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High-Angle Photo of Robot · Free Stock Photo

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Vicious / virtuous cycles

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Jonathan Cutrer - iPhone 11 Pro Max

There are some vicious & virtuous cycles in using a lot of products.

Samsung and Apple make a lot of phones. Thus, they can reduce some of the costs by repeating some things. It’s generally cheaper to produce more of a thing.

Also, they can invest some profits into research.

If there’s a newcomer in the smartphone industry, they could have low prices to have a successful product. However, this will lead to low profits and low budgets allocated to research. This will bring low-quality products and fewer sales.

If a company invests in research, it will likely have better products, but it will need to increase the prices, which will reduce sales and, again, result in low profits.

It’s a big advantage – being the first in a niche.

It’s also a big advantage to be able to produce a lot of pieces of the same product.

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On group interviews

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Phạm Hồ Thanh - Talk

I remember my first group interview—in high school when I applied for a scholarship through Open Society Foundations Romania (now defunct: Fundația pentru o Societate Deschisă —Wikipedia).

I took an English test and passed, and then there was a group interview.

There were three people, me and two girls.

Imagine our situation: at an extreme, two girls next to each other, and me.

After some initial questions, we were supposed to talk to each other.

Now, imagine how the interview went – as you can imagine, the girls started talking to each other.

I didn’t get the interview. I don’t blame it solely on the group interview issue, but I think it’s one reason.

In college, I got some group interviews with student organizations.

At some point, an HR person came to hold a conference organized by one of the organizations that organized group interviews and bluntly said that group interviews are bad. There was a lot of laughter from the audience.

The manager of the NGO rose and said they organized a series of recruitment sessions and group interviews and how good they are for doing so—oh boy! They are the greatest.

The speaker softened his message but kept his ground – group interviews are not recommended.

How I view it: In group interviews, you need to talk, but you don’t need to talk to everyone. There’s no specific reason for which a person doesn’t get spoken to; the blame is collective. If no one wants to speak to X, for whatever reason, there’s not a single individual to blame this on.

Another thing is that evaluating a group of people becomes more complex (Differences between a panel discussion and a single speech—Blog de Olivian Breda). When you talk one-to-one, you get an idea of how a person is. When evaluating a group of people, this becomes more difficult.

A better solution? If you’re an NGO and have 1,000 people applying for ten positions, you could give each person a task that you need to do (writing a blog post or doing something that could benefit you). Then, provide a more challenging task to the remaining 100 people who do the first task. Then, only have interviews to ensure you can talk to the person, but don’t refuse people because you don’t like them for whatever reason. In the end, hire 20–30 people for the NGO and give them a lot of tasks at the beginning. After a while, you should have ten very motivated persons.

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I never make mistakes

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ms. Tibbetts - error

I recently went to a Vodafone store.

I went around lunch, and only one person was handling clients.

A line formed with quite a few persons.

At some point, a new person came to handle clients.

The last person on the old queue wanted to be the first on the new one.

She was told she should wait in line.

And now the point—she started telling others that there should be more queues, there was not enough staff, etc.

Was she right? Of course, it was a real issue. But it was not on topic.

The real topic was that she wanted to go in front of all the people.

When she started to speak about the secondary issue, she likely refused to admit that there was an issue.

It’s very hard to correct something if you don’t first admit there’s something wrong.

It’s not a pleasant solution – you must admit that you’ve made a mistake, apologize, and start from there.

The lady chose an excellent solution, but the issue will likely be there in the future.

The easy path leads to her happiness only.

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Missed opportunities

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Seven White Closed Doors

Romania is growing; we are getting some highways, and the general economic level is rising.

The thing is – we could have grown faster (see the Poland „shock therapy”), we could have had more highways, etc.

It’s nice that we are growing, but we don’t know how we could have grown further.

When we evaluate a situation, we don’t know the full consequences.

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Why read books? Why go to theatrical plays? Why attend conferences?

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Apply Conference MARTIE 2024

Why read books? Why go to theatrical plays? Why attend conferences? – these questions might be silly, but I think there’s a common answer to all of them.

The answer? Even if you can read a book summary, read at your own pace (perhaps faster) a theatrical play, and not attend a long conference, if you do things like these, you might notice things tend to stick.

It’s one thing to quickly go through an article or to have it explained in detail at a conference.

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Energy and fun

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The Phantom of The Opera

I’ve been to some concerts in my life.

I think there are two kinds of concerts:

  • When the artist is energetic, fun, and especially bold.
  • When the artist is just there to do their job.

Even when singing opera, you can be bold and make a show.

But I’ve been disappointed a few times by good voices and little to no energy.

It’s not enough to sing nicely; you need to do extra.

I even remember singers I didn’t especially like before, but I enjoyed their energy.

And, of course, being bold (even a bit over the board) helps.

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Out of business

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Seven White Closed Doors

Sometimes, some places go out of business.

Before the current Carrefour in Unirea, there was a store with good prices and a great location, but few customers. It was a pleasure buying in there.

There was a restaurant in Gara de Nord București (Bucharest North Station). It served good food at low prices.

I used to organize some events at Journey Pub, which is close to Piața Romană. It was a very fancy location with unfancy prices.

I used to organize events at Alouette, which is in a very central location, but not too many people knew about it.

Cora hypermarket had good quality but high prices. They sold to Carrefour.

I regret some of the brands above, some less so.

It makes you wonder.

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The importance of one person

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longreach - People 5498

Everyone sings in an orchestra, but the most essential person tends to be the main singer in front of the orchestra.

On the other hand, the orchestra will sound poorly due to a single person.

In a football team, everyone matters.

“If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.” (source and full details: Genesis 18 NIV – The Three Visitors – The LORD appeared – Bible Gateway)

One person is essential. Do your job well!

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