I finally got around to reading Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer after having it recommended by multiple people, including a great review by J. Scott Shipman.

As soon as I finish up my MBA (1 week left) I’ll get around to posting my own write-up.  Until then, just buy it – I’ve read quite a few books on creativity and this one stands above them all.

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PotteryPrint didn’t end up making its funding goal on Kickstarter – never fun to miss the mark, but we had a ton of fun testing a new concept and received a lot of great feedback.  Thank you (really, I’m humbled) to everyone that helped us out, it made me realize how many amazing people I’m blessed to be connected to in a myriad of ways.

Creating something new and substantial is hard – sounds obvious, but it’s why so few people make a living doing startups…or even try for that matter.  Just after the end of our campaign a friend sent Shlok, Brian & myself a post by Chris Dixon entitled, “The myth of overnight success” – it’s short, but awesome:

Angry Birds was Rovio’s 52nd game. They spent eight years and almost went bankrupt before finally creating their massive hit. Pinterest is one of the fastest growing websites in history, but struggled for a long time. Pinterest’s CEO recently said that they had “catastrophically small numbers” in their first year after launch, and that if he had listened to popular startup advice he probably would have quit.

You tend to hear about startups when they are successful but not when they are struggling. This creates a systematically distorted perception that companies succeed overnight. Almost always, when you learn the backstory, you find that behind every “overnight success” is a story of entrepreneurs toiling away for years, with very few people except themselves and perhaps a few friends, users, and investors supporting them.

Startups are hard, but they can also go from difficult to great incredibly quickly. You just need to survive long enough and keep going so you can create your 52nd game.

All this to say, it’s not over.

At some point in the future I’ll write a more substantial lessons learned post, but for now here’s the update we posted on our Kickstarter page.

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Friends,

Despite our best efforts and amazing support from people like yourself, we did not reach our funding goal on Kickstarter.  Naturally, this is disappointing, but the level of interest that was generated & huge amounts of positive feedback we received have convinced us that we are close to something with PotteryPrint.  We want to sincerely thank each of you that backed us financially and/or helped spread the word about PotteryPrint – we were humbled by your generosity and dedication to helping us succeed.

Over the next several weeks we will be sifting through the feedback & results looking for ways we can improve on PotteryPrint.  This could mean sticking with the same basic idea with slight modifications, or pivoting to something different – from CNC to lasers, plastics to metals.  At the end of the day we want to make highly creative, engaging applications that help kids become makers…there are a TON of great ways to do this.

We will be looking to you to help us by providing us with your honest feedback and collective imagination.  Great apps are not built in a vacuum, but via the constant two-way communication of an engaged community.  If the Kickstarter campaign did anything, it helped us build this community – now it’s time to make something awesome together!

Be a part of the creative process by signing up here.

Thanks,

Cameron, Shlok and Brian

www.potteryprint.com

@potteryprint

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Hey friends, below is a quick update on PotteryPrint, the project I mentioned last week.  If you haven’t back us yet we could really use your help.  Even a small donation would be greatly appreciated and help turn this idea into a reality.

Click here to donate

We’re excited to announce that we’re partnering with Ponoko, one of the world’s leading 3D printing companies, to do the actual fabrication of the pottery pieces developed within PotteryPrint.  In doing so, we will be able to connect our app to their high-quality order and delivery system, making the entire process incredibly simple and painless.  Ponoko is developing an awesome portfolio of ‘making apps‘ and we are very excited for PotteryPrint to be one of them.

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In the last two months I haven’t finished any books, I haven’t done much blogging, tweeting, Facebook-ing, gardening…all because I’ve been working on a really fun, challenging project with a few good friends, Shlok and Brian.  And now we’re finally ready to share it with the world.

PotteryPrint is an iPad app that lets young kids express their creativity by designing pottery pieces that they can have printed in 3D.  We just launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of the app and I’d love for you to check it out.  The Kickstarter page features a short video explaining the concept, as well as additional details, mockups and even some cool prizes should you decide to help make the app a reality by donating.

As a parent of two small children I want to help ensure that they can develop their creative and artistic abilities in addition to learning about technology like 3D design and printing. PotteryPrint does just that, operating on the principle that every child is a maker at heart.

Check it out on Kickstarter here

Sign up for e-mail updates on the progress of the app here.

Follow us on Twitter: @potteryprint AND Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/PotteryPrint

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To come to the pleasure you have not
you must go by a way in which you enjoy not.
To come to the knowledge you have not
you must go by a way in which you know not.
To come to the possession you have not
you must go by a way in which you possess not.
To come to be what you are not
you must go by a way in which you are not.

St. John of the Cross, I, 13, #10
The Ascent of Mt. Carmel

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LtCol Dave “Sugar” Lyle recently wrote a great rebuttal piece in the Armed Forces Journal addressing the Oct AFJ article “Goodbye, OODA Loop” which Lyle says, “…should have set off alarm bells across the U.S. defense community.”

As has already been commented on by several in the Boyd community, the oversimplified OODA diagram and corresponding straw-man argument presented in the Benson and Rotkoff article takes an elegant and fairly sophisticated framework and cuts it down to the equivalent of a kindergarten finger painting, turning OODA into a linear decision-making checklist of which Boyd himself would have likely lit on fire with his cheap cigar.

Adam Elkus points out in his own rebuttal piece,

The OODA is neither linear nor prescriptive. One doesn’t, as the article implies, sit down and think “What does my OODA say about ordering lunch today?” It’s simply a model of decisionmaking that more or less occurs automatically. As the “full OODA” shows, it’s significantly more complex than simply a tactical model built on speed

It’s often our initial tendency when dealing with things or ideas that are complex to quickly simplify them to something more manageable or familiar. In certain cases this makes sense as it allows us to filter through a infinite variety of options without getting bogged down in irrelevant details. The full OODA Loop however, it is itself a simplification of a lifetime of Boyd’s work, so by creating an OODA lite one is actually simplifying a simplification…to the point of irrelevance.

Lyle puts it much more eloquently,

Studies by cognitive neuroscientists have demonstrated that as a basic human trait, we are stressed more by uncertainty than unpleasant certainties. But in our efforts to achieve parsimony and the false cognitive ease often associated with it, we sometimes cut out too much detail and end up building expensive empires on theoretical foundations of sand.

Boyd’s work is no different than that of many great theorists of the past in that it requires a good deal of mental wrestling and time to understand. It is not intended to provide straight-forward answers as much as it is better questions.

Here are a few other sections from Lyle’s piece I found of great value,

Ironically, the popularity of Boyd’s ideas has created the largest cognitive trap in which much of the defense community still finds itself. As people absorbed the wisdom of the OODA Loop, they absorbed the simple version as a decision loop, but not the deeper insights of the adaptation engine that Boyd actually offered. While emphasis on the decision-loop aspects of OODA is absolutely appropriate in tactical situations, large parts of the defense community became obsessed with the idea that paralysis — collapsing the adversary’s OODA Loop while maintaining your own at a faster pace — was the ultimate goal of warfare. Network-centric warfare advocates promised that we could achieve “decision dominance” and gain victory through the right combinations of kinetic and nonkinetic effects if we only had the right interconnected systems to remove the fog of war. Under Transformation, we designed light, agile forces designed to overwhelm the enemy’s ability to respond to our higher operations tempo and assumed that this would collapse our enemies’ wills to resist us.

But this approach, just like the simple OODA Loop that it invokes, fails to consider the longer and more important adaptation loops that describe the long-term interactions needed for lasting conflict termination. We focused on short, fast races, forgetting that the race never really ends. The ability to cause paralysis through combat is vitally important to our national security, but paralysis is irrelevant or even counterproductive if it is not serving as a temporary stepping stone on the way to creating lasting, nonviolent, long-term patterns of complementary adaptation between two societies. In the strategic sense, victory does not come from paralysis — it comes from its opposite.

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We’ll never be able to accurately predict the future in a complex world, and we’ll never be able to completely control what happens in it, but with a better understanding of the universal process of adaptation, we can organize what we already know from various disciplines of study, and find new ways to leverage the entire process of adaptation — in the physical, cognitive and moral domains — with comprehensive approaches that go far beyond paralysis. The “better peace” we’re looking for on the other side of war comes when societal patterns of adaptation favor nonviolent methods of competition and cooperation over violent ones. If we don’t understand what drives and sustains mutually beneficial adaptation, how can we ever hope to create the conditions for it using military force?

We don’t need to get rid of the OODA Loop; we need to rediscover it. The universal description of adaptation in OODA can serve as the foundation for a unifying theoretical framework of a more interconnected grand strategy. If Boyd were here today, he would probably tell us to get moving on something better than what he left us.

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seriously, this is amazing not just for the skiing, but for the creativity that went into making it:

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It’s December, that time of year when we can finally drink one of life’s greatest culinary pleasures without getting any too many looks of judgement…eggnog.  My friend Aaron Stern calls Mountain Dew the “nectar of heaven,” but he is mistaken, it’s eggnog….and it’s not even close.

So, a few remarks before enriching your lives with this recipe.

First, it makes A LOT of eggnog so I recommend going to your local brewery/pub/hipster bar and picking up a couple growlers to store it in.  Also makes it convenient when toting to holiday parties or giving to friends.

Second, if you intend on making this recipe sans alcohol I leave you with the words of the great Deangelo Vickers, “Ever play Russian Roulette? Time to spin the chamber Boris.” The alcohol is what kills potentially harmful bacteria like salmonella that are enter the realm of possibility when the first ingredient in your nog recipe is 12 eggs. Don’t believe me…science proves it.

Homemade Egg Nog from GQ Magazine that Author Can No Longer Find (Serves 8-10)

Ingredients:

• 12 Eggs (pasteurized if possible, but not necessary…see above)
• 1 Cup + 3 Tablespoons Sugar
• 3 Pints Whole Milk
• 3 Cups Heavy Cream
• 6 oz. Hennessy vs Cognac
• 6 oz. Maker’s Mark
• 5 Teaspoons Freshly Grated Nutmeg

Directions:

• Separate the eggs.
• Beat yolks w/ electric mixer for a minute or so until they lighten up in color, then
• Gradually add 1 cup sugar and beat until completely disolved
• Add milk, cream, cognac, bourbon, and nutmeg – stir to combine
• Beat egg whites in separate bowl until soft peaks form with the mixer running, then
• Gradually add 3 tsp of sugar and beat until peaks stiffen.
• Whisk beaten egg whites into mixture, garnish w/ nutmeg.

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