Tell everyone your idea. As many people as you can, especially people not in your industry. Tell your mom’s friends. Do not make them sign an NDA. What are they going to do, steal your idea? Not a chance.
Someday soon you’ll be sitting in a meeting and someone will want to go around the room and have everyone say what they’re planning to do this summer. This is your chance to tell people about your project. Here’s what you should say:
I’m going to learn to speak Vietnamese.
or
I’m going to make a portable heart monitor in Processing.
or
I found this company called Aircraft Spruce and they sell airplane kits so I’m going to make an airplane in my backyard.
A model airplane? they’ll say. Like a radio-controlled one?
No, you’ll say, a real airplane.
This meeting now has 2 outcomes: one, you have to go build a full-scale airplane in your backyard, which, yes, is going to take some work. But two: the badass from the meeting who’s building a freaking plane? That’s you.
The important thing about telling everyone your idea is that it puts you on the hook for following through, because you’re going to look foolish if you do nothing.
And this is important because what’s really at stake when you have an idea is not being first to market. It’s not capturing learnings from your users or iterating on your MVP. That’s small stuff. What’s at stake is your pride. Pride may be your greatest asset in terms of making ideas happen and getting projects done. You have to be too proud to do nothing.
It also helps if you name the company after yourself.
Intuition Pumps – celebrated philosopher Daniel Dennett on the dignity and art-science of making mistakes.
Is it a typeface I’d want to hang out with?
Typefaces definitely have personalities and I’ll get into ways to conceptually brainstorm about type shortly. When it comes to text type, I usually want something even-tempered and laid back but not lacking in personality. Finding typefaces with the right personality balance can be incredibly difficult because if you add even the most minor bits of flair to a letter—even the slightest curvature to a serif—it can make the type feel like it’s sporting a screaming purple mohawk when set in paragraph form. Sometimes you want your type to sport a screaming purple mohawk, but I can confidently say that those times don’t happen often. I should also note that “screaming purple mohawk” is relative. What I consider to be a screaming purple mohawk, you would probably consider the most subtle nearly invisible change in tone. You are the husband that won’t notice I got a haircut unless I chop it all off and blondify myself.
Source: jessicahische.is
The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table: Pay people enough so that they’re not thinking about money and they’re thinking about the work. Once you do that, it turns out there are three factors that the science shows lead to better performance, not to mention personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
I just noticed something strange on Wikipedia. It appears that gradually, over time, editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the “American Novelists” category to the “American Women Novelists” subcategory. So far, female authors whose last names begin with A or B have been most affected, although many others have, too.
The intention appears to be to create a list of “American Novelists” on Wikipedia that is made up almost entirely of men. The category lists 3,837 authors, and the first few hundred of them are mainly men. The explanation at the top of the page is that the list of “American Novelists” is too long, and therefore the novelists have to be put in subcategories whenever possible.
Too bad there isn’t a subcategory for “American Men Novelists.”
So my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you.
On studying his chronic fears this man found they fell into five fairly distinct classifications:
1. Worries about disasters which, as later events proved, never happened. About 40% of my anxieties.2. Worries about decisions I had made in the past, decisions about which I could now of course do nothing. About 30% of my anxieties.
3. Worries about possible sickness and a possible nervous breakdown, neither of which materialized. About 12% of my worries.
4. Worries about my children and my friends, worries arising from the fact I forgot these people have an ordinary amount of common sense. About 10% of my worries.
5. Worries that have a real foundation. Possibly 8% of the total.
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
