The Idea Dude

Words are powerful

2008-10-03T08:49:00.002-04:00

Someone said on the radio this morning that words are powerful. I thought of our blogs as being intellectual meals. We have recipes in our heads and everyone cooks differently.

Some blogs are great appetizers but have little substance leaving you hungry and wanting more.

Others are bloated, heavy meals making you churn through long-winded posts that go on forever.

Often blog posts stop abruptly with little or no conclusion as if dessert was forgotton.

Some are just plain fast food, copied from others simply to put food on the table.

Then there is the gourmet blogs that give you just enough, making you crave for more. Everything is balanced, everything has a place. Presentation, taste and originality are equally great.

Taking a page from the Iron Chef, perhaps that is the way to judge our blogs.

Presentation. Well-thought out, well-said.

Taste. Great ideas and flavours, invoking just the right emotions.

Originality. Providing something you won't find anywhere else. The biggest sin of bad restaurants any great chef will tell you. Forgoing fresh ingredients.

How do you sharpen your knives? but drawing inspiration from our fellow bloggers.

BTW: if blog is a meal and the blogosphere is a feast, what is Twitter? the ultimate snack food?

Hmmm, food for thought, isn't it?

The user experience of change

2008-10-02T09:11:00.003-04:00

I've been working a lot lately with several companies starting up new Internet ventures. The most notable feature that all of these have in common is that the founders have a passion to bring about new and unique user experiences different from what we have now.

So it was terrific to find my good friend Sean had penned a post about creating user experiences that bring about change

Sean said "...if we can't imagine different futures beyond the present situation, then we can't effectively explore new ideas, cover new ground or innovate..."

Change is perhaps the only constant for any startup
The 7 stage model that Sean outlines in his blogpost is so applicable to entrepreneurs architecting the next big thing. Here's a synopsis of the 7 stages with my embellishments from a startup lifecycle point of view. I highly recommend you head to Sean's blog to read the whole thing.

Picture: The business guys like to call this vision. For me that's too grand. Keep it simple. Call it a picture. Have a picture in our mind of what it is we are going to accomplish.

Commit: this is the crossing of Rubicon. You can't get half wet when you jump in the pool.

Glimpse: The quick and dirty prototype that will give us both inspiration and direction for something bigger.

Trial: Can't say this better than Sean. "...a period of confusion where we leave behind our old ways of thinking - where we are unsure and even frightened enough to look for something different or new..."

Arrive: We achieve a well-define milestone that is usually conveniently positioned at the cross-roads of the next series of big decisions. Or put differently, if you arrive at point and didn't have to make any big decision, it isn't a milestone.

Payoff:The time to reflect on the impact of what we have done for user community and all the stuff we could have and should have done if we could do it again.

Secrete Payoff:Did we achieve or provide something for our users that is unique, relevant and personal that they couldn't get anywhere else. Gotta say it again, UNIQUE, RELEVANT, PERSONAL

Return: start over at the beginning. Because it is a cycle and if it is successful, it will have momentum and it challenges us to keep reinventing ourselves to ensure we are unique, relevant and personal so we can create experiences for our users that are unique, relevant and personal.

Thanks Sean, you should make posters of your post, I for one would buy one!

The tree

2008-10-01T08:38:00.002-04:00

I've been taking a new route to work in the mornings. It runs past a golf course which makes the morning commute a little less stressful. On Monday, a single tree caught my eye. Being the first and only one to welcome spring, it stood bold out in blazing reds and vivid oranges. Even though it wasn't the largest or the tallest, it was the one I would remember that defined the arrival of fall.

The next day, the tree's neighbours jealously followed suit, changing the canvas of green to a gradual sea of vermillions and reds. By day 3, I could not find the tree... It reminded me of Seth Godin's Purple Cow. Things that are extraordinary become less so when there are many of them or if we see them everyday.

We seem to be genetically trained to seek and admire those that stand out. We are inspired by those that have the courage to stand alone and stand out. Yet we seek to be the same and belong lest we are marked as different.

Perhaps that is what defines those who lead and those who follow.

George Clooney has my phone

2008-09-11T08:44:00.002-04:00

I have a old Blackberry hand-me down. Old in that is probably a 3-year old model that has similar proportions to a brick. It is creamy white with a blue face, so unlike the slim shiny phones you get these days. It's saving grace is that it has a bright display that my aging eyes appreciate. I ditched my previous Blackberry that had a non-lit black and white LCD display.

To say it is unfashionable would be an understatement. My daughter would rather use quarters and a payphone than carry my phone around. Over the weekend we were watching Michael Clayton and lo and behold, George Clooney's character had exactly the same model. RIM must have paid a fortune because it was shown repeatedly and quite prominently in the movie.

"Look Dad, he's got the same phone as you!"

All of a sudden, my phone was cool. I felt cool!

Then dawned the realization why we pay athletes and celebrities millions of dollars to endorse our products. Sometimes there is more value in what people endorse than the product itself.

That is the power of endorsement.

Cuisine or buffet

2008-08-14T08:35:00.005-04:00

Can't help but notice how impatient we all get if a web page takes a couple of seconds longer to load. As an internet society we have come to expect our information instantaneously. Everything is on tap and available. Is that always a good thing?

I remember as a child the anticipation of running to the bookstore to see if my favorite monthly comic had arrived. I wrote letters to friends and looked in our letterboxes every day for a reply. Somehow, the anticipation added to the experience when something eventually arrived.

I wonder if the analogy is the same as my eating habits. I enjoy visiting a good restaurant, being served personally, choosing my meal and then waiting for it to be prepared specially for me. And when it arrives, I take a few seconds to admire the presentation before digging in. Compare that to having buffet meal, where I go and pick what I want and usually I'll try a lot of things because I can. I generally over-eat because of it and walk away too full and feel like I got my money's worth but really not sure there was any resemblance of a dining experience.

The internet has become a wild west with no signs of maturing. If anything it is getting worse. Search for any term on Google today and the majority of the links even on the first page are either spam pages, pages with no relevant content, content that is copied from other sites or sites that require a membership to view the content. Regardless of the number of Ph.Ds Google may have, they will always lose the battle of crowd-sourcing, millions of intelligent minds that find ways to game the system.

The problem is because so much of the internet is free, both in the creation and consumption of content. The internet has made us information gluttons and quantity has overwhelmed quality, a good sign for search engines but a bad sign for us who spend too much time looking for diamonds in the sand.

The problem of being ordinary

2008-08-06T12:03:00.002-04:00

There's a quote from America Beauty that's been running around in my head for last day or so... "I don't think that there's anything worse than being ordinary."

Most of us, if not all of us, have that fear. Watching the hundreds of thousands audition for American Idol each year points to that fact. To leave this life without leaving a legacy would be waste of a life.

The challenge is to find ways to be extraordinary doing the smallest of things. If I can figure that out, I'm sure it's a great start to being extraordinary at a grander scale...

Surely building software should be like building railroads

2008-07-28T13:14:00.003-04:00

My friend, Steve and I were discussing project management over lunch. He left me with a wonderful gem. Since he doesn't blog, I'll share it here.

Imagine you were building a railroad and management wanted a timeline. So you diligently look at the costs of building the trains, the train stations and the railroad etc. and come up with a cost. Armed with the data based on all your years of experience, you're present this to your management team and board of directors only to be told it is not good enough. They need it much faster than that. You're told you have to be more innovative in your thinking. Here are some of the recommendations that were offered at the meeting.

Take an existing train and make it work on the track even if the track gauge is different. Can't be too hard, they all work the same way.

Don't wait for the seats to arrive. Passengers can stand for the first few months. We'll put them in the next time the trains are serviced.

Don't test the train or the signalling system. We could cut our launch date by several weeks. Better still, let our passengers tell us what's broken.

If the railroad is taking too long build, remove some of the tracks thereby saving materials and labor.

Don't advertise the timetables to save publishing and marketing costs. We'll spread the word virally by using our passengers.

Train drivers are too expensive, I have a cousin who's looking for work and he's pretty cheap. I'm sure he has friends too.

The point is we don't build railroads or airplanes that way. So why do we consistently do this in the software world. Beats me. Do you know?

Entrepreneurial communism, an oxymoron

2008-07-28T07:50:00.003-04:00

Robert Scoble has an article about the Silicon Valley VC disease. His observation is that venture capitalists are only interested in investing in companies that potentially can make lots of money in a short period of time i.e. 1-3 years instead of 10 years. They also want you to develop solutions for broad platforms instead of narrow niches because logic says the broader the market the better your chances of making more money.

I've seen the coin from both sides. Firstly in defence of the VC. They are not charities and their number one priority is to invest where they see the biggest return in the shortest period of time. Like it or not, that just makes plain business sense. Secondly, the good VCs get involved with their companies, many of them have been successful in the their own careers. So it only makes sense that they help you grow your business from within and externally.

The economics of focus. For the VC it's about focus, if you invest $100k in 100 companies, you're no better than a bank. If you invest $1 million in 10 companies, you can spend your time figuring out how to scale them. So it makes sense for them to spend big and focus rather than lots of little investment and have no time for you.

The need to go big. Despite best intentions and due diligence, the long tail concept applies equally well to VCs. i.e. if you have 10 investments, it is likely that 1 or 2 will hit it out the park, 2-3 will linger around and eventually make you money and the last 5 will either die or dilute you with subsequent rounds that it might as well be dead from an investment point of view. Given those odds, it's no wonder they spend most of their time trying to figure out which is going to be the home run.

Angels of mercy. For small startups who needs $100k to $500k to bootstrap their companies their only recourse is to look for angel funding. It's always been this way. Angels are usually people who have money to invest, do it in smaller amounts and often add no other value to your business than the money they contribute. They do less due diligence, ask less questions and take less equity. Unfortunately, the number of savvy angels have substantially dropped due in part to bad experiences during the dotcom era.

Incubators, the middle ground. Another source would be incubators. They typically invest enough to bootstrap your company, supply you with business development/marketing resources and even office space. The caveat is for taking an early stage risk they demand 50% or more of your company for very little money invested. The decision you then have to make is it better to realize your dream on someone else's coin or perhaps not at all.

The bottom line is being an entrepreneur is tough. Being a new one without rich relatives or a deep Roledex is even tougher. You wake up every night wondering where you're next meal is coming from and you eventually start looking into the mirror questioning whether you're not just chasing windmills at the expense of your family. Then you spend tons of time chasing reluctant VCs instead of developing your application. Finally, you start doing consulting and ad hoc work to pay the bills which is better than chasing VCs but you're no better off because you're taking precious time away from your startup idea. Which by the way is starting lose it's lustre as the world moves on or worse still some other startup who manages to land a million dollars muscles in your turf.

As they say, Caveat Emptor. Let the buyer beware

BTW: Only the rich will tell you that having too much money is a bad thing.

Why you should not stop blogging

2008-07-21T08:53:00.002-04:00

New York Times has an interesting article called This is your life (and how you tell it). It's about people telling stories about themselves. The part that struck a chord for me was...

...We think that feeling you have changed frees you up to behave as if you have; you think, ‘Wow, I’ve really made some progress’ and it gives you some real momentum...

It is not a coincidence that the majority of therapy sessions is spent getting patients to talk about themselves, their successes, their problems and their fears. Unknowingly, they may have some event that have been locked away in memory stopping them from being more than they really are.

We always see blogging as a voice or a vehicle so others can hear. But it is as much a vehicle for us to rid ourselves of demons, to reinforce thoughts or inspirations. Doing in publicly makes them more concrete and less scary. Declarations that rid us of our fears and failures.

Blogging about the insanities around our lives don't make them disappear but writing them down helps us deal with them maybe because once committed to words, they become more manageable.

Of course, once they are declared, the benefit to others is that they see the parallels of your experiences to theirs and all of a sudden you are less alone and maybe it isn't whether it is you or not, maybe it just is.

Momentum created and shared is infectious and is easily transferred.

Seeking to find inspiration from around us is often easier than finding it from within.

Where did you draw your inspiration from today?

Learning to fail fast

2008-07-20T22:54:00.002-04:00

If you're a serial entrepreneur, Roger Ehrenberg's post mortem of a failed startup is a must read. It is unlikely that the exact same 7 deadly sins will spell doom for every startup nevertheless they are ones to watch out for simply because each one on its own is hardly a giant killer. Rather it is a case of circumstance and dying of a thousand cuts.

There were two that resonated with me. Firstly, falling in love with the vision and the conflict between technology and product. Those how have failed many times and succeeded some times will tell you that the successful vision is often not the same as the one you started with. The difficulty is knowing when to stick your guns and when to know the vision is not financially viable. Usually it is an answer we can only tell after the fact and often too late.

Questioning our assumptions has to be a regular event and not seen as doubting our capabilities.

In fact it is the recognition that even with best efforts, we sometimes cannot predict changes in world around us. Also, our planning is based on what we know and we cannot account for things that we don't know.

The second one is failing fast.

From childhood, we are taught to be winners and success is a measure of personal worth. Everyone loves a winner and failure is a social stigma. So our fear causes paralysis. We delay product releases because we want the product to be perfect. The more features the better. We stop speaking to customers in case they tell us what they hate the most about our product and our company. In reality, following a path with closed eyes and ignoring the pulse of public opinion only makes the ultimate failure an even more bitter one.

Gone are the days of quarterly or yearly product cycles. The internet has changed all that. No longer do you have to wait for months for customer feedback. The playing field has levelled which means whatever you do, the chances are someone else will claim to do the same in 30 days. The appetite of the technology consumers has accelerated. They expect changes in days not month. They expect responses in hours not days.

While it is not the silver bullet, one of keys to survival in the modern technology age is learning to iterate quickly and often. To do that effectively, means constantly listening to our customers and recognizing and admitting to our failures quickly regardless of whether it is product of our incompetences or market changes.

The regret I have the most often with many of my decisions?

I wish I did it sooner

Living the moment

2008-07-08T23:14:00.003-04:00

We are taught as children that it is important to have goals. As teenagers we are encouraged to think about our where our university education will take us. In our workplaces, we are told that we have to set targets for our revenue, projects and business. Without a destination, how would we have a journey, and without a plan, how would we have a journey.

But sometimes, in our rush to complete the race, to reach our goals and destinations, we forget to live the moment. I often think about how hard my grandparents worked so their children would have a better future and in turn how hard my parents worked so I would have a better one too. Is that the circle of life? or is it wheel of death? or at best a daily churn.

I always get pangs of guilt when Harry Chapin's song Cats in the Cradle plays on the radio.

When you comin' home dad?
I don't know when, but we'll get together then son
You know we'll have a good time then

We will never be remembered for how hard we worked but rather by how much joy we brought to those around us. To do that means we have to spend time with the ones we love. We see the hills ahead but ignore the flowers at our feet.

Sometimes it is not about seizing the day but living the moment.

When was the last time all you thought about was the coffee clasped between your hands or stood for a few more seconds to savor the sunshine on your face?

Did you live your moment today?

The importance of reputation

2008-07-03T21:07:00.002-04:00

My daughter graduated from elementary school this last month. The following anonymous poem was quoted.

Be careful of your thoughts, for your thought become your words.
Be careful of your words, for your words become your actions.
Be careful of your actions, for your actions become your habits.
Be careful of your habits, for your habits become your character.
Be careful of your character, for your character becomes your destiny.

I thought about the importance of this blog and the impact on my reputation. I met someone a few weeks earlier to discuss a potential business opportunity. He had read my blog and it made it so much easier meeting the first time... at least for him because he felt he already knew me and what I stood for.

Our blogs reflect our thinking and our values over time. It tells people who we are over a long time-line. Unlike resumes that objectively list our accomplishments or subjectively try to sell our talents, blogs are much more personal and much less presumptuous.

Thanks to Google and internet archives, we have to be careful what we say for while they are not cast in stone, our words hang around for a very long time. They do become our legacy.

Our reputations are what others think of us. It is a public opinion... a social opinion. It is how others perceive us irrespective of what we are really inside. If we are authentic, then the inner and the outer is consistent. If we are not, we come across as being slippery and false.

Guard your reputation well. It will become your legacy.

Slipping back into Blogtown

2008-07-01T01:53:00.002-04:00

It's 1 July and Canada Day. Maybe a good way for a phoenix to rise from its ashes. I didn't intend to stop blogging. It sorta just happened. Too much work, too much exhaustion. Most of all, too little inspiration.

Everyone blogs for different reasons. I believe there is enough sadness and depression without needing me to add to it in any shape or form. When I stopped reading, I stopped being inspired and not being inspired, I failed to inspire others, ergo, a slow blog death spiral.

Even the short sporadic bursts of inspiration seemed too much to commit to words. I wondered what kind of example I had set for others. It's been too long and this isn't like me.

I'm sure the road ahead tomorrow will be as murky as it is today and was yesterday. But if there is a legacy for me to leave behind, it is this blog.

This blog is me and I am this blog.

For when we are finally gone, what can we leave behind but our thoughts and hearts. How can we leave them except through our words. And how can we ensure they hear those words but through our blogs.

Supermoms and a man's perspective

2008-05-11T00:40:00.002-04:00

I saw an article about what it takes to be a supermom today. At first, I thought it was wonderful article celebrating Mother's Day. After all, I too have a super mom and I'm married to one as well.

Then I thought about all the Mom blogs I've read in the last two years since starting TheGoodBlogs. I can't recall out of the 600-800 blogs I've read, any of them ever refer to themselves as supermoms. How tough it must be for any mother to think that there are supermoms out there because from all that I've read none of them are perfect and they definitely do not have super powers.

Instead they have plenty of bad days, mundane days, days where everything goes wrong. Too often they have very little time for themselves. It's car pooling, cooking, cleaning, worrying about sick kids, doing homework and darning socks. Hardly the stuff one associates with super heroes. Sometimes they wonder what if they took a different path in their lives. What if they chose to have a career without children. What if they had them earlier or later.

My point is that most mothers don't think about being perfect mothers. I doubt any of them aspire to being super. They simply wake up every morning and instinctively do what needs to be done. There's no handbook and often there's no safety net. Sometimes (and maybe often) they wonder whether what they are doing are the right things.

I prefer to call them ordinary miracles (inspired by a song by Sheryl Crow). Because most of what mothers do are ordinary everyday things. But they do them with big hearts, selflessly and tirelessly. They are miracles because as sons, daughters and spouses, we love them for who they are and what they do for us each and every day. They make every day extraordinary for the rest of us. We would not survive without them.

For me, super doesn't cut it. Special does because it's how they manage to make us feel. It's the place we have in our hearts for them. They in turn have places in their hearts for us. It's about the simple things, the sweet kiss after skinned knees, the hug after a bad day, cheers from the sidelines on a sports day. It's about the little things they do that we often take for granted but they never ask for praise, reward or recognition in return.

I heard on the radio from a competition organizer that when mothers win cash prizes, they often spend the bulk of it on others instead of themselves. I can believe that, don't you?

Mother's Day is a time for celebration and recognition so at least once a year we let them know they are indeed special.

Yeah! Have an awesome Mother's Day.

Chicken soup at your doorstep

2008-05-02T07:44:00.002-04:00

I read a blog this week on TheGoodBlogs. I've lost the url now but the story I read hung around for a day or so. The blogger told how he had locked his keys in his house, his saga trying to find his spare at his mothers, finally getting a locksmith, then rushed to a wedding, forgot the directions and then sat in a traffic jam. Yet at the end of it, he laughed at it all. And blogged about it.

For me, this is what the blogosphere is about. The digital chicken soup. Real people telling real stories that let everyone else know, we're all more alike than we realize. That we all have tough times and we can inspire each other. Not with fancy words or political rhetoric. Just a simple story about us.

The best stories that moved me have always been personal. They are not always success stories, but real stories. Mom blogs are the best in that regard. The blogosphere is a great gathering place for moms because often their lives are immersed in their children. They see very little else because they have little time for anything else. But through their blogs, they connect with each other at their own time, in their own way. Conversations can be made between the carpool and making dinner. Tears and laughter are shared willingly and resonate because more often than not, the reader on the other side is a mom.

That is the magic of the Internet.

Somehow we've cheapened that with spam blogs, corporate blogs, blogs with so much advertising you can't find the message. Like small quaint towns that grow into large sprawling cities drowning in smog and billboards. Imagine if no-one could make any money from their blogs, we would probably remove 99% of all the digital trash. And the last 1% would be pure honey. Real stories from real people... As John Lennon once sang, "Imagine.."

When you get your acronyms wrong

2008-04-17T10:03:00.003-04:00

There used to be an acronym for wealthy young couples with no children. They were referred to as Dinkies i.e Double Income No Children. Lots of disposable income and no commitments.

I finally figured out I'm actually socially dyslexic....

Because I have a Double Children and No Income!

Have a great day.

Made you smile

2008-04-15T10:23:00.003-04:00

A friend sent me story today that reminded me of a very simple principle we tend to forget. I did until today.

People may not remember exactly what you said or did, but they will always remember how you made them feel.

That is so true both in our personal and professional lives. Perhaps to build our legacy, the key is to make sure that we can convey a memorable experience with everyone with whom we come into contact. How often do we return to a store that may charge a little more or a pricey restaurant just because they made you feel special? More often than we care to admit, I'm sure.

Think about how we remember the good ole days. They were certainly not always that good and often we can't even the exactly details. But we remember feeling good at the end of a summer's day at the beach with your best friends or the surprise gift or favor from a friend or even a stranger.

Perhaps, you will never remember every post you read on this blog but I sure hope you remember it made you smile or sigh even if it was just for a brief moment in time.

The power within you

2008-04-04T09:15:00.005-04:00

I heard a phrase on the radio that has echoed in my head all week. It goes like this...

Can you hear the smile in my voice?

It was so simple, yet made me smile long after the sound had faded.

It reminded me of how we underestimate the power of language whether it is written, sung or spoken. Take a bag of words, dip your hand in and see what you can do.

Each sentence or phrase is alive. Like a warm breeze, it can embrace us. Like an eagle it can lift us up, inspire and make us soar. Then like a knife, it can cut right through us. It has the power to make us weep, be angry, laugh or cry.

Two necessary ingredients, your choice of words and your delivery.

Without language, there would be no record of history, no power to inspire, no means to learn. Perhaps it is that richness that has made humans supreme on this planet.

Nowhere has this been more evident than profound effect blogging has had on our society bringing together people with like interests from all parts of the world. People sharing their knowledge, their successes and their pain.

More often than not, we blog because we long for a connection, a response that says, I hear you... I am here

So, can you see the smile in my blog post?

BTW: If you doubt the power of words, head on over to my friends Liz at Successful-Blog and Joanna at ConfidentWriting. There's always magic in their words.

Your life in 6 words

2008-03-23T11:20:00.002-04:00

Legend has it that Ernest Hemingway, when challenged to write a novel in six words, produced the following. "For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn". The Toronto Star replicated this challenge, here are some of my favorites:

Started out strong, what went wrong?
I have studied my life away.
I found God in a tipi.
I have not accomplished much...yet.
Financial good, everything else a bust.

You can find the whole list here

It is amazing how six mere words can convey a myriad of images. It's almost a catalyst for one's imagination. Reading each sentence, I feel I understand whether the author is upbeat, regretful, exhilerated or depressed even though the details are missing.

I thought about what I would say, I'm sure it would be different if I thought about it each year.

This is what I would say today...

Still searching for the Holy Grail

Pray tell me your 6 words...

10 signs that you're in a startup

2008-03-11T10:13:00.003-04:00

Fred Wilson had a post about money-saving tips for startups. Made me think about the dynamics of startups again. Truth is, I've never been out of one, so money or the lack of has always been a concern.

So here are my 10 things to look for that tell you that you're in a startup.

1) You have to bring your own computer to work.
2) An email goes around asking if anyone has a copy of Microsoft Office.
3) None of the office chairs match.
4) Daylight savings means you get to work one more hour.
5) The CEO also writes code.
6) You trip over the network cables at least once a day.
7) The phone rings but because there is only one line, nobody answers it.
8) You know every customer by their first name.
9) Vacation plan? what vacation plan?
10) You working on Friday night... Saturday night... Sunday night...

Stepping out from the umbrella

2008-03-04T08:39:00.004-05:00

I looked up and it was March. The last few weeks have been intensive, writing code as if our lives depended on it. Actually it does, it's an unpaid internal project so the faster we can get it off the ground the better. It's pretty much 24/7 except the breaks to do the family duties. Unfortunately, I'll still be grinding away for quite some time.

I do miss blogging, both the reading and writing. Driving in the rain this week, I realized two things. Firstly, it is important to be networked both from a social and informational point of view. Blogs do both wonderfully and very efficiently too. It's like reading a gigantic newspaper with different reporters every day. Being tapped into a cloud of human thought is privilege we take for granted, that is the power of the unseen collective.

Secondly, you have to step away from the umbrella we often create for ourselves. If each word of each blog is a drop of rain, let it fall on you and immerse you. Read blogs that challenge our thinking, our prejudices, our biases and surely we would be better human beings. Our umbrellas are often created by our culture, our schooling, our friends and our jobs. And if you step back, it shields us from so much. Being exposed to the rest of the world through the Internet, both good and bad, at lightning speed creates dimensions of thought we would have not had in any other way.

I know this to be true, because I feel soulfully poorer today despite the thousands of lines of code I have generated. I wonder if those would wander by my blog and who wait to see my comments on theirs have thought that I have left the building. The reverse is true, I'm really stuck in the basement.

Having wrote this I do feel better already.

But I do think of all of you every day

What if?

2008-02-12T11:06:00.000-05:00

I like to think I'm a lifelong optimist. I have to be if I want to continue being a web entrepreneur. I believe in ideas, people and opportunity. If you put the three together, good things can happen. And when it does, the fireworks is a joy to watch.

Nevertheless, as you get older and the scars grow deeper and more plentiful, there's a part of me that becomes more cynical. And it's hard to fight because you have this gravity called experience that changes your gut feeling about things.

Being both cynical and optimistic is necessary. Cynicism stops us from doing stupid things and optimism gives us the inspiration to try things and give life a chance. The problem in both is whether that cynicism or optimism is driven by naivity.

An example of naive optimism would be to buy a lottery ticket and then proceed to buy a new house because you figured someone has to win and you're a good person so it should be you. It sounds pretty stupid but we start companies the same way. ie. we are smart people and we have great ideas so if we started a company, there's no question we will become the next Google.

On the other hand, there is naive cynics. These are so-called self-style 'experts' who discredit potential great ideas and opportunities only because they can't see it happening. They have very little basis for their decisions and usually they and their followers are fooled by their credentials, their position and perhaps because once upon time, they predicted something that happened to come true.

We can't predict next year's weather with any degree of certainty and we don't expect anyone to, yet we believe our economists who predict interest rates in the next 5 years, or stock analysts who tell you to buy and sell stock. Life is not linear, if it was, it would be predictable and boring. As my son reminds, if everyone was rich, then everyone would actually be poor. Wealth is a relative thing.

Age makes us cynics because our experience gives us the right to make judgement on things we know very little about or worse still, because we know too much about. Children are optimists because of what they don't know. Everything is possible and pigs can fly. Is innocence simply a euphemism for naivity?

I know I get less excited these days about gadgets, computers, technology and it concerns me. I have to stop myself and ask why? I have to remind myself that what I know is usually based on my history and is no proxy for my view for predicting the future. If something didn't happen in the past doesn't mean it won't happen in the future and vice versa. The best and worst thing that happened was to know that there is much that I don't know because it creates insecurity and inaction.

I still believe in ideas, people and opportunities. The difference now is that I realize the three are necessary ingredients but by no means the guarantee to success. Many successes (if not all) have some randomness as the catalyst. What does it mean? Dream like it's going to happen but don't sell the farm.

Recently, I had a great dinner with someone who had moved to the West Coast. During our conversation about some of the things he was doing, he stopped and looked at me and simply said, "I can see the cogs are running in your head". I knew right then, I had not lost my sense of possibility. For that I'm truly grateful. Without possibility, there would be no meaning in life because we would not have outcomes to look forward to.

It would be way cool, if I remembered on my death bed to utter two words, What if?, not said because I looked back at my life with regret but said because I was looking forward to next journey.

When we forget the reason for our journey

2008-01-29T12:02:00.000-05:00

John went on a Sunday ride on his bicycle. Like most weekends, he cherished this time, to smell the flowers, to listen to the birds and stopping at the top of each hill to look at the view.

On this Sunday, a cyclist swept by John at great speed. John admired his strength, his wonderful physique and the shiny bike as the cyclist passed him. John decided he was just as fit. Did he not travel this path every week? He decided to pedal faster. A little while later, John reached the end of his journey. Drenched in sweat, his chest heaving, he was disappointed that he could not keep up with the cyclist even though he covered the distance in half the usual time.

But John felt empty on the way home. Uncomfortable and tired, he couldn't smell the delicate freshness of the flowers because he was gulping all the air that he could. He couldn't hear the birds because his heart thumped loudly in his ears. He didn't notice the magnificent view because he just wanted to get back home.

John forgot the reason for his journey that week. He forgot it was a time to rejuvenate, to reflect and to be inspired by all around him. John wasn't John... he was someone else.

We're all like John sometimes. We feel we have to blog every day because the best bloggers do. We have to say something smart so people will link to us. We crave for comments because they validate our words.

Perhaps we should remember to blog like no-one's reading... to keep very sacred our own reasons for why we blog at all.

Natural born connectors

2008-01-23T10:19:00.000-05:00

I was brought up in a culture that defined my road to success before I was even born. It simply said, go to a good school, get good grades, go to university, get a degree, find a job, work your way up to the top and then retire and enjoy the fruits of your labour. The thinking behind that was brainpower was the secret success juice. As long as you were smarter than anyone else, you would be rich.

Forty+ years later. My perspective has changed. As parents, we always stress the importance of the academic, often at the expense of other skill sets. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. How true that rings now.

Looking around me at successful people over the years, many were Nobel Prize winners, not even close. Yet they were immeasurably successful. One of the keys was they knew they weren't the sharpest knife in the kitchen. But they knew who was and they knew where their strength lay. In connecting people and selling ideas.

In retrospect, it makes sense that these people, I call them natural born connectors, would ultimately be more successful. If you believe in the concept of evolution, these folks succeed because their promiscuity allows them to cast a wide net and sooner or later, they will land a whale or at least be on the right boat when the whale is caught.

For the academic, his choices are limited by his own abilities and mental prejudices. He will fish in the same stream year after year in the hope of the whale because he feels he designed the best fishing rod and has the best fish detector.

Thanks to the Internet, knowledge today is a commodity. Your maven is Google. The value is not in the neuron but the connections between them. Funnily enough, nature got that right, each neuron in our brains is pretty simple and not exactly interesting. But wire a billion of them together and we have something pretty awesome!

Today, I spend as much time figuring out how to help my children be better connectors as opposed to be better thinkers. Both are equally important!

What type of blogger are you?

2008-01-21T12:35:00.000-05:00

Haydn Shaughnessy blogged recently about social media here and here. He talked about the different types of bloggers and how it important to it was to understand what constituency you were serving. It inspired me to copy and augment his list:

Reporters. My friend, Mark Evans would fall in this category. If you wanted the lowdown on what's hot in tech, his blog does exactly what Haydn says viz, picking up on interesting bits of news and trends and spinning out a good story, responding to people’s need for novelty.
Influencers. Folks like Guy Kawasaki or Robert Scoble would fall into this category. It is their opinion more than their knowledge that holds sway. (they are pretty smart people but it is their brand that makes them special) They can effectively make your product simply by saying, I have one and I love it
Mavens. These blogs will tell you how to cook, where to find the latest software fixes, how to replace the battery in your iPod. Simply great resources to search for when you're looking to fix and make something. This is where you learn to smack your Wii controller on the palm of your hand if it stops working because there is a small accelerometer that is stuck inside.
Inquirers, philosophers and mentors. They don't necessarily have the answers but they are preoccupied in exploring events around us, helping us make ourselves better while they do the same for themselves. Some of these are purely social commentators, while others take the form of leadership and inspirational tracks.
Lifestyle bloggers. They do it just because it's fun. Often it's about their travels, their home. It's off the wall commentary. Reality blogs. It's about being able to express themselves in another medium other than voice and touch.
Consumer bloggers. These blogs are about the latest gadgets and gizmos. It's about the latest games, toys, handbags, celebrities, sport cars.
Business. A great example would be the Lenovo blogs. They educate their customers and potential customers. They describe their designs, products and issues. They create dialog between business and consumer.
Fanatics. Gossip blogs, sports blogs would probably fall into this category. These people love talking about their passion or perhaps better put, their obsession.

Often these categories overlap, because the blog offers a broad canvas of opportunity. But Haydn's point is that we need to understand what your constituent is and remain true to that. If you have diverse interests, multiple blogs are better at making sure no-one gets lost along the way.

At Successful-Blog you'll find blogs that talk about business, changing the world etc. If you're looking at the more personal side to Liz, you'll find her at Letting me be, where her thoughts, poetry and heart is a perfect destination for the restless or weary soul.

Understanding yourself (heart), your canvas (blog), your paint (words) and your audience (readers) is key to a successful blog.