Friday Links 07-05-25

From the Web

How to Prioritize – Steve Pavlina did an excellent job overviewing the CARVER system for prioritizing your goals. Unlike short-term prioritization like the 80/20 rule this system seems best suited to help decide what major projects you should choose between.

How to Start a Business if You Know Nothing About Business – Ben Casnocha, a young entrepreneur, does a great job with this post. I’m looking forward to reading his book: My Start Up Life.

Overclock Your Readings Speed – Kim Roach does a guest post on Zen Habits about speed reading. Some great tips. My one point of contention was her comment,

“Never move backwards. When you are speed reading, the main point is to keep moving forward and not stop to reread something. This is the most inefficient use of your reading time. Keep yourself moving forward at all times.”

This assumes that all quality information is uniformly distributed across a book. My opinion: if you find something really important read it a dozen times if you have to. Otherwise a great post.

From the Archives

Empty Calories – What are the empty calories in your life? This post is only a few months old, so it won’t be new for some readers, but it was still a popular entry making lifehack and several other sites.

From the Shelf

The Prince – This is a classic book first written by the Italian statesman Niccolo Machiavelli. If you’ve ever wondered where the term Machiavellian comes from, it’s from here. I was disappointed to find when reading that Machiavelli isn’t nearly as wickedly evil as I had heard. I’d label his problem solving approach as unemotional and logical as opposed to psychopathic.

I’m always searching for new perspectives as it get’s tiring to hear the same viewpoint repeatedly. You don’t have to agree with him on everything, but his ideas definitely represent a different way of viewing the world.

Some of his more contentious points:

• For every attempt at deception there will always be those who are willing to be deceived.
• If you have to injure a man do it swiftly and with extreme severity. Minor insults only serve to foster attempts at revenge. Injure so that retaliation is impossible.
• It is better to be feared than to be loved if you cannot be both. For a man will praise you out of love, but he will follow you out of fear.