I'm doing 18 things
1. I read this book on the weekend called the Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It is quite insightful and floored me several times.
2. To summarize: Suppose you are a turkey. For a thousand days a human comes into your coop and feeds you. Based on induction you will theorize that humans love you and care for you. And it’s the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving. In other words we cannot foresee unforeseeable events. And yet these events can have huge consequences.
3. Reality because of feedback loops is rarely Gaussian. A Gaussian means you have a nice bell curve where the average case is the only one you need to worry about. Reality mostly because of feedback loops and interdependencies between things has huge outliers and we ignore them at our peril. These outliers can be both positive or negative. The main point is: (a) they are huge, (b) they are more likely than we think they are, (c) they are unpredictable and unknowable.
(I promise this will connect back with the iPhone app. Just hang in there.)
4. Given that this is how things are what should we do? If you are an options trader then the best strategy is: put 95% of your money into hyper-conservative investments and put 5% of your money into hyper-risky, completely irresponsible, slightly insane investments. In other words drive the 5% like it’s your parents’ car.
5. This is the only strategy that makes sense because we have no idea how to estimate risks. Risk estimates are totally made up. These estimates are no better than astrology—in fact more dangerous because they are taken more seriously.
Finally, the moment you have been waiting for my gentle reader. We finally connect this with the iPhone app Job Frenzy http://bit.ly/jobfrenzy.
6. My full-time job is my 95% safe investment. I play it safe there. I avoid doing things like going in barefoot for example. The iPhone app on the other hand is my 5% crazy money. It’s my parents’ car. And I am so used to playing it safe that I have been playing it safe with this app as well.
7. Now my risk aversion is totally stupid. First I am making just enough money from it to buy coffee sometimes. So the downside is extremely limited. Even if my risk-taking blows up in my face all I lose is my periodic cup of mediocre coffee. But if it works, the upside could be much bigger: I might be able to have two cups of coffee and maybe even a slice of a luscious looking Pullman cake with fresh cream and strawberries on some days.
8. So here is what I did. Instead of the innocuous landing page copy that I had before which read at best like a dull marketing brochure from a dull large corporation, and at worst like a spam e-mail, I rewrote the landing page so it sounds like a letter to a friend.
Here is what it sounds like now. Let’s see what happens.
Job Frenzy 1.2
I came back from lunch one afternoon and discovered that half my team had been fired. So I went into panic mode. I downloaded all the iPhone job apps I could find. But either they had features I didn’t need which got in the way or they were missing important features I needed. They were all awkward.
So I decided to write an app that I could use to find real jobs. This was how Job Frenzy was created.
Here are some reasons I love using it:
- Job Frenzy has a simple intuitive UI which means you can scan through jobs quickly and pick the ones you like.
- It gets jobs from Monster, Dice, LinkedIn, and many other sites. So this means you get a lot of jobs in one place.
- It let’s you save jobs and then e-mail them to yourself which means you can send resumes later from your desktop.
- You can also send jobs to your friends who are hurt by the recession—they’ll appreciate it.
- Job Frenzy was developed using Extreme Programming which means it runs fast, lean, and stable, and keeps your phone data usage low.
- I am using Job Frenzy for my own job search so I will keep updating it and will make sure it does a great job. You’ll get the latest features as soon as they become available.
Here are some testimonials I got from beta users:
“Really useful.” — ZS.
“Puts all these jobs at my finger tips — literally.” — ZF.
“I like it.” – MJ.
