alan wells

Today I was reminded of what life is like when school work isn’t consuming my every waking moment, and some of my non waking moments (having a nightmare about a web design/CSS problem is a rather unsettling way to wake up). I spent a good portion of today engaged in good conversation with good friends, it it felt very refreshing. Over a late breakfast with two of my friends we touched on cool classes, business ideas, and religion. One of the ideas that came out of our conversation had to do with a recent article in business week about young entrepreneurs. Chuck Branding (25) is working on a business that helps people buy cars by doing all the legwork with finding a dealership and negotiating the price. The most interesting thing to me about his business was that 15% of his customers are "single women who are intimidated by car dealers".

I brought up this fact with my two breakfast companions, both female, and was surprised to hear them say that they would never buy a car without a male there too. I consider both of my friends to be independent, strong women, so I was a little surprised that this was the case, but I think this speaks to a real problem with the car buying process and a place where there’s room for a lot of improvement. And it also reminded me of the importance of seeing the world through other people’s eyes whose perspectives differ from my own – whether that be because of gender, race, nationality, whatever.

The other conversation I had today was with my roommate, and we spoke mostly of relationships with other people – what affects the quality of those relationships and the kind of people we most like to cultivate interactions with. Early in the conversation, I said that I felt there was a sort of x-factor in people that I couldn’t put my finger on, but that it was some rare trait/combination of traits that make someone really interesting to me. My roommate pressed me to try to define this x factor, and over the course of our conversation we came to the following conclusion:

The people that we cultivate relationships with, the people we find most interesting and most pleasurable to be around are those people that allow us to feel comfortable enough with them to share our true selves. These are the people who we share our most personal thoughts with because we know that they are worthy of the trust entailed in sharing those thoughts.

There were many other musings from my day of conversation, but I’ll save those for another post.

Reason #537 that I love my Powerbook: backlit keys are awesome for blogging in the dark.

Now that I’m breathing easier after my final critiques, I’m working on a list of things that I’ve been thinking about over the past few months and have wanted to write about now that I have the time, so here’s what I’ve got so far:

- The idea of trying to connect the dots forward in one’s future in the way that Steve Jobs says is not possible in his Stanford commencement speech.

- I’m wondering what it is about California that makes it such a hotbed for really good ideas and new businesses. It seems like a disproportionate amount of the cutting edge things I hear about are happening right here in my own back yard in sunny California. Is it the weather, the water? I’ve got some ideas that stem from ecology and biodiversity that I think might be related in a theoretical sense

- I’ve got some notes and thoughts from a lecture that Eric Heiman of Volume Design gave at UCD this fall. He’s one of the best design speakers I’ve heard in my short career, and said some things that really resonated with me.

-I’ve been reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, for the last few weeks. Its been an absolutely fascinating read so far and its interesting to see some of the things that I’ve thought about myself as a creative person be validated by a psychological study of other creative people

-As mentioned before, I spent thanksgiving in Copenhagen, and I had the opportunity to appreciate the refinement of danish design while there. I’ve been thinking about why their design has been pushed in the direction that it is, and I want to explore a few ideas about that

-I read a book called West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origin of Belief by Steven Kotler… I hadn’t read a non-design book in a while and I really enjoyed the read. Kotler talks about some interesting topics including syncronicity and the genetic basis for spirituality. There’s something about the way he writes that appeals to part of me that’s interested in the intersection of science and spirituality.

-I read John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicty early on this fall quarter, and found it to be a great set of general guidelines for many things, and I’d like to share some of the things that have been most useful to me.

I’m sure (I hope) this list will keep growing but I think this is a good starting point for the first couple posts.