If you must compromise, do so on the brilliance not culture

"Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men" says the unconventional title of the article a friend shared.

That sounds wrong, with all the talk of hiring only A players to build an A team. I found the article (written almost a 100 years ago) quite interesting though, simply because it went against conventional wisdom and offered an analysis to support the view. But it looks like the author completely missed the concept of a "Cultural Fit"

It looks like the author was looking at hardworking A-players to build a steady slow growing business. I would call them brilliant men too, men who have control over themselves and have figured out how to provide consistent low risk returns with good processes, hardwork and dedication. The author was however, not ready to handle the kind of brilliant men with bigger risk appetites who liked to shoot for the moon. Or the kind of men brilliant only in creating an illusion of brilliance. They would obviously contradict the culture he was looking to build.

Perhaps the maxim should be "Always hire brilliant men who fit with your values and culture. If you must compromise, do so on the brilliance"

What affects our energy levels?

I have been observing what affects the level of energy I have to work on something, and how to optimize it.
My first "Equation" was that, we had a long term base level formed by good / bad habits (health, inner peace etc). Our "state of mind" then acted as a multiplier on short term modifiers like level of sleep, hunger, coffee and so on influence the amount of energy we had at any point. But after some discussion with friends and observation, I realized that this is only our store of "potential energy".

We also need a trigger (or "Do Work") to convert this into Kinetic energy that is actually used. Tiggers could be a deadline, an interesting project, good company, energetic environment, force of habit, nice weather or probably even Coffee.

To optimize for energy, we need to watch our potential energy reserves and keep them high, and then look for triggers that allow us to use them. And then be mindful of how fast an activity drains our potential energy reserve. For an introvert like me, talking to people drains my reserve pretty fast, while being in the zone working on an interesting project is a much slower drain.

What should you measure?

One of my thrusts this year is to understand myself better using data and objective analysis. 

The way I am going about this is to collect whatever data I can, look for patterns, form hypotheses, and then try to verify them.

Online activity, Phone calls, location are some relatively easy ones. RescueTime can help you track your computer activity, phone logs can be obtained (with difficulty) from phone companies, and location data from foursquare or a similar API. Fitbit tells you how active you were. These require little effort,  but might not give all the information you need to measure performance.

Other things like mood, productivity, output, food consumption are more specific but require more effort to collect.

The challenge is to figure out how to collect maximum relevant data with minimal disruption.

Pull or push?

I think there are 2 types of innovation - The pull, and the push.

Pull is more lean-startup. Look for the lowest hanging fruit, pluck it as fast as possible, and iterate. A consumer problem creates demand for a solution which pulls development of solution. Like Dropbox. And I think Amazon was pretty lean too.

Push, on the other hand is more like traditional research. Someone feels Solution X will benefit the world, builds it and pushes it into the market. Like Tesla, SpaceX.

There is a lot of focus on lean startups these days, but I think we need a balance of both. While pull innovation reduces risk and forces companies to start creating value quickly, we also need a healthy dose of wild swings and huge bets to keep shaking things up and push new ideas into the market.

After all, greedy algorithms don't always lead to the best solutions.