I will be speaking at Hypepotamus on March 28th to the Atlanta Web Design Group and I’d love to hang with you.
Here’s the description of the talk:
Your best friend is like a physical reminder of what is good, worthy, and true. They are a moral compass when you cannot seem to find yours and an encouraging conscience when the dark clouds of doubt suddenly appear.
They see the things that you are apparently blind to and are unafraid to let you know about them. They are hard when hardness is required and quiet when words would destroy.
They allow you to fall and persuade you to get up. You never asked them to be all these things and they don’t feel as if it’s a burden to bear – with gladness they partner with you.
Powerful.
There are moments in our lives where we find ourselves undone – that is, we find that the worldviews and perspectives that we once held so dear are collapsing all around us.
We have to do a very difficult reset – a literal unplugging from the wall while all systems and running and abort all processes with the high chance of data loss.
Recovery isn’t guaranteed, especially in the previous state. This is both a blessing and a curse. An opportunity and a challenge. A renewing of the mind and a divorce of what was.
Click for larger view
A very interesting article on the Entrepreneur’s DNA via the WSJ was passed to me by my father last night.
A fascinating perspective on the difference between disruptive business leaders and execution-driven executives. To be the former it seems that an emphasis on the following are vital:
- Associating – Drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields.
- Observing – Scrutinizing the behavior of customers, suppliers, and competitors to identify new ways of doing things.
- Questioning – Posing queries that challenge common wisdom.
- Experimenting – Constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge.
- Networking – Meeting people with different ideas and perspectives.
Do you find yourself well-versed in those ingredients?
One reason I enjoy teaching so much is because it’s powerfully cathartic – although I don’t express those feelings or emotions outwardly in any obvious manner it stirs quietly underneath because I know that I’m helping others accelerate their goals by giving them a heads-up on what’s to come.
In October of last year I said goodbye to Instagram - it was a sweet departure and it has been a great one as I don’t regret it at all.
Yet even my next choice, Path, wasn’t a perfect alternative and only kept me interested for a few months. Ugh. You see, I still wanted the functional aspects of a good image capture system with nice filters without the overhead of privacy and without sacrificing creative freedom.
In other words, I still wanted to post filtered images but to do so simply wasn’t very simple. As you can see, I enjoy posting filtered images on Twitter every so often:
I am incredibly protective of my mornings – this is an uncompromising part of my day where I find I am the most productive. I once plotted this out as you can see here. This has slightly changed now that I’m spending more of my time in my work office instead of my home office, but it is essentially the same.
In a not-so-strange way I demand absolute authority in this space and time to do as I please – whether that’s writing content, listening to a podcast or viewing a must see video, or relaxing. I may even schedule an early morning meeting too. Heck, I might do all of these things at the exact same time.
Whatever it is this is also the worst time to interrupt me – I’m the most volatile and most sensitive at this point in the day as I hold this morning period sacred. A few people have experienced my wrath and it’s not a pretty picture. I can’t say that this is “right” but it is what it is.
It’s interesting to think that one of the previous 10 free ideas is something that I decided that I would actually take on for a personal side project.
But, for your viewing and ideation pleasure, here are 10 more great ideas that might spawn the right amount of inspiration for you to build your next killer app, product, or even company.
