Responsiveness isn’t just something we can build into our product. It’s an attitude we can adopt. We can learn to listen to the changing environment, to be available to respond. ”
What do we want to spend more time with? What shapes us? What nourishes us? What do we want to see grow?”
Design is the choices we make about the world we *want* to live in.”
We’re very fancy now—with our user interface design and our user-centered design and our mobile first and our right ways and wrong ways.
But we’re all just geeks—folks in glasses and ties and knits and tweeds fiddling, fumbling, exploring.
That picture there, up above, is one of the first computer games ever made. One of the first computer interfaces.
“Hey guys, this is the first computer monitor… ever.
Let’s do something with it!”
That’s where we come from. That’s our roots: fiddling and exploring and being excited in tweed.
It makes me want to stop looking for more right answers and start looking for more of that “shit, I have no idea what we’re getting into here but I can’t stop being excited about it!” spirit.
Now we are entering a third age in which the central economic actor is someone who both produces and consumes in the same act. I like the term “creator,” as this new kind of actor is doing something more fundamental than the mere sum of their simultaneous production and consumption. Creators are ordinary people whose everyday actions create value.[...] Thus, just as the time clock symbolized the producer economy and the credit card the consumer economy, the computer mouse is the symbol of the emerging creator economy.”Paul Saffo viaPierat
Do what you love is not the same as love what you do.”
You always hear people say, ‘do what you love, do what you love.’ That’s partly true, but if it’s business, if you start a business doing what you love, it will kill you, it will kill your passion.
If you like to bake and you start a bakery, you will hate baking very soon.
I like ‘love what you do’ better because, it’s kinda like, wherever you are just be good at it, embrace it, love it, and eventually success will find you.
I actually kind of believe that.
But you never forget your passion.”
This is the life. This is the work.
The work is spiritual—it matters.
The work is sweaty. The work is followthrough.
The work is about solving problems.
Real problems—not problems that only exist in our heads.
The work is about fishing. The work is about farming.
The work is about insights. The work is about ideas.
But the work is mostly about sweat and followthrough.
Props to David on the whole “the work is spiritual” seed.
Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan.”
The new canon should bind the content to the device.”
A new restaurant has opened in Portland.
Shit—there’s already 34 on the list I haven’t tried.
How often does this sort of thing happen—starting up restaurants?
How many bars and cocktail-slinging, wing-frying places can this town support?
What does it take to think you can do it better than the other guys? Better than Clyde Commons. Better than Sapphire Hotel. Better than Toro Bravo. Better than Ned Ludd. Better than…
How many restauranteurs believe that?
Probably all of them.
Just like me.
The next site I start up I’m thinking to myself: I’ll do it better than the other guys in this space.
But it’s a crowded space with established names and some big guns. I’ll have a stronger brand, man. Better insights. More ME less fluff and tumble.
That’s the entrepreneur’s bravado/insight/ignorance/simplicity. We’re selling ourselves a bill of goods that won’t get shipped. Maybe. At least it’s likely.
Because for every successful restaurant there’s 25 failed attempts.
But NOBODY’s doing wings like this, man. Out of business.
Yea, we’re kind of like the previous restaurant that closed months ago in the same location, but this gonna be different—it’s ME behind the wheel of THIS one. Rent’s up. Payroll’s up. People just ain’t coming.
And yet there’s plenty of room in this town. There’s plenty of room on internet. Remember, we only need 1,000 true fans.
So maybe the right way to think of it is: this is a decent location, this is a hungry neighborhood, there are lots of families here. I’ll put in a play station.
Serve your audience. Your brand won’t save you. Either you offer value or you don’t.
