Tim Harford
speaker
411 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 11 Sep
Tim Harford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford · Talent, Time and Money: The Curse of General Magic · 11 Sep 2026
podcast
I think he's right, although I'd add something.
General Magic's problem wasn't that they actually had no constraints.
They did have constraints.
Every person and every organisation does.
Their problem was subtly different.
They didn't think they had any constraints.
In his book, 4,000 Weeks, the writer Oliver Berkman urges us all to face up to the fact that none of us really have much time.
With luck, we can expect about 4,000 weeks on this earth.
For Berkman, this isn't depressing.
It's liberating.
We can stop making impossible lists of the novels we're going to write, skills we're going to master, countries we're going to visit, languages we're going to learn.
There's an infinite number of things we might want to do, and there's only a finite life in which to do them.
We might as well face up to that, and make some deliberate choices.
The alternative is to fritter away our time, pretending we'll live forever, and eventually smacking into the painful realisation that we won't.
For General Magic, that painful realisation dawned when their alliance partners lost patience and started demanding a product urgently.
Belatedly, general magic started to scramble.
Engineers built bunk beds in the office so they could work around the clock.
Everyone was exhausted.
It didn't make any difference.
The product was still late and still had too many coin flips and walking lemons and not enough streamlined, responsive, useful apps.
Showing 341–360 of 411 · page 18 of 21
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