Social Kinetic Energy & The Roseto Mystery (From Outliers)

I was waiting at the pharmacy at the local market today and a thought struck me like a hard rock thrown at my head. The idea was “Social Kinetic Energy”. I define it as the level of interactivity between individuals within a community (usually a town, city, or family).

I believe that the more interactions a person makes with someone, the more likely they are to be happy. This is because they are in touch with the world, the society around them. For example, working at the Guess! retail store has forced me to become more social, and greet all the customer that come in. Whether or not I am having a bad day, the very role of my job in greeting people makes me more social, and more happy. Imagine yourself in your daily life. Are you someone who interacts with a lot of people during the day? Or do you feel alone as you go about your day? Are the guy who people come to at work to chat about life or ask for help? Don’t these people seem to hold more power at work too, even if their positions do not have as much authority? Even leaders are more open and more aware of what is going on when they interact with more people.

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Marina Barbies vs. Mission Hipsters/Artists in San Francisco

San Francisco. The city with the coldest summer in the world. Well known to most locals but unbeknown to most visitors, the the San Francisco neighborhood has its own breed of females. These two tribes hate each other, and seem to have their own stereotypes of what types of guys they go for.

The Marina Girl

The first one is the notorious Marina Girl. The stereotypical Marina Girl hangs out with ex frat-boys. They are transplants from colleges all over the US that have since moved to the upscale neighborhood. Walking around the Marina on a Saturday night, I felt like I was at Toys R Us, in the Barbie section. There were all types. Brand-whore barbie, sports barbie running back from the gym, Legally Blonde barbie walking her chuwawa, and cougar barbie walking to a charity event with free drinks and an optional $10,000 donation.

In a well written definition from Urban Dictionary: Read more

Failing Fast

In business school, one of my professors taught me something very important. He said that the difference between a winner and a loser… is that the loser hasn’t failed enough. Winning business owners, he says, seldom achieve success on the first try. I believe this to be true.

People always ask our founders how we manage innovation at Google. Newspapers and publications will print quotes and headlines like “top 10 things Google does to foster innovation”. The truth is, put quite simply: we have a very unique culture and DNA, one that has not existed before. To truly understand this, one has to actually live on the Google campus for some time. Read more

Jeffy and Tim: Flawless Natural

In writing the naturalization of game on PUA Lingo, I came acorss a really funny clip of Jeffy and Tim promoting Flawless Natural. There’s some great material in this product and there is no doubt that in the next few years, more models will be developed for creating more internal based game learning.