Posts Filed Under ‘People’
March 23rd, 2009, 6 comments
Stanford graduate Ramit Sethi's personal finance blog, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, is one of Lifehacker's most-quoted sources of financial advice, so I was honored when Sethi asked me to contribute a bit to his new book, also entitled I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Sethi's direct, authoritative style (evidenced by the blog and book title) may put you off at first glance. But on closer inspection you'll find he's an approachable, sensible guy, not some jerk trying to sell you a "foolproof" make-a-million-dollars-a-month system.
In fact, the I Will Teach You To Be Rich book, which went on sale today, is an excellent graduation gift for the college students in your life who are venturing out into a horrible economy steeped in student debt. To get a taste of what it's like, download the introduction PDF for free.
When you do get the book, you can find my contribution on page 134, a short piece on how I automate my week-to-week transactions in order to set and track long-term goals. Here's a full reprint.
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On This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte
March 23rd, 2009, 2 comments
I had the pleasure of joining Leo Laporte on his mega tech podcast TWiT yesterday afternoon, alongside Kevin Rose, Jason Calacanis, David Prager, and Dan Patterson, plus a couple of fun surprise drop-ins (like Geordi!). Here's the downloadable MP3 of the episode: TWiT 187: So Say We All.
March 23rd, 2009, 2 comments
Got a case of the Mondays this morning? Techie Andre Torrez says he loves Mondays because:
It's the start of the week. You get to see what ideas that were so important on Friday stayed important until Monday. [...] Mondays are a fresh start. They're like a reset button for the doldrums of your Wednesday afternoon meetings where two people are going on about something the other eight people in the room don't even understand.
I need to work on an attitude like his. Here's to appreciating the weekly reset button. The full post from Andre: I heart Mondays.
March 19th, 2009, 5 comments
You've got to wonder what makes a guy who builds 3D printers which also ice cupcakes tick. Apparently it's an obsession with getting things done. Maker-of-crazy-cool-things Bre Pettis posts his and Kio Stark's manifesto for the "Cult of Done," 13 edicts about finishing. Here they are, bolded bits mine:
1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you're done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.
Check out the cupcake-icing, 3D-object printing MakerBot here. Here's The Cult of Done Manifesto, with two posters you can download and stick to your wall to stare at while you procrastinate. Image by spatulated.
March 10th, 2009, 10 comments
In the depths of email overload desperation last week, I wished email messages had an 140-character limit like Twitter updates do. In response, two people recommended doing what Kevin Rose does: Set your desktop email signature to "Sent from my mobile phone."
It's a white lie that makes you look less rude for being short. It's annoying to have to fib (and embarrassing if you get caught somehow--of course all of Kevin's friends now know his "secret"). But for someone who gets more than 100 messages per day, this technique may be a matter of survival versus just saving time. Haven't set this up myself yet, but if I wind up at the bottom of another email mountain getting ready for a processing marathon, I just might.
Sundry Appearances About the Interwho
February 20th, 2009, 4 comments
Had a fun week flitting about various online outlets, and I wanted to share the carnage I left behind. Over at Harvard Business, I get all Stephen Covey on your ass and published a post on how to mitigate the urgent to focus on the important. The Blog Herald interviewed me about my transition from Lifehacker to Smarterware. Then Leo Laporte and Sarah Lane were very kind to me on this week's episode of the net@night podcast. I had so much fun chatting with Leo I agreed to get in on this Sunday's episode of This Week in Tech (TWiT) alongside Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing and Ryan Block formerly of Engadget. You can watch it live at 3PM Pacific time right here. Update: Here's the MP3 for download and listening. That is all. Have a great weekend!
February 13th, 2009, 5 comments
Anyone who makes things for a living should watch author Elizabeth Gilbert's 20 minute talk at the TED conference this month (full video below). Gilbert published the mega-Oprah-bestseller Eat, Pray, Love which is soon to be a movie starring Julia Roberts. In this talk she explains one way she's found to quell the anxiety that comes with following up after a big commercial success. Namely, she's gone back to the ancient idea that creative inspiration is an entity separate from us, which speaks through us: the muse, as it were.
It's not a popular idea these days.
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February 9th, 2009, 10 comments
60 Minutes interviews Coldplay's front man Chris Martin about how he writes hit songs. Being "openly neurotic," Martin makes sure he captures song ideas the moment they strike him--even if it means scribbling them onto his piano with a Sharpie. He's got a marker holder mounted to his whitewashed piano for just that purpose, as shown. In the video below, reporter Steve Croft asks about it.
Croft: You have notes written on the piano?
Martin: Yeah, look, but this is just the beginning. In six months, this will all be covered.
Croft: And you have to repaint the piano?
Martin: Yeah. When we finish something, we repaint.
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January 28th, 2009, 1 comment
Ultramarathoner and Ironman triathlete Graham Cooper is a 38-year-old father of two who lives in the Bay Area and holds down a full-time job 500 miles away in San Diego. His athletic accomplishments are impressive enough, but it's his ability to find the time to train between commuting to work during the week and being a weekend dad that makes you think he must be a robot who doesn't sleep. Turns out he's not; he's just ruthlessly disciplined about cutting out every unnecessary activity out of his day in order to log his training miles. Competitor magazine reports:
When Cooper is in serious training mode, a few luxuries fall by the wayside.
"I don't watch TV. I don't socialize much. I don't read as much as I'd like. I don't do long lunches and I don't drink. When I'm training, I get about six hours of sleep a night. When you're getting up at 4:30 or 5:00 and starting your day with a workout, you get a lot done."
Cooper starts from a thesis that most of us have an inefficiency in the system. The key, he says, "is to squeeze as much of the slop out of our lives as we can."
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January 26th, 2009, 1 comment
Actress Felicia Day writes, stars in, and produces the hit web series The Guild, which is one of my favorite things happening online right now. In a recent blog entry, she describes what made her start writing the series:
I had a strange realization that time passes whether you’re doing something with it or not. It would be easy to let every day go by easily with no risk and then, at the end of the day (my life), I would look back and realize that fear ruled me: At that point there would be nothing I could do about it. So, I got off my butt! It wasn’t easy and I had a lot of lapses (I still do) but the experience of being ruthless with myself was an amazing lesson to learn.
The Guild is in season 2 right now, and a new episode comes out every Tuesday on Xbox Live, and then on MSN Video. Even though the webisodes are only around 10 minutes or less, I look forward to them as much as I look forward to a new episode of 30 Rock. See also my starstruck interview with Felicia over at Lifehacker published a few months back, or her full blog post: How I Started Writing.
January 21st, 2009
Happy Presidential inauguration, Americans! Frontline's whole "Dreams of Obama" series is well worth watching, but my favorite part is the post-Harvard Law chapter, where Obama turns down a coveted and potentially lucrative job opportunity to follow his heart back to Chicago.
Abner Mikva, Federal judge 1979-'94; Obama mentor; offered him a clerkship after law school which Obama declined:
One of the reasons I was sort of surprised that he turned me down was at that time I was what was known as a feeder to the Supreme Court. The justices included Justice [William] Brennan and Justice [Thurgood] Marshall and Justice [John Paul] Stevens and Justice [Harry] Blackmun, all of whom would frequently take my clerks, Justice [Sandra Day] O'Connor. And it was a good likelihood that anybody who clerked for me with his kind of background would have gone upstairs to the Supreme Court. … Those are the best credentials you can have entering the practice of law. You can make an awful lot of money very quickly. You can just about call your own spot and where you want to practice, who you want to practice with.
As he said when he told me why he wasn't going to interview with me, that wasn't the track he wanted to follow. [...]
He had a pretty good idea of who he was and where he wanted to go; that money was not going to drive his ambitions; that he viewed success not in terms of how big a mark he could make in the law but rather on a larger stage.
Emphasis mine. Full video's inside.
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