So, you're a willing and eager participant in capitalism?

fudcap is an unstructured collection of ideas and excerpts which have stuck with the author and they find themselves returning to often.  The content here sits in one of two themes: working on yourself, and working on business.  None of it is self-help content, empirical data, or should by any means be used in isolation as a single source of truth.  Instead consider each a point on a perimeter — a messy perimeter — from which you may be able to triangulate your own methods.

Modus operandi

1. Further to Einstein's misattributed definition of insanity: what got you where you are now won't get you where you want to go next.
2. If you don't change direction you may end up where you are headed.  Excelling at things which no longer matter leads to failure more than poor performance.
3. There is no guaranteed path to success, it comes down to luck and luck is often created for us by others.
4. If you want to succeed increase your Luck Surface Area with the Gaddie Pitch.
5. Build brands for your ideas; make it a thing. It gives them mass, gravity.  Others get drawn in.
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6. Adding more isn't always the best way forward; but it will be harder work to reduce an idea.
7. Pursuing "best imaginable" leads to remarkable.  "Good enough" leads to ordinary.
8. The Cynefin Framework determines how much to care in any context and Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions Theory helps with relevance.
9. The firmer your priorities are the easier it is to say no.
10. You are what you don't automate.
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11. Learn to recognise Pace Layers and how they spin.  Most of what you see around you is not a set system but a series of opportunistic process.
12. Work out where The Cluetrain Manifesto was right and where idealistic.
13. Read Mencken's Notes On Journalism 18 September 1926 or The Basic Laws Of Human Stupidity.
14. You can learn something from everyone and it’s amazing what happens when it doesn’t matter who gets the credit.
15. Liking, agreeing with, or respecting someone are separate things.  If in doubt be respectful.

Alan Cohen, 1993, The Dragon Doesn't Live Here Anymore

No connection to Lao Tzu found.

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Abigail Posner, 22 April 2015, Google Firestarters

“Whatever you work on, give it a name.”

Build brands for your ideas.  Define everything you do as a thing.  More mass, stronger gravity.  Others are drawn in.

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Jason Roberts, 2010, Codus Operandi

"Your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated."

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H.L. Mencken, 18 September 1926, The Baltimore Sun

"No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.  Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.  The mistake that is made always runs the other way.  Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more.  This assumption is a folly."

As the passage appeared, syndicated to The Chicago Tribune the following day.

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Stewart Brand, 18 January 2018, Journal of Design and Science

"Fast learns, slow remembers.  Fast proposes, slow disposes.  Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous.  Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution.  Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy.  Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power."

"The job of fashion and art is to be froth—quick, irrelevant, engaging, self-preoccupied, and cruel."

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