Modest Operations | Newsletter Volume 3

We're in that weird limbo period between Thanksgiving and Christmas / NYE where everyone's hesitant to start any major new projects, but they also want to tie up any loose ends before some time off. 

A combination of senioritis and the two-minute drill. 

Have a great week. 

This Week's Links A list of things I've been reading & thinking about. “Andrés:* I think Tony always saw himself as a man always on the edge of the good or the bad. It’s like a knife. It’s a very small edge, a very thin edge, but you have to be careful because you can cut yourself and you’ll never know what side of the knife’s blade you’re going to end up on.” - The Enormous Life of Anthony Bourdain, According to Those Who Knew Him Best(Drew Magary for GQ) * “A lot of the best work I’ve ever done started out as something completely different because I gave myself permission to have space around my time and expectations. It’s about being open to the idea that I’m the fucking pilot of this jet; I’m the one who has to decide all the stuff that happens in the Merlin Mann Enterprise. The more I accept that and build the relationships I want to have in order to make that work, the better off I am. It’s when I abdicate the power for that and start blaming the world for why things are the way they are that life goes tits-up.” - Merlin Mann (Merlin Mann for The Great Discontent) * "If you traffic in perfect, it pays to turn your perfect into a system, not simply wing it. In the last fifty years, thanks to Deming and Crosby and others, we’ve gotten significantly better at creating perfect outputs that don’t rely on heroism and luck. Design a better system, you’ll get better outputs." - Perfect Processes (Seth Godin for Seth's Blog) * "Susan and Renee ran Boat Street on a human scale, with real respect, care, and a minimum of stupid rules." - Delancey: A Man, a Woman, a Restaurant, a Marriage (by Molly Wizenberg)