Odd question:
When did you take your twitter picture?
http://twitter.com/sebastmarsh
You look very different between the two photos.

Enjoyed. Though, instead of humanitarian, I would say emotion. You need to connect with people on both an emotional and rational level to sell anything and get them to do anything. The root of the humanitarian efforts is emotion, for better or worse.

Wow. Very interesting. First, you write exactly the way that you talk. It's quick. It's train of thought. It's passionate. For some reason, it reminds me of Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men.

You've definitely become more honest and aggressive recently. Sometimes when you want to get shit done you have to not skirt around issues and really tackle the problems people are afraid to go for directly. I've recently been following this route at work and I've gotten amazing results that have given me incredible leverage. Sure, I've upset some coworkers (higher ed is slow, tactical, and linear), but my effectiveness has shot through the roof. It's interesting to compare it all to your recent results as you tweak your philosophy.

I've been reading as many of your posts as I can, emailed you to help you out, and watched your videos. What I can't seem to figure out yet is what kind of project you're working on. I get that you're building this incredible team that can pivot easily to provide great results, you are working for some incredibly wealthy guy, and you've done more in a short period of time than a whole team has done in months. Still, what the fuck are you doing?

Regardless, great work. You seem like an interesting person to work with. It looks like you're the type of person who either fucking kills it or goes down in flames. I'm the same way so it's exciting to watch. Best of luck with your hiring and project!

@Ricardo, I think he mentioned hospitality business somewhere in his recent posts - technical solution or marketing or something... You'll need to search the website for keywords, 'hotel' might help too. It's interesting - the amount of content here is mindblowing and still, most of it doesn't mention the project in detail.

2007.

Thanks!

Re: which industries my projects are in... I can share with you the interesting details, OR the boring details, but not both. Come now, if our top competitor knew we were recruiting away their best salespeople that would make it a lot harder to do so.

Hey Sebastian, have you read Eliyahu Goldratt? If you didnt you will love it! So many things in common with what you think (For the little skim I did, I will watch all later)

Mainly The Goal, wh9ich is a business novel teaching the principles and The Choice (Imo the greatest of them all, really make you think)

I agree that emotion is important, but I think there's more to good humanitarianism than just following your emotions.

As Seb indicates in his video as well, "Rational" isn't *quite* the right word for the right either.

I would break it down using another set of concepts Seb outlines for us today.

I think that the Left is people who value Strategy more than Tactics *in the realm of Governance*. The Right values governance tactics, at the expense of often losing sight of governance Strategy.

Not to say the right doesn't use strategy. For instance, they often advocate good financial strategy. But the goal is to keep the Government running (tactics), not what the Government should be achieving (strategy).

/insert mirror argument for left.

Politics is a polarizing field. That is, benefits accrue to the extremes in politics. So a Left and Right emerges.

But personally, I think neither extreme is virtuous. Sure, the extremes illustrate the virtues of both levels of governance. But, as Seb illustrates, the ideal is actually to correctly value good governance, both in strategy and in tactics that can actually accomplish the strategy's goals.

You may look at markov chains to give you an easier handle on representing your probabilistic machinery. I have yet to check out Moltke's stuff, but I can say that the relevant equipment for doing that kind of calculation didn't exist in his lifetime. I'd bet you could represent many of the monetary calculations you describe with a simple matrix operation. Better still, the markov representation will bring a lot of expressiveness to the situation you are trying to model, and might yield some non-obvious strategy implications.

There is a classic problem about how to decide on a betting strategy as a prisoner trying to gamble with your guard to buy your freedom when the deck is stacked against you, the solution to which involves betting exactly enough to win your freedom while you have that ability, and placing the minimum bet otherwise (if memory serves). If you could usefully add an out-of-money failure point and allowed decisions that did not immediately yield success (ie different levels of contingent failure) to your problem definition, a similar strategy might emerge.

You made some strong points above that I will have to reflect on. Cheers.

Video is a natural extension of your shamelessness. By putting more of yourself in public, you get more feedback to help you improve more quickly in addition to communicating more information per second. (I still wanted transcripts, though.)