Just finished reading Tribes, by Seth Godin. Highly reccomended, and certainly provided me with some food for thought.
On imagination:
“Albert Einstein said, ‘Imagination is more important that knowledge.’ Leaders create things that didn’t exist before. They do this by giving the tribe a vison of something that could happen, but hasn’t (yet). You can’t manage without knowledge. You can’t lead without imagination.”
Last night I finished reading The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God. I’m humbled by Carl Sagan’s capacity for insight and clarity of thought. As someone with a strong background in science but an interest in spirituality, I enjoyed hearing the thoughts of Carl Sagan as he tried to reconcile his thoughts on religion with his expertise in the sciences. A few choice words from Carl:
On questioning the value of ancient tenets passed down through the generations:
“So I claim that there are very different ways of thinking for these two circumstances: when change is slow compared to a generation time and when change is fast compared to a generation time. There are different survival strategies. And I would also like to suggest that there has never been a moment in the history of the human species in which so much change has happened as in our time. In fact, it can be argued that in many respects there never will be a time when the change can be so rapid as it has been in our generation… Very major changes, and therefore not a circumstance where the wisdom of, say, the sixth century B.C. is necessarily relevant. It might be, but it might not be. And therefore, for this reason as well – for this reason especially – wisdom may lie not in simply the blind adherence to ancient tenets but in the vigorous and skeptical and creative imagination of a wide variety of alternatives.”
On the Earth as a lifeboat:
“When you look at Earth from space, it is striking. There are no national boundaries visible. They have been put there, like the equator and the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, by humans. The planet is real. The life on it is real, and the political separations that have placed the planet in danger are of human manufacture. They have not been handed down from Mount Sinai. All the beings on this little world are mutually dependent. It’s like living in a lifeboat. We breath the air that Russians have breathed, and Zambians and Tasmanians and people all over the planet. Whatever the causes that divide us, as I said before, it is clear that the Earth will be here a thousand or a million years from now. The question, the key question, the central question – in a certain sense the only question – is, will we?”
On why our planet is in conflict over ideologies:
“We kill each other, or threaten to kill each other, in part, I think, because we are afraid we might not ourselves know the truth, that someone else with a different doctrine might have a closer approximation to the truth. Our history is in part a battle to the death of inadequate myths. If I can’t convince you, I must kill you. That will change your mind. You are a threat to my version of the truth, especially the truth about who I am and what my nature is. The thought that I may have dedicated my life to a lie, that I might have accepted a conventional wisdom that no longer, if it ever did, corresponds to the external reality, that is a very painful realization. I will tend to resist it to the last. I will go to almost any lengths to prevent myself from seeing that the worldview I have dedicated my life to is inadequate. I’m putting this in personal terms so that I don’t say “you,” so that I’m not accusing anyone of an attitude, but you understand that this is not a mea culpa. I’m trying to describe a psychological dynamic that I think exists, and it’s important and worrisome.
“Instead of this, what we need is a honing of the skills of explication, of dialogue, of what used to be called logic and rhetoric and what used to be essential to every college education, a honing of the skills of compassion, which, just like intellectual abilities, need practice to be perfected. If we are to understand another’s belief, then we must also understand the deficiencies an inadequacies of our own. And those deficiencies and inadequacies are very major. This is true whichever political or ideological or ethnic or cultural tradition we come from. In a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything?”
On the impression we give to the universe through our transmissions:
“Very nearby civilizations can detect our presence, and that is because television gets out. Not just television but radar. Radar and television get out. Most of AM radio, for example, doesn’t. So let’s just look at the television for a moment. Large-scale commercial television broadcasting on Earth begins when? In the late 1940s, mainly in the United States.
“So forty years ago there’s a spherical wave of radio signals that spreads out at the speed of light, getting bigger and bigger as time goes on. Every year it’s an additional light year away from the Earth. Now, lets say that it’s forty years later, so that expanding spherical wave front is forty light-years from Earth, containing the harbingers of a civilization newly arrived in the galaxy. And I don’t know if you know about 1940s television in the United States, but it would contain Howdy Doody and Milton Bearle and the Army-McCarthy Hearings and other signs of high intelligence on the planet Earth. So I’m sometimes asked, if there are so many intelligent beings in space, why haven’t they come. (I’m just joking.) But it’s a sobering fact that our mainly mindless television transmissions are our principal emissaries to the stars. There is an aspect of self-knowledge that this implies that I think would be very good for us to come to grips with.”
I recently finished reading Geoffrey Moore’s tech marketing classic Crossing the Chasm. After finishing it, I can see why this was such a popular book when it came out in 1991. Coming from a design and ecology background devoid of marketing experience, I appreciated the easy-to-read primer for marketing disruptive technologies. Because of the stage I’m at with the ideas I’m thinking about lately, one of the most helpful sections was The Claim: Passing the Elevator Test. A few notes:
The elevator test: “Can you explain your product in the time it takes to ride up in an elevator?”
Why it’s a bad sign if you can’t pass the elevator test (pg 152-153):
A high concept pitch distills a startup’s vision into a single sentence
…people should already understand the building blocks of the pitch: buses, bombs, Jaws, space, the seven deadly sins, Flickr, Firefox, MMOGs, et cetera. The pitch combines the building blocks by using analogy, synthesis, juxtaposition, combination, whatever; e.g. “Jaws in space.”
“Taking actions to create, grow, maintain or defend markets.”
“Winning at marketing more often than not means being the biggest fish in the pond. If we are very small, then we must search out a very small pond indeed.”
“Cross the chasm by targeting a very specific niche market where you can dominate from the outset, force your competitors out of that market niche, and then use it as a base for broader operations.”
“… because, confronted with the immensity of opportunity represented by a mainstream market, they lose their focus, chasing every opportunity that presents itself, but finding themselves unable to deliver a salable proposition to any true pragmatist buyer.”
“A vertical market with a broken mission-critical process creates an attractive beachhead opportunity… The more serious the problem, the faster the target niche will pull you out of the chasm.”
“Success through subtraction is the key lesson here. And that subtraction was made possible by a vote of confidence in design esthetics and in target marketing. By contrast, the companies who failed had over-designed for their target market because they were hedging their bets.”
“You need to understand that informed intuition, rather than analytical reason, is the most trustworthy decision-making tool to use.”
“Expect that the best scenarios will be ‘whole product challenged’ – if it were easy, someone else would have done it. Indeed, the fact that it is hard will create a barrier to entry in your favor once you have stepped up to the solution.”
“The best sub-segmentation is based on special interest groups within the general community. These typically are very tightly networked and normally form because they have very special problems to solve.”
“…your market alternative helps people identify your target customer (what you have in common) and your compelling reason to buy (where you differentiate). Similarly, your product alternative helps people appreciate your technology leverage (what you have in common) and your niche commitment (where you differentiate). Thus you create the two beacons that triangulate to teach the market your positioning.”
“…market alternatives call out the budget and thus the market category, and product alternatives call out the differentiation.”
“Time to establish a sustainable market position, and not cost or breadth of sales is your critical success factor. You simply cannot afford to lose one day of opportunity, and the only channel that would ever be that responsive to your needs is your own.”
I’ve been reading Emotional Design by Don Norman on and off for the last few weeks. Here’s some choice ideas from it that I thought were worth remembering:
Norman quotes Sergio Zyman, former CMO for Coca Cola:
“Emotional branding is about building relationships; it is about giving a brand and a product long-term value… Emotional branding is based on that unique trust that is established with an audience. It elevates purchases based on need to the realm of desire. The commitment to a product or an institution, the pride we feel upon receiving a wonderful gift of a brand we love or having a positive shopping experience in an inspiring environment where someone knows our name or brings an unexpected gift of coffee – these feelings are at the core of Emotional Branding.” (pg 60)
“The principles for designing pleasurable, effective interaction between people and products are the very same ones that support pleasurable and effective interaction between individuals.”
During the summer of 2007, my roommate Porter Felton and I had an idea about where mobile technology might be going. It was before the release of the iPhone SDK, but the potential of mobile, location aware technology was still very clear. We began working on an idea for a location aware service that would find the most popular events around you based on popularity within your group of friends.
We decided not to pusue the business idea after looking at a number of other companies doing similar things (Loopt, Whirled, etc), but not before I designed and coded a working prototype for nightlife destinations in San Francisco. I learnd basic PHP and MySQL to write this site, which has CSS skins for both iPhone and desktop browsers. You could link it up with your Facebook account to see venues your friends were attending, and see lists of venues ranked by proximity and popularity.
Doing all this in a web browser seems rather quaint now that the iPhone SDK is available, but at the time I wrote the prototype, Safari was the only place for app developers to make iPhone services.
The prototype is still functional (except for the Set My Location address mapping feature), and can be accessed at www.gettoutt.com
No Impact Man: “I am not realistic. I never want to be realistic. God save us all from realism, especially if it means we have to limit our vision for the world.”
Author Unknown: “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back– Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
William Drenttel: “Great design does not, in fact, come from compromise; it comes from strength of character, persistence of vision, and expertise.”
Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect. (1864-1912): “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”
Tim Brown: “Inspiration. Where do ideas come from? Insights are the fuel of inspiration. You don’t get ideas from sitting at your desk. Use the world as a source of inspiration (not as a source of validation). It starts with empathy and seeing things from other people’s viewpoints, not yours. Aim to understand people on multiple levels: physically, cognitively, emotionally, socially, and culturally.”
Louis Pasteur: “Luck favors the prepared mind.”
Andy Rachleff: “Well I don’t believe that entrepreneurs are created, I think they are born… You can always hire execution, you can never hire vision.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihaly: “To be human means to be creative.”
Edward Albee: “Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of their way to come back a short distance correctly.”
Pablo Picasso: “[Work] below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.”
David Cabianca: “Rules are used as a substitute for skills of observation.”
Steve Jobs: “You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”
Frank Gehry: “Is starting hard? You know it is.”
Richard Schoenwald: “I can’t lead the life of the mind in solitude, and neither can you, and together we defy the tyranny of change, and we escape being imprisoned by falseness and triviality, and we jointly venture onward.
Unknown: “To be bound to our own mistakes is the ultimate expression of freedom.”
From John Maeda’s Blog: “Your expression of anger … belies the qualities … of a lesser man.”
Today I finally finished a book I’ve been working on since my Thanksgiving break in Copenhagen: Creativity, Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. This book was an absolutely amazing read. Its a study of creativity based on interviews with 91 exceptionally creative and successful people, spanning the fields of science, technology, business, art, and literature. It is one of few books I’ve read that I felt like I could flip right back to the first page and read it all over again right after finishing it. I’d highly reccomend it to anyone who feels like they don’t fit into the typical molds of our society, sees the world slightly differently than most, or aspires to be creative personally or professionally.
I’ll need a new book for my trip to Tasmania tomorrrow, and I’m hoping to pick up a copy of one of these at the airport tomorrow:
Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present by Michael Oren
