One of Jack Dorsey’s key points, paraphrased:
Draw out your ideas, share it immediately, and get instant feedback on what works and what don’t. If it’s not working, then shelve it. Some elements of it might pop up later. How do you quickly move from idea –> drawing –> prototype –> to a position where you can say, “this is what I want to spend my life doing”. Or “something I want to put away for now so that I can draw out the next idea.”
Just 16 mins!
We hear people whining about stress but rarely do we hear someone extolling it. And that’s why I’d like to make a distinction between stress and pressure. I understand that the two words are used interchangeably, and that there was a book about good stress, but the word is itself stressful. Stress is when you’re contemplating failure, when you’re threatened, in danger, being pushed. Ah, but pressure can be when you’re hopeful, when you’re contemplating victory, when opportunity is winking at you, pulling you onward.
“Deadlines are your friends,” has been my companion for many years. Deadlines mean you get to finish, to let go. And, for many of us, deadlines mean you get to start. After all, if there’s no hurry, it’s never going to see the upper half of your to-do list. A deadline is GAME ON!
I haven’t been posting as regularly the past ~2 months or so—was out of the country for a month, and was busy with some things. Just to quickly add this gem I found today by Seth Godin. Coding, programming, developing, writing software, or whatever you want to call it, is creative work. And real artists ship. Ship it, damn it!
I think I found myself feeling guilty on at least 2 counts from watching this short video. Check it out!
This is a cross-post from my other for-own-use developer blog. I’m posting it here because people often ask me what I’m so busy with.
It’s been a while since my last post; I have been real busy. Anyway, just to quickly say this, I’ve made a change in direction in my development efforts.
I’ve said earlier that I am determined learn a new programming language this year because my brain is starting to rot, but have since decided a few months ago that it will not be Cocoa Touch, for various reasons: too niche (the emerging global mobile apps market is highly fragmented by Nokia, iPhone, Android, Crackberry and possibly Palm as a viable contender), and skills here only attacks a small piece of my larger effort, which my gut tells me it’s a task that could probably be farmed out and done cheaper/faster by outsourcing to a iPhone dev shop where Cocoa Touch is their core competency.
A mobile app that does not utilize any connectivity, nay, “intelligent” connectivity, is not much different from calc.exe on your WinXP desktop. It’s fine for a narrow and specific, uninteresting task. An interesting mobile app would tap the cloud for some form of intelligence. Why not leverage that mandatory data plan from AT&T for your iPhone?
When the time comes, if necessary (such as if the iPhone app will be an important part of my competitive advantage), then I’ll pick up Cocoa Touch myself. For now, I do not think that will be the case, thus I’m going to spend more time on laying the groundwork for the more important piece: the back-end, web 2.0 / cloud computing / SaaS piece. And as Microsoft knows, as Tim O’Reilly says – nobody with their right mind would bet against the Web! (Have you seen HTML5?)
The past month or two, I’ve tried real hard to squeeze time in to learn Python, Django and Google App Engine – all at the same time in parallel, not sequentially. Yes, I’m trying to rush – because I am impatient.
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It’s new year’s resolution season! But I don’t make “resolutions” because by and large, it’s mostly an excuse for people to make promises they don’t keep, just to give themselves the illusion that this new year would somehow be different than the last, better than the last.
More fat people and smokers are still fat or are still smoking, after the new year’s “resolution” effect wears out, usually before mid-year. There’s absolutely accountability, no follow-through’ing on the commitments. I really, really, need to know how and why and really how, my year is going to be different. Anyway, I’m calling mine “goals“. As in, S.M.A.R.T. goals.
I won’t share my entire list (some of it is private) but among my non-work list of goals -
A few days ago I saw Om Malik’s list, and I’d like to share that here as the lessons learned are valuable. Om had a heart attack last year and made a promise to drastically change his lifestyle for the better. Folks, you don’t need to be at the brink of death to change your ways. Without further ado, here are Om’s lessons (and how I’m going to use it as a guidelines for myself)
Lesson #1: Set simple goals
When I came back from the hospital on Jan. 17th, I made a silent pledge to myself: I am going to do whatever it takes to make it to the first anniversary of my heart attack.
I am not a big advocate, however, of simply surviving. Rather I want to feel a sense of winning, on a daily basis. In order to do this, short-term goals had to supplant those focused on the long term. The result has been two good weblog posts a week, two great conversations a day, and more smiling, day and night.
Looking back last year .. I did sometimes feel demotivated because I found it difficult to stomach a steady diet of negative outcomes. This year, I need to celebrate even the small wins.
Lesson#2: Binary choices help make better decisions
When faced with a binary choice — live or die — I made the following upgrades:
1. After a 40-Dunhills-a-day-habit for nearly 20 years, I stopped smoking.
2. No more cigars, either.
3. No drinking.
4. No red meat.
5. Caffeine, sugar, salt and all unhealthy foods are now banished from my diet.
6. I go to the gym every single day.Making such drastic changes wasn’t easy, but they offered me the best chance of staying alive — and 50 pounds and 12 months later, have clearly worked.
How bad do you want it? For Om, it’s “how bad do you want to live?” I just need to ask myself, how bad do I want <insert goal here>? If I treat it like life or death, then you betcha I will be ruthlessly brutal on execution.
This also means I will be saying “no” to a lot of things. I will be brutal on cutting down on activities that doesn’t in some way help me get to my goals. I don’t care what it is. If it’s not aligned with my goals, I won’t regret not doing it.
Lesson #3: Simplification through elimination
A culture that emphasizes success, like the one here in Silicon Valley, can make setting parameters especially hard. Lucky for me, my cardiologist, Dr. Eddie Rame, came right out and told me that unless I stopped working more than 10 hours a day I would be back in the hospital.
In doing so, he set parameters for my daily work schedule, leaving it up to me to be figure out how I would be most productive. Those parameters helped me make tough choices -– like cutting back on excessive public appearances, travel, frivolous RSS feeds and unnecessary company pitch meetings.
One year later, nearly 75 percent of my conversations are with people I love to converse with and nearly every topic on which I write (or focus) is something that I care deeply about.
Sometimes when I don’t limit and time-box an activity, I tend to end up spending more time on it than I initially would have wanted to. Sometimes because I’m a perfectionist, when “good enough” was all I needed. Sometimes going that extra mile cost me diminishing returns on my effort and time. So this year, I’m going to let myself be sloppy and “good enough” for non-core goals, so that I can focus my effort on my real core goals. (more…)
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