Finding Clarity in an Ambiguous World
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Satiation of Desire : Be Good-Enough First
You’re walking through the desert, the sun beating upon the back of your neck. You are sweating, or at least you were, until the dryness in your throat seemed to dry up your skin as well. With sand in your eyes, you see a store on the outskirts of town selling bottled water. You pay…
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When Customers Hate Innovation
I’ve started to loathe renting cars. Not because they aren’t high quality nor because of the ridiculous hoops that agencies make you jump through. Rather because each car was designed to “innovate” on a bunch of things that were already good enough. Does it really make a difference if the open trunk button is to…
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What Do You Take Pictures Of?
This weekend we attended a birthday party for my Spanish teacher here in Guadalajara. Her friends brought a simple point-and-shoot digital camera and were taking lots of pictures of everyone there. They themselves posed for many pictures. I realized that the pictures I’ve seen from Mexican events are pretty much exclusively of the people that…
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The Fine Line Between The Great and the Amateur
What makes a dancer, singer, or speaker great? I mean really great, like genius-level great? There are three things that make the great different: First, they stand out. They break conventions. No one gets excited if they play it safe. In fact, they know “playing it safe” is one of the most dangerous options around…
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The RapidChip Fallacy
“The market is going to face this big, nasty problem and they will have no other choice but to use our product to solve it.” – Excited Entrepreneur Most of the time, this entrepreneur is committing the same fallacy that we faced when working on a failed project called RapidChip. This fallacy is related to, but different from…
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Book Worth Reading: The Inmates Are Running The Asylum
This week I got a rental car that had three buttons on the front of the dongle with the keys. In most cases, it’s lock, unlock, and open trunk. On this key chain, it was lock, unlock, and alarm. Seriously, the alarm was front and center and exactly where you would normally expect another function.…
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The Importance of a Warm Up
Several weeks ago, we went to see Daddy Yankee in concert. He is one of the more popular reggaeton artists, which is mix between pop, rap, and latin music. Doors opened at 7pm, so we showed up 15 minutes early to queue up and get a good spot. After waiting for about an hour, they…
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Doubt is the Spark Killer
It may be that “Fear is the mind killer”, but doubt is the spark killer. Earlier in my career, I had the opportunity to hire a number of great engineers and tried to help cultivate their careers. In the process, I found that one of the most difficult things to teach was initiative. Some were capable…
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Nature of Leading and Following
Concrete and concise stories of leadership are hard to come by, but the video below provides exactly that. It creates a visual picture of the relationship between leaders and followers. I originally saw this video on Seth Godin’s blog in the middle of last year. Seth mentioned that we need more “Guy #3″s. Since then,…
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Guest Blog: Mawy had a Yittle Yam
[In response to my post on Tea Bog Beet Knee, Matthew Ritzman, a friend of mine, wrote a response that I thought worthy of more attention. Matthew and I met while he was President of the local Toastmasters club that I attended. His speeches always tied in personal stories and how they impacted him and…
Got any book recommendations?