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Kill Your Favorite Ideas
Sometimes the road blocks that are keeping you from where you want to go are actually the ideas you like the most. Perfection is the enemy of progress, but so is vanity. Learn to let go, says Henning, as he describes a feature he loved, but removed from his bucket list app. My first app concept [...]
Continue reading...The Opposite of Perfectionist
11. August 2012
If I told you there is a guy who travels the world dancing for a living, you’d call him a professional dancer. If I told you he had no formal dance training, you’d be impressed. Matt Harding has paid his bills by dancing dorkily all over the globe. And in a great interview with the New [...]
Continue reading...The Marathoner’s Guide to Accomplishing Anything
14. June 2012
If you want to run a marathon successfully without getting injured, spend four days a week doing short runs, one day a week running long and hard, and two days a week not running at all. Now, that seems like a pretty smart schedule to me if you want to do anything challenging and sustain it [...]
Continue reading...Something Complex Can Be Simple, Something Complicated is Always Complicated
3. June 2011
Many people use “complex” as a synonym for “complicated.” In make a complex startup, Peter Ehrlich doesn’t argue to make things complicated. In fact, he says to make them simple. And complex. An idea must be complex inside (to the founders), for otherwise it is nothing and weak. It must not be complicated inside, for then [...]
Continue reading...The Simple Solution That Stopped Wandering Patients
29. April 2010
“Occasionally people slip out the front door and then they wander.” That was the problem facing a senior center in Germany. Their patients, afflicted with dementia or Alzheimer’s, would walk away in a desperate search for a reality that only exists in their heads. The story is told in fifteen minutes on an episode of the [...]
Continue reading...Unrut Yourself: My Six Week Side Project
19. January 2010
Almost every day I walk down to a local Mexican restaurant and spend at least an hour there. The same restaurant. Every day. I may have mentioned this before. If there is anyone who needs out of a rut, it’s me. That fact gave me an idea for a new side project, which I started [...]
Continue reading...Social Software Needs More Context
8. December 2009
I have a problem: I don’t remember who you are. Okay, maybe not you, but in my travels around the Internet, I sometimes become connected to someone on a social website that I don’t remember. I could use a little context, some help triggering my memory. Has there ever been a time when the average person [...]
Continue reading...Make Up Units to Simplify Your World
1. December 2009
Lately I’ve been thinking of distances in terms of a strange unit you’ve never heard of: the LaBo. You’ve never heard of it because I made it up. It’s the number of steps between my house and the local Mexican restaurant, La Bonita. While I was actively writing my book I would go to La Bonita [...]
Continue reading...Give a Simple Gift Through Advertising
17. November 2009
I’m not sure why I never thought of this. Want to make someone feel good? Create a Google Ad using his name as the keywords. Then, when he does his next vanity search, he’ll see your message front and center (or, well, off to the right, probably). This is exactly what happened to my friend Rick [...]
Continue reading...What is Personal Feature Creep?
26. October 2009
When creating products, feature creep is the usually slow process by which additional complexity is added. It is not intentional, but it is normal. And it doesn’t stop at your projects, either. It infiltrates your life, creating personal feature creep. Rather than additional functionality, personal features are usually commitments we’ve made, or ventures we’ve taken on. [...]
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16. December 2012
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