InBev Buys Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac
“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have endured troubled times lately,” said InBev CEO Carlos Brito, “but that will change now that they have joined our corporate family. A little tweaking, some layoffs — there is no limit to what we can achieve together.”
“We often make our expansion decisions based on brand equity,” Mr. Brito added. “However, in this particular case the first thing we will do is change those incredibly stupid company names.”
Weakened in Paradise
I always believed my best bet for employment was the service sector, but it hasn’t worked out the way I expected. I’ll never give up intelligence-gathering, covert surveillance, and stalking as hobbies, of course, but ever since Big Government became more deeply involved in those fields I’m finding it much more difficult to make a living pursuing the observational arts.
Deliberate Practice
I ran across this short review of the book This Is Your Brain on Music a few weeks ago and was reminded of it again today by Stephen Dubner’s post on deliberate practice.
In his review of Your Brain on Music, John Walkenbach says:
many people have found that you can become an expert in anything if you devote a minimum of 10,000 hours to it. Assuming a 40-hour week, you can become an expert at something in about five years. If you’re not working at it full time, figure three hours per day for ten years.
In the Freakonomics post, Dubner says:
excellence is accomplished mainly through the tenets of deliberate practice, which are roughly:
1. Focus on technique as opposed to outcome.
2. Set specific goals.
3. Get good, prompt feedback, and use it.
I don’t have much to add by way of tying all this together except for my fascination with the subject and with people who have devoted themselves to something so profoundly that they transform themselves.
