Seth Godin recently wrote a blog post where he rants about the uselessness of textbooks. His rant concludes with this paragraph: This industry deserves to die. It has extracted too much time and too much money and wasted too much potential. We can do better. A lot better. I'm here to tell you that Seth is being very conveniently ignorant. I mean this in the very literal sense, not the ...
"****! They got it wrong AGAIN! This is ****-****!" "You're really selling me on this iPhone-thing, Ben," my brother cheerfully chimed in. I was pissed. I'd been in Austin for a week and was at the wrong place again. Why? Google Maps. ... In July of 2007, I made a spur of the moment decision with a friend to buy a van and go on a road trip for three months. On the trip, ...
For the past two years, I haven't lived in a single location (and city) where I knew I was going to be there for more than two months. In July, it will have been two years since the original road trip was planned. In fact, living in that van was the most certain I've been about my living situation for more than five weeks at a time. That ended in ...
I'm using some fuzzy math here, but I'm pretty sure I make about $4 per work hour. Let me explain.... When you start a company, you don't just start a company. It's not like consulting where you immediately take on jobs. When you start as a consultant, you are the identity. Your history, your accomplishments, etc. When you start as a company, the company is nothing and its identity is nothing. The ...
Middle school Spanish class was a blast. I was two rows from a window, with a clear shot into the courtyard. Between the window and me was a girl whom I probably had a crush on. (Ok, so I did.) Let's call her CrushGirl. Basically, Spanish class taught me to multitask..."If I'm going to be looking out the window, I might as well fawn over a cute girl while ...
Twitter is such a wonderful source of information for catalyzing conversations. This post stems from a post linked to by someone on my Twitter follow list. I don't know who posted it, I just saw the title, got thinking, and now you have this... I think the idea of "living well with less" is terribly flawed. First, it presupposes that you should have more. Perhaps even that you deserve, or ...
I've helped two people with this so far, and they seem to appreciate it. So here it is for you, too. Since Google Alerts added the ability to send alerts to feeds, the world got a lot easier...at least in my book. (I had started writing an email parser for Google Alerts...now I don't have to.) What I love about Google Alerts is that it lets me do research without ...
Just like any suburban-american kid growing up in the 80s, we had bake sales, cake walks, and 739 other elementary school fundraisers named after sweets our mothers didn't want us to have. Often, these events would have drawings for prizes. It was very simple. You buy a ticket. Then you put your ticket into the bucket in front of the item you wanted to win. Organizers hold a drawing, choose a ticket, ...
As a note: I am qualifying "Personal" here, because "Social Awareness" has become a significant conversation in the corporate space. This blog post will talk about the social awareness that an individual has, not an organization. However, these principles do fundamentally apply to corporate social awareness. The fundamental principle of Personal Social Awareness is very simple: Personal Social Awareness is the accurate ability to think with another person's or group ...
If you read a lot of business books, chances are that you are reading a lot of Business Entertainment Literature. Big deal, right? Well, it is, depending on what you think you are reading. The Promise of Business Entertainment Literature Business entertainment literature makes only one promise: entertainment. It does not promise to make you smarter, affect your education, or make your knowledge more useful. The interest of book publishing companies, magazine publishers, and ...
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