January 2012
1 post
March 2011
5 posts
“Don’t try to be original. Just try to be good.” That sounds sort of naive but...”
– Paul Rand, quoting Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (via)
“We sit down every day, and you do need to sit down every day if you wanna really...”
– Merlin Mann
I have a rubber band on my wrist […] I wear it to remember I’m alive. Every time I see it I remember I’m alive. And I’m here. Is that cheesy? I don’t care. I remember I’m alive. And I think a lot of people are terrified to remember that they’re alive. Because they have to feel. And they have to think. And they have to make decisions. And they have to...
Ernest Hemingway said this:
You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.
He was talking about writing books, but I find his advice perfectly apt for what I’m doing with Daring Fireball. Without having a boss or editor, I could do anything at the start of...
What productivity tip have you discovered that now you can’t live without?
Keep a to-do list.
A real one. One that you actually use and update throughout the day. It doesn’t need to be fancy, like the getting-things-done task managers — I use TaskPaper, which is essentially a text editor with optimized syntax highlighting for to-do lists, against a text file on Dropbox.
From...
February 2011
28 posts
Some of the best advice I’ve seen regarding how to write essays is from Paul Graham. He says writing is thinking, and, insightfully, that writing forces you to think better. He wrote, “Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well.”
My other suggestion (also, I think, stolen from Graham) is to...
“What’s the best thing you could be working on, and why aren’t you?”
– Paul Graham, Good and Bad Procrastination
“Spend time, don’t waste time”
– Marco Arment
And what I like best about a conference is walking out with an opinion on something that is different than my opinion about that topic when I walked in. Convince me to change my mind about something. I’m sure I’m wrong about many things — a good speaker is someone who helps me figure out what some of those things are.
From The speaker interviews: John Gruber
“Tim, like Steve, is like a metronome who sets the pace for the rest of Apple”
– Meet the man filling in for Steve Jobs
Best Writing Advice for Engineers I’ve Ever Seen. Period.
How to make engineers write concisely with sentences? By combining journalism with the technical report format. In a newspaper article, the paragraphs are ordered by importance, so that the reader can stop reading the article at whatever point they lose interest, knowing that the part they have read was more important than the...
Simple five step plan for just about everyone and everything
Go, make something happen.
Do work you’re proud of.
Treat people with respect.
Make big promises and keep them.
Ship it out the door.
When in doubt, see #1.
Why intelligent people fail
Lack of motivation. A talent is irrelevant if a person is not motivated to use it. Motivation may be external (for example, social approval) or internal (satisfaction from a job well-done, for instance). External sources tend to be transient, while internal sources tend to produce more consistent performance.
(via Kottke)
Motivation is on every single page
Head First authors and editors assume that every single page needs to provide an explicit motivation that will keep the reader continuing. And “This material is interesting for its own sake” is not an adequate motivation. Nor is “Trust me, you need to know this.” The motivation has to relate to a clear, specific functional goal (in Brett’s words, something...
Watching the Corners: On Future-Proofing Your Passion
For myself, I wish I’d known the value of developing early expertise in interesting new skills around emerging technologies (rather than just iteratively pseudo-honing the 202-level skills I thought I “understood”). Alongside that, I wish I’d learned to embrace the non-douchier aspects of building awesome human relationships (as against...
The Acceleration of Addictiveness
People commonly use the word “procrastination” to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what’s happening as merely not-doing-work. We don’t call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.
What Happened to Yahoo
If circumstances had been different, the people running Yahoo might have realized sooner how important search was. But they had the most opaque obstacle in the world between them and the truth: money. As long as customers were writing big checks for banner ads, it was hard to take search seriously. Google didn’t have that to distract them.
“Distraction,” Simplicity, and Running Toward... →
Reducing Distraction through Care (Rather than braces, armatures, and puppet strings). Removing interruptions and external distractions that harm your work or life? Great. Counting on your distraction-removal tool to supplement your non-existent motivation to do work that will never get done anyway? Pathetic.
Frankly, this is a big reason I’m so galled when anyone touts their...
“Doing that annoying hard stuff is how you grow, get better, and learn what real...”
– Merlin Mann, “Distraction,” Simplicity, and Running Toward Shitstorms
Merlin Mann on Malcom Gladwell:
Put differently, I’ll bet he and I would differ wildly on which of his contributions (let alone paragraphs) will be remembered as the most effective, long-lived, and useful. For myself, I most enjoy the paragraphs where he helps me see well; not the ones where he announces surprising half-facts about how my fucking eye works.
“When you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell...”
– Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
“A kitchen machine that you use every day in your kitchen can’t stay in a...”
– Dieter Rams
“It’s very important to know when you’re in a pissing match. And...”
– Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
“My tennis coach would say: “Don’t try to hit the ball in. Try to...”
– Mark Pincus
“Your engineering mandates; those are bullets and you have only so many that you...”
– Mark Pincus
“Do not tell people how to live their lives. Just tell them stories. And they...”
– Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
Roth has pared his life down to the minimum number of moving parts. Near his desk he kept two small signs, one reading “Stay Put,” the other “No Optional Striving”—reminders to avoid temptation of anything other than the five essentials: food, writing, exercise, sleep, and solitude.
From The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us...”
– Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was...”
– Steve Jobs
Someone who has decided to write a novel, for example, will suddenly find that the house needs cleaning. People who fail to write novels don’t do it by sitting in front of a blank page for days without writing anything. They do it by feeding the cat, going out to buy something they need for their apartment, meeting a friend for coffee, checking email. “I don’t have time to work,” they say. And...
Ian McAllister on what makes a great product manager:
One specific talent that all truly great product managers must possess is to see the world through the lens of their product. There is a background thread running in their mind during every conversation, meeting or other activity in their life ( work-related or not). That thread is taking in visual and auditory inputs and trying to...
“I work on film, and develop my pictures using chemistry and photographic paper...”
– Morten Krogvold
The 30 Steps to Mastery
Start
Keep going.
You think you’re starting to get the hang of it.
You see someone else’s work and feel undeniable misery.
Keep going.
Keep going.
You feel like maybe, possibly, you kinda got it now.
You don’t.
Keep going.
You ask for someone else’s opinion—their response is standoffish, though polite.
Depression.
...
January 2011
8 posts
Stephen Hawking’s editor told him that every equation he included in his book would cut sales in half. When you work on making technology easier to use, you’re riding that curve up instead of down. A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn’t just increase your sales 10%. It’s more likely to double your sales.
From How to Start a Startup by Paul Graham
“Personality is 40% genetics, 40% upbringing, and 20% the last book you read.”
– Neven Mrgan
“If you’re digging a hole in the wrong place, making it deeper doesn’t help...”
– Seymour Chwast
Most of us want to practice the things we’re already good at, and avoid the things we suck at. We stay average or intermediate amateurs forever.
and
And if the neuroscientists are right, you can create new brain cells—by learning (and not being stuck in a dull cubicle)—at virtually any age. Think about it… if you’re 30 today, if you take up the guitar tomorrow, you’ll have been...
Master the art of the pause – I’ve known this for 20+ years. I was fortunate enough when I was 20 to attend Toastmasters for 2 years and they taught me so much about vocal variety, energy, pacing, well written copy, hand gestures, etc. Brad reinforced this at our dinner. He said, “often when somebody pitches they just keep going. I’m trying to process what they’ve told me but they’re already on...
Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way. At Viaweb one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going...
Overcoming Creative Block
Chad Hagen:
Staying creative is hard work. Honestly, I don’t think when I got into art school I was very talented at all. I struggled to stand out. I struggled to stay in school. Staying creative was hard work. BUT, the one thing that kept me focused was my desire to be good. I wanted to be really good. I wanted to be as good as those people that WERE talented. I...
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I’ve looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And...
April 2010
2 posts
Merlin Mann: my one thing is… →
I love that I get to work for myself, and, more often than not, on my own. Since this leaves me wholly responsible for every failure (and the occasional, modest success) this can be existentially harrowing, but I’m at a point now where I can’t imagine having it any other way. I also love that what I do is so poorly defined. It means that, like my childhood beagle, Shorty, I can follow my nose,...
Achievement Porn
Games fast becoming standard are the “followers” and “friends” games for example. Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, et al, all have their own ostensible raison d’etre, but the psychological underpinning they all share is this treadmill of achievement. This accumulation of points that’s correlated with whatever the intended benefit of the service is.
This explosive growth in...
March 2010
33 posts
Justin’s Top 10 Practice Tips
Practice what you can’t do, not what you can.
Never practice making a mistake.
Play perfectly slowly before you speed up.
Using a timer saves time.
Focus on one element of practice at a time.
Try and practice a little every day (not lots on one day).
Keep track of your practice (use a practice schedule).
If it sounds good it is good.
...
Schrodinger’s Products (ten ways to be desirable)
Kathy Sierra:
Perhaps the best we can do is stay more focused on the user’s perception and experience than on the actual product itself. It’s so easy to get caught up in feature lists, implementation quality, performance metrics, etc. and then miss the whole point. We focus on the trees, not the forest. We create a product that...
Battling the Half-Life of Idea Execution
Upon reflection, I think my love of idea generation has become an escape hatch for when I start to second guess myself in the midst of long-term execution. When things aren’t going as well as planned with a venture, new ideas appear more attractive. And so I quickly jump to something new. As the saying goes, the grass is always greener on the other...
But it's better than TV →
At the local health food store lunch buffet, they offer stir fried tempeh.
I never get it. Not because I don’t like it, but because there are always so many other things on the buffet that I prefer.
That’s why I don’t watch TV. At all. There are so many other things I’d rather do in that moment.
HOWTO: Read more books →
Most people think the way you read more books is by spending more time reading. But I’ve found that, like exercise, this is an effect and not a cause. I spend time reading when I have a great book to read. When I don’t, I feel no urge to read and when I do start reading something, I put it down quickly. But if I’m reading a great book, I spontaneously come up with times and places to read...
Analyze your own skill set. See where you’re strong and where you need dramatic improvement, and tackle those lagging skills first. It’s harder than it sounds (most useful habits are), but it’s the only way to improve. In A Book of Five Rings, the sixteenth-century Japanese swordfighter Miyamoto Musashi counseled, “Never have a favorite weapon.”
Twyla Tharp, The...