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I met my wife online in 2005 on a site called eHarmony. It uses a match-based system to deliver a pre-screened list of candidates, and the reported divorce rate amongst e-Harmony couples is about 1/18th the usual US rate (3.86% vs. well over 50%).
Health/Wellness
“One should view their spiritual work as learning to live life without stress, problems, fear, or melodrama.” – Michael Singer
Money
The discount Irish airline Ryanair has proposed standing seats (“you stand on the tube, why not on short flights!”), charging for bathrooms (“if we get rid of 2/3 bathrooms, we can reduce everyone’s seat price 5%”), and has a CEO who says “the customer is nearly always wrong”. I love when people call conventional wisdom into question.
In Ryanair’s case, it’s resulted in the most valuable airline in the world. I think it’s a lesson about knowing your customer and servicing them precisely. Ryanair wants to be the cheapest way to fly. And virtually every decision is in service of that goal, and they are willing to throw out old tropes “the customer is always right” in order to make their business better.
Random
I really enjoyed this posting on doing what you love, by Paul Graham. My favorite insight is about constantly producing things in areas you are curious about:
“"Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.”
Reflection/Quote
“Parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than for themselves…if your eight year old decides to climb a tall tree, you won’t get a share in the excitement, but if he falls you’ll have to deal with the consequences” – Paul Graham
“They say on average, you have 19 years with your children; 18 of them occur in their first 18 years of their life, one year of total time with them occurs once they go off to college.”
Chris