How I buy things when Lightcone wants them fast
On occasion, for my work at Lightcone I have been able to buy things faster than their advertised lead times. For example, I once got… * 10 sofas in 2 days when the website shipping speed said 5 days to 3 weeks * 10 custom beds from Japan in 1 week when all suppliers initially said 2-3 months[1] * A custom bookcase in 1 week when website said 5 week lead-time * 1000 square feet of custom hardwood flooring in 3 days even though the salesperson initially said it would be 2 weeks And a bunch of other stuff. The first times I did this were a bit of a desperate scramble. Now, however, I mostly have a handful of helpful tips and tricks that I keep reusing. When working with new colleagues, I’ve found myself explaining these a lot. So I figured I’d just write them up as a shareable document. I’ve numbered the tips to make them usable as a checklist. 21 tips I find helpful When I want to buy something fast, I start by asking the seller: 1. “How soon can we get it here?” I’m not asking this because it’s that helpful in getting things faster. It’s mostly just a conversation starter to get some helpful information. In particular, sometimes the seller will say something like “You can pick it up today” or “In 3 days”. If so, then great! All is good! The project can move along! No need to bother with the rest of this essay. Don’t spend time optimising what doesn’t need optimising. Usually, though, they’ll often say something like “2 months”.[2] Uh oh. Now there’s work to do. As a next step, let’s think about it from first principles. Suppose you want to buy a table. What steps are required before it can get to you? In the easiest case, the table is in stock with the seller. So the molecules making up the table need to be transported from where they currently are to where you want them to be, while preserving enough of their structure that you can get a table back out of them. This is “shipping”. If the table is not in stock, a new table might have to be manuf
Surely one should think of this as a vector in a space with more dimensions than 1.
In your equation you can just 1,000,000x magnitude and it will move in the "positive direction".
In the real world you can become a billionaire from selling toothbrushes and still be "overtaken" by a guy who wrote one blog post that happened to be real dang good
I made a drawing but lw won't allow adding it on phone I think