He had his neurotic moments, like the time he chewed through drywall and insulation during a thunderstorm, or the time he opened a locked door (he was quite bright) and climbed the back fence during the Tornado of 2008, but he was a great dog through and through.  Over the past year (his 14th) he entered a marked physical and mental decline and it got to the point of being cruel to let him continue.

Godspeed Mr Buddy.

1. Any sentence starting with “I need” – you want, “need” is an attempt to manipulate someone from a position of weakness, and that is how they will think of you in the future-weak.
2. “In the real world” – where else does anyone live?  By saying this you just make excuses for your own failures.
3. “In reality”, or it’s evil cousin “In actuality” – All you say about yourself is that the previous thing you said was not true, which means that you have no interest in describing matters well.
4. “I didn’t have time” – You chose to spend the time on something else, don’t apologize for putting something else first.
5. “But we know more about X than we ever have before” – Possibly true, and probably not meaningful.    Citing unspecified knowledge is a manipulative appeal to authority.  If you had a good reason, you would be sharing it.  If you are not sharing the reason, it is probably not good.

That is my preliminary list.  Can anyone thing of any other counter productive phrases?

photo credit: h.koppdelaney

The 12 things (with my notes in bold and italic)

1. EXERCISE | Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power. – The most important chapter.  Short version – if you exercise your brain will be smarter and it won’t get dementia.  I’ve put this to the test, and I am more focused with exercise than without.
2. SURVIVAL | Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too. – Not that memorable, good background information.
3. WIRING | Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently.- Not that memorable, good background information.
4. ATTENTION | Rule #4: We don’t pay attention to boring things.- Intuitive,  and general background information
5. SHORT-TERM MEMORY | Rule #5: Repeat to remember. – Important, counter intuitive info on memory.
6. LONG-TERM MEMORY | Rule #6: Remember to repeat.- Important, counter intuitive info on memory.
7. SLEEP | Rule #7: Sleep well, think well. – The second most informative chapter.  I had always thought of sleep as a time of rest, it turns out to be a very active process for the brain.   Sleep is when the brain cleans and restocks itself.
8. STRESS | Rule #8: Stressed brains don’t learn the same way. – I had no idea that stress was the physical reaction that it is.  This is the third most important chapter.
9. SENSORY INTEGRATION | Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses. – Good advice for graphic designers.
10. VISION | Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses. –  mostly background information.
11. GENDER | Rule #11: Male and female brains are different . – we knew this already, but Medina tells us how male and female brains differ.
12. EXPLORATION | Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers. –  mostly background information.

From this book I have made the following changes in life

• I am distance cycling again
• I sleep eight hours or more per night
• I structure presentations differently (in accordance with the memory chapters).
• When I do graphic and information design I use more graphics and less text

After reading this book I life a more positive, more effective, and less stressful life.  Thank you Dr Medina.

photo credit: laszlo-photo

I realized this while at a client meeting; we were talking about problems with a botched sales program and the staff had a litany of complaints about the program (ed. note: it was created by a separate vendor years ago, and the fault lies with the now-departed project manager who designed something inappropriate.  It does a masterful job of integrating legacy systems from different vendors, languages, platforms, a mainframe and Europeans are involved somehow,  but the user interface is wanting.  But I digress…).  Then I remembered hearing the same litany of complaints a year ago.   Unlike last year,  I offered suggestions on how to make small improvements to the program. Everyone proceeded to ignore me and continued complaining.  At the end of the meeting everyone felt a lot better once they had talked about their problems.  No one made any plans to actually fix the problems.

Then I had the realization, (to me anyway) that, complaining makes you feel better and this is why you should never complain! Complaining cures the short term rage and anxiety caused by the problem while sapping your motivation to actually fix the problem.  The end result of complaining:  Much short-term anxiety, and then the problem either continues or recurs.  You never solve the problem.    Therefore never complain, and let the problem eat away at you until it hurts enough to be worth fixing permanently.  It is the only way you’ll have the motivation to arrive at a permanent fix for the problem.

Disclaimer, I have not read A Complaint Free World, though I’ve heard it is quite good.  And upon further reflection, part of this thought was inspired (yet again!) by Derek Sivers.

photo credit: uncafelitoalasonce

With no further ado – here are the books I recommend to start out.

1. The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss – while it sounds like a scam, Ferriss actually write about how to say no to almost everything and focusing on a few things
2. Rework by Jason Fried and David Hansson – more manifesto than tutorial, but manifestos are important.  There is a bit of method involved, but it is mostly manifesto.
3. Growing a Business by Paul Hawken – As you might expect, a nice book on growing a business.  Worth reading – over time I’ve felt the gardening metaphor to be apt.
4. Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi – pretty much the classic on networking.
5. Ignore Everybody  by Hugh MacLeod – More motivation than method, but motivation is usually more important.  Whatever you do consistently defines you, and motivation is the biggest piece of consistency.
6. The Art of Profitability  by Adrian Slywotzky – Changes how you look at business methods, and helps define your goals.
7. Certain to Win by Chet Richards – The thinking of John Boyd applied to business.  I maintain that this book is the best introduction to the thinking of John Boyd and the OODA loop.
8. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath – a handy checklist to use when evaluating ideas.
9. How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie – the all time classic on working with, for, and around people.  Everyone would be far better off if reading this book was mandatory.  One of the inspirations for Stronico.
10. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It Michael Gerber – The classic book on how to systematize your business.  It helps you make the shift from owning a job to owning a company.

For another list, arguable much better, check out Derek Sivers’ list of worthwhile books.

photo credit: gadl

For whatever reason I find this sort of open, public, rule based scheduling more appealing than the current approach most companies (including mine) follow.  As one must commit to software these days the process of development is important to my decision to buy in the first place.  I’m not sure I have any real reason to believe in this, but it would seem that this approach would be more likely to fix problems that actually exist, as well as resulting in greater usability.

In sum, the idea is that software scheduling should have the following characteristics

• Performance over new features
• Separation of performance development and new feature development
• Published scheduling
• Transparency for timelines

Thoughts?  This is actually close to Milton Friedman’s idea of a monetary rules to replace a gold standard, instead of monetary policy being arbitrarily set by the Federal Reserve.

photo credit: Peter Kaminski

photo credit: Rego – twitter.com/w3bdesign

First things first, I have not seen the Apple iPad.  I am an enthusiastic owner of an Amazon Kindle.  I honestly don’t see what the hype is about.  Granted, I never do with Apple products, but I can’t even see it from Apple’s point of view this time.  The Kindle is perfect at what it does, largely because it doesn’t do that much.  You read order, download, and read books on it.  Period.  The Kindle does that effortlessly and the e-ink is easier to read than paper.  The pages are consistently sized (an under-reported feature of the Kindle that helps quite a bit) and the battery lasts forever.  The Kindle also weighs almost nothing and you do not have to choose between it and a laptop in terms of weight or space.  In sum, the Kindle solves the problem of “I want to read something” quite well.

What problem does the iPad solve?  It will have the low battery life of anything with an actual monitor, so it can’t go that long without being charged, so add in the bulkiness of a charger 40% of the time to the transport of the unit.  It is harder to read (again, relative to the Kindle) so that’s another strike against it.

Perhaps I’m reading this wrong, maybe the competitor isn’t the Kindle, but rather some segment of the iPhone market.  Perhaps there is some segment of the world that is clamoring for multimedia computing power that is available while in motion.  But the obscurity of the Microsoft Tablet OS/PC indicates that there are not legions of people clamoring for walkable computing power.

Happily no one’s products depend on me, so good luck Apple.

photo credit: mil8

“Before I tell you about it you have to sign this!” is what they all say.  The idea will be written out over five pages, usually in the passive voice, with as many adjectives and adverbs as possible.  By the time you finish reading the document the concept will be fuzzier than when you started reading the document.

As a solo web/software I’ve signed 15 or so non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) over my past eight years in business for new products and companies.  I don’t recall any of the products being successful in the long term.  In fact, I can’t recall any of the products being around after six months.  Most of the products never reached any sort of development at all.  To a man the people pitching the NDAs had great enthusiasm, and  they all insisted on a great many meetings.  Why is this?

The idea they present probably is easy to steal, and also not worth stealing.  If the idea is easy to steal (i.e. such as “Let’s come up with something that makes it hard to pirate software” or “let’s make a website that runs a business by work flow stages” then it is so general that the idea proponent doesn’t have a clue about the problem that the new idea is supposed to solve.  If the product is specific, then it is generally pointless to copy it, as the person with the idea will always be able to do it better.  People with refined concepts have confidence in their ideas, and generally don’t ask you to sign anything.

Instead NDAs are a way for the NDA pr0ponent to feel good about himself, indeed, proof that his idea is for real.  It’s easier to have expensive documents drawn up than to refine an idea that might turn into nothing when you think it through.  So think carefully before signing one.  Not that the NDA will make any difference, but anyone who asks you to sign the NDA has probably not refined the idea, and you will be wasting your time.  If all they have is the idea they don’t know anything about the industry (whichever industry that is).  If you do sign and NDA, do it just to be nice to the person asking you.

NDAs are usually not the sign of a bad idea, just an unformed one, which is the sign of a bad client.  Avoid if possible.

And please note, I am not talking about situations where trade secrets (the formula for Coca Cola for example) are at stake, just new business ideas.

Derek Sivers has an excellent blog post related to this one:Ideas are just a multiplier of execution .

Please Note:

An NDA is not the same as a work for hire agreement, or a non-compete agreement.  Both of those contracts have value.  Read them very, very carefully.

I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice