From Jeff Bezos' Shareholder Letter, December 2017:
AWS – It’s exciting to see Amazon Web Services, a $20 billion revenue run rate business, accelerate its already healthy growth. AWS has also accelerated its pace of innovation – especially in new areas such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and serverless computing.
In 2017, AWS announced more than 1,400 significant services and features, including Amazon SageMaker, which radically changes the accessibility and ease of use for everyday developers to build sophisticated machine learning models. Tens of thousands of customers are also using a broad range of AWS machine learning services, with active users increasing more than 250 percent in the last year, spurred by the broad adoption of Amazon SageMaker.
If you're working in an office, here are some of the checklist items that might have been omitted from the job description:
- Add energy to every conversation
- Ask why
- Find obsolete things on your task list and remove them
- Treat customers better than they expect
- Offer to help co-workers before they ask
- Feed the plants
- Leave things more organized than you found them
- Invent a moment of silliness
- Highlight good work from your peers
- Find other great employees to join the team
- Cut costs
- Help invent a new product or service that people really want
- Get smarter at your job through training or books
- Encourage curiosity
- Surface and highlight difficult decisions
- Figure out what didn't work
- Start a club
- Smile a lot.
Now that it's easier than ever to outsource a job to someone cheaper (or a robot) there needs to be a really good reason for someone to be in the office. Here's to finding several.
(-Thanks again to Seth Godin.)
My left foot is much better this week. It has been causing me to limp severly and stop running since January. Went to a surgeon last week and he recommended an "MRT".
Had that yesterday.
Now I'm waiting for the report, hopefully o surgery required. Next appointment on Thursday. Running still out of the question. Still I have managed to be able to go dog walking and to write and write code, even.
My brain is learning to cope. At all levels. And the sense of humour we develope with age is helping a lot.
How many decisions or commitments would end up more positively if you had a five-minute snooze button on hand?
The hasty one-liner, the rushed reaction, the action we end up regretting--all of them can be eliminated with judicious use of the snooze button. It's a shame there isn't one built in to our computers when we're communicating online...
When in doubt, go for a walk around the block.
Roger Bannister did something in 1954 that many people had said was impossible.
He ran a mile in less than four minutes.
The thing is, he didn't accomplish this by running a mile as fast as he could.
He did it by setting out to run a mile in one second faster than four minutes. Bannister analyzed the run, stride by stride. He knew how long each split needed to be. He had colleagues work in a relay, pacing him on each and every section of the mile.
He did something impossible, but he did it by creating a series of possible steps.
It's easy to get hung up on, "as possible." As fast, as big, as much, as cheap, as small...
The Bannister Method is to obsess about "enough" instead.
Roger Bannister passed away at the age of 88 on Sunday 4th March, 2018.
BBC Radio in 2012, Sir Roger Bannister speaks to Eleanor Oldroyd about the day he became the first man to run a mile under four minutes.
(25 Minutes).
With the passing of the Rev. Billy Graham today at the age of 99, it seems appropriate to share Bono’s poem. He wrote it about Graham when he visited him and his family on March 11, 2002. (The poem and photographs are on display at The Billy Graham Library)
May you rest in peace, Billy Graham.
U2, the psalms, Billy Graham, words worth following.
In 2017, AWS announced more than 1,400 significant services and features, including Amazon SageMaker, which radically changes the accessibility and ease of use for everyday developers to build sophisticated machine learning models. Tens of thousands of customers are also using a broad range of AWS machine learning services, with active users increasing more than 250 percent in the last year, spurred by the broad adoption of Amazon SageMaker.
