difficulty

June 4th, 2009 by William Shank

I remember once having a discussion with a guy who knew a lot about professional basketball. He had read an article from a big sample of NBA players who they felt would be the most formidable one-on-one opponent in the league. The answer was fairly unanimous: Vince Carter. Now that’s surprising. Why Carter and not Kobe Bryant or LeBron James or any number of other, far more accomplished, offensive players? The answer, this guy told me, was the same in nearly every case: “you have no idea how hard it is to do the things that Carter does.”

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Creative work, summarized

May 16th, 2009 by William Shank

In the time you set aside each day to work your ass off, ignore anything that makes you consider stopping.

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to make a change

March 12th, 2009 by William Shank

Two stories that I know I should be learning from:

  • Paul Graham on overcoming distractions. By creating an Internet-Only computer.
    Quote:

    I now leave wifi turned off on my main computer except when I need to transfer a file or edit a web page, and I have a separate laptop on the other side of the room that I use to check mail or browse the web. (Irony of ironies, it’s the computer Steve Huffman wrote Reddit on. When Steve and Alexis auctioned off their old laptops for charity, I bought them for the Y Combinator museum.)My rule is that I can spend as much time online as I want, as long as I do it on that computer. And this turns out to be enough.

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