then passed on to your customer.
Working Backwards
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
“Electric cars are not the end of the oil era,” is the way that Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, puts it. Even if every other car sold in the world from now on were electric, he adds, oil demand would still grow. Cars and light trucks (SUVs and pickups), as pointed out earlier, constitute 35 percent of world oil demand—cars alone, about 20 percent. The rest of transportation consumption goes into heavy trucks, ships, trains, and airplanes. The global fleet of civilian airliners, while more efficient, was expected to double by 2040. That may now be pushed out a few years by the slower growth in passenger travel. Nevertheless, demand will return; over 80 percent of the world’s people have never been in an airplane.
The New Map
Daniel Yergin
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