Realtalk: How many times have you started a project with a burst of motivation and dream and then it just… fizzled out? Not with a bang, but with a whimper? (Or dreamt about it and planned it, but never started it?) Believe me, I’m not wielding the Scepter of Snooty Judgment here. I used to… Read more »
It’s been a crazy fucking year. A mixture of horrible things, wonderful things; a mixture of things that happened to me, and things I made happen. It wasn’t boring for a single second. (“May you live in interesting times” – a curse indeed.) My year really kicked off, in October 2014 — yes, yes, I… Read more »
Sex, money, health — those are the three skeeviest industries in the world. I operate in one of them. Our class 30×500 is, broadly speaking, a Make Money Online product. Our business “neighbors” fascinate me. Last week, I spent several hours devouring a 40-page forum thread about one of our (putative) competitors. Every single person,… Read more »
“How do you motivate yourself to write 1,000 Words a Day when you don’t feel like it?” “I don’t.” — Chris Guillebeau, author How to Write 300,000 Words in 1 Year Apparently it was morning. 10…30? I patted down all the major parts: face, chest, thighs, upper arms. Man, my arms were freezing, though I’d… Read more »
“I’m going to write a book.” “I’m going to build a SaaS app.” “I’m going to quit my job and travel the world.” Sound familiar? How often are these statements followed by action — real action? We all know That Guy. We all know people who spend all their time talking about what they want,… Read more »
The user is using your app. The user requests a feature. You think: OK, they know what they want and they want this, so I’ll do it. But it’s not that simple. Replace “user” with “player.” The player is playing your game. The player requests a rule change. Well, here we have a conflict, and… Read more »
This is an email I sent to my mailing list a year ago. We miss you, Steve. I’ve been following Steve closely for more than a decade. Most folks don’t know this, but I ran a Mac-oriented news & opinion site from 1999 to about 2003. Before that, I was “just” a rabid fan. It’s […]
Seems like most of my best writing goes to the 30×500 Alumni mailing list these days. Including this little bit below. One of my brilliant (and particularly sesquipedalian) students was talking about the way that pedestrian thinking tends to exert inexorable drag on humanity: Wordy Student: Just a zooming out sub specie aeternitatis observation: certain […]
I’ve traveled the world. Well, quite a few parts of it, anyway. Enough to see a pattern, certainly. First of all, everybody, everywhere, is convinced that their countrymen are the worst drivers in the world. And… Everybody, everywhere, is convinced that their country/city/family is the worst environment for creating a great business. In Austria, people […]
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My friend K is smart, vivacious, funny, driven, talented, passionate, and bubbling over with what the suits of yesteryears called “work ethic.” And a few days ago, K and I spent at least an hour going back and forth about her horrible, shitty, no-good very bad boss — hereafter known only as “Crazypants.” The Ballad […]
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