Sean Oliver

A picture’s worth a thousand words. Goes to show that even...

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:30:00 -0700

A picture’s worth a thousand words. Goes to show that even investors care more about cool new products than big dividends.

For a long time, hedge funds roped themselves to Apple and rode its remarkable rise higher. It was almost like they had to own it. The stock had such a large weight in stock market indexes, the so-called smart money risked severe under-performance by opting not to own the electronics giant. But as Apple’s shares have stalled, so has hedge fund enthusiasm for them.

The stock has been a terrible under-performer this year, down more than 18%, even as the broader S&P 500 stock market index is having something like a career year, rising nearly 16% so far. Meanwhile, Google’s up roughly 28% year-to-date, with shares recently hopping to more than $900.

If this is ever built, I can’t imagine how much of a...

Sat, 04 May 2013 09:46:00 -0700

If this is ever built, I can’t imagine how much of a liability it will be if someone either falls off… because I’ll be having too much fun bouncing across the Seine.

The firm says it did try to keep safety in mind as it was putting the bridge together. The perimeter buoys are designed to be about 5 feet high, preventing any dismounts into the river below, accidental or otherwise, and guard rails are included on the walkways between the trampolines.

That’s good enough for me! Ship it!

Silicon Valley Needs Houses

Fri, 03 May 2013 15:37:46 -0700

Silicon Valley Needs Houses:

I’ve read many, MANY articles since moving to San Francisco explaining why housing prices are on the rise and why real estate developers aren’t able to create more affordable high-rises and apartment complexes.

At least this article explains why:

Because zoning generally mandates low-density uses and because the California Environmental Quality Act perversely hyper-empowers NIMBYs to block projects even though California’s pleasant climate makes it one of the most ecologically sustainable places for new housing to go.

Housing is expensive here, and it’s clear why. But what’s less clear is why it hasn’t changed given the fact that everyone knows the right thing to do would be to stop suppressing economic growth by placating the rich. Repeal whatever laws are preventing more development of housing, and let the private sector run with it.

But for some reason, that’s not happening. No one’s doing anything about it other than the rich retirees who don’t want to give up their five story Victorians in Russian Hill. Tech companies are just paying their employees more money to live here, and residents are finding other things to cut from their budgets to make room for high rents and mortgages.

It’s not a sustainable situation, and sooner or later, something’s got to give… Right?

I love looking at new UI/UX design concepts for existing...

Wed, 01 May 2013 23:20:00 -0700

I love looking at new UI/UX design concepts for existing products, and this one is no different. There’s something really satisfying about manipulating pixels the same way you manipulate analog materials like paper. I hope at least some of these concepts make it into iOS 7.

The pressure’s really on Jony Ive to deliver something great. I’m optimistic that it’s in good hands.

McDonald’s Theory

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 23:41:08 -0700

McDonald’s Theory:

This article summarizes an interesting aspect of human nature I’ve noticed in many work settings:

Projects start in different ways. Sometimes you’re handed a formal brief. Sometimes you hear a rumor that something might be coming so you start thinking about it early. Other times you’ve been playing with an idea for months or years before sharing with your team. There’s no defined process for all creative work, but I’ve come to believe that all creative endeavors share one thing: the second step is easier than the first. Always.

And this doesn’t apply only to “creative” efforts. It goes for any kind of project that requires you need to convince someone to do something that they don’t have to do for their job.

For example, say you’re trying to convince an engineering team to build a new feature. You’re going to be a lot more successful if you’ve already done some of the upfront legwork to show that you’ve thought this plan through. It doesn’t need to be perfect; it doesn’t even really need to be all that good. It just needs to be something people can react to in order to move the whole project forward.

Turning off Email Notifications

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 06:38:00 -0700

About a month ago, I decided to try an experiment and turn off email notifications on my phone and my laptop. I’d read a lot online about the benefits of turning off email notifications, but I was always afraid to try it for fear of missing something important.

But after a month of this, I can safely say I’m not going back. My stress level has decreased, and my ability to focus has never been better. I have a greater appreciation for the world around me, and my general happiness level has hugely improved.

Notifications make everything seem urgent
Notifications do everything they can to get your attention. They appear, they flash, they vibrate, they chime. They don’t let you ignore them.

This is really useful when they information they carry is urgent. But it usually isn’t:

Urgent: A close friend was bitten by a poisonous snake and only has minutes to live. You alone possess the antidote.
Not Urgent: A coworker needs to know why we’re seeing a WoW decline in DAU.

This is an extreme example, but the point is very few things require an immediate reply. After turning off notifications, I find myself setting aside time to look at email when it’s convenient for me. Then I can prioritize my replies relative to all of the unread emails in my inbox, rather than processing each one as it comes in.

Notifications make you less effective
No matter how you look at it, the point of a notification is to get you to pay attention to something other than what you’re doing. But there are lots of times, when you need constant, unbroken attention to get something done effectively.

Here’s a generic experience I’d often have before turning off notifications:

Begin working on project that requires focus.
Receive email notification.
Glance at it.
Open the email and skim it.
Consider how long it will take to respond and how urgent it is.
Decide it’s not worth a response right now.
Flag it.
Remind myself what I was doing.
Get back to work.

The whole process happens in a few seconds, so it doesn’t feel like a huge tax. But in reality, it breaks up your thought process, causing you to make mistakes and ultimately increasing the amount of time it takes to get the task done.

Notifications consume your attention
How many times has this happened to you?

You’re walking down the hallway.
You receive an email notification.
You pull out your phone and read the email, while walking.
You you arrive at your destination.
You put your phone away.

What was going on around you between when you started walking and when you arrived at your destination? Hard to say.

After a few days without notifications, I noticed how much more often I was bumping into people and having quick conversations. I realized that some of the walls of my office building were painted blue and others white. I noticed there were cherry blossom trees in the courtyard outside.

Without notifications, I’m getting a lot more out of my days. I have more control over my time, and I finish the things I start more quickly. I’m learning more about the people I work with, and I pay more attention to the world around me.

I have to admit that the new Bing logo looks pretty snazzy. It...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 19:55:00 -0700

I have to admit that the new Bing logo looks pretty snazzy. It feels fast and simple, two emotions you want to associate with a search engine.

I like that the major brands at Microsoft are all receiving similar treatments. If it works, they’ll soon begin to accrue some value to one another. The problem is they’ve forgotten about the only brand that has lots of positive momentum. Where’s the new Xbox logo?

My wallet is obese.

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 06:26:00 -0800

If you know me and you haven’t yet seen my wallet, it’s because its increasing size has made it a little embarrassing to carry it around in public. In my college days, it wasn’t so bad. I’d go out with friends for dinner and after a while of sitting on it, I’d move it to my front pocket to give my gluteus some much-needed relief. But that was college, things weren’t so bad then.

When I moved to Seattle, things began to escalate. My wallet started to get too big to sit on comfortably, even for a moment. It could still fit in my back pocket, but only barely. And it began to wear away a wallet-shaped indentation in the back of my pants. I started to carry it in an inner pocket of my jacket so others wouldn’t notice, and that solution proved to be good enough until only recently.

Now that I’m living in San Francisco, I still have a need for a jacket, but not a thick one like I usually did in Seattle. I can often get by with a windbreaker or a hoodie, both of which still have pockets I can use, but my wallet made it look more like I was lugging rocks around the city than carrying credit cards.

When your wallet is so large that it won’t close without some forcing, you have a problem on your hands.

If you’re a Seinfeld fan, you may remember the episode when the lovable George Costanza dealt with the same issue.

So what’s causing this? For George, it was because he’d become an ultra-hoarder, treating his wallet like a mix between a purse and a filing cabinet. But for me, the issue was that I really hadn’t taken the time to look through and take stock of what was actually building up in there. And when I did, I was pretty astonished by what I found.

First, there were some things I always use:

CA State Driver License (my current valid ID)
Amex Platinum Card (my primary spend card)
Citi MasterCard (my backup when Amex is not accepted)
Cash (my backup when credit is not accepted)
Schwab Visa Debit Card (for use at ATMs to acquire more of the above)
Caltrain Go Pass (this is how I get to work every day)
Clipper Card (my pre-pay card for Bart and Muni)

But then, to my horror, I found a disturbingly long tail of items for which I have absolutely zero use on a day-to-day basis:

Safeway Card (backup in case my phone is dead and I need to buy something at Safeway)
Costco Card (only useful on my once per month trip to Costco)
United MileagePlus Silver 2014 Card (when I flash it fast enough, sometimes I can cheat my way into the priority boarding lane)
Health Insurance Card (this was really useful when I was setting up a primary care physician in California…)
Priority Pass Select Card (helpful about 2-3x per year when traveling internationally and need lounge access)
Amex Blue Cash Card (I forgot I still have this)
Dental Insurance Card (that reminds me, I need to set up a dentist appointment)
Contact Lens Prescription Card (already entered into 1800contacts.com)
Pinkberry Stamp Card (I’m only 8 stamps away from a free small yogurt with toppings!)
Auto Spa Club Stamp Card (I’m only 4 car washes away from a free car wash!)
Another Contact Lens Prescription Card (now I’m confused…)
MTA MetroCard (I don’t live in New York, but I’ve still got $2.50 remaining for the next time I visit!)
United MileagePlus Silver 2013 Card (it’s expired but I’m keeping it for… posterity?)
United MileagePlus Silver 2012 Card (it’s got the pre-Continental merger logo! this could be valuable someday!)
WA State Driver License (I moved to California 8 months ago, but I still thing this is my best DL photo)
ZipCar ZipCard (In case I ever re-open my account?)
WA Health Insurance Card (proof that I’ve been insurable?)
1000 Korean Won (roughly equivalent to 93 cents in USD… that could be useful)

Whatever the reason, there’s no excuse for carrying all of this crap around in your pocket wherever you go. So I decided to try an experiment. I’d take only the things I found most useful (from list #1 above) and carry them around with me using a makeshift “wallet” which was really just a binder clip I got at work.

It immediately felt as though a tremendous weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I was free to go wherever I wanted, comfortable in the knowledge that I’d always have my essentials on me at a moment’s notice. This little package slipped snugly into my front pocket, and was so comfortable that I sometimes even forgot it was there.

What a dream. Could this be my miracle solution? Unfortunately, not quite.

If you’re familiar with How I Met Your Mother, you may be familiar with the concept of an “over-correction,” when you embrace the exact opposite of something to prove that you’re forever done with it. Over-corrections typically occur in the context of dating and relationships, but it seems to be quite applicable in this circumstance.

Sure, the binder clip solution was great for keeping everything together, but it utterly fails at providing quick access to your most needed cards. Each time I opened the clip became an exercise in fumbling to keep my valuables together while extracting the needed card for the situation. It wasn’t ideal, and it also gave everyone around me a bird’s eye view at the amount of cash I was carrying to wrap my cards in. Really not a perfect solution.

After some hunting around, I finally found the right option for me: a simple flip wallet.

Sure, it’s a little thicker than the binder clip, but it’s still a huge step forward from the monster I’d been previously dealing with. And best of all, it gives me quick access to everything I need. All of the cards are accessible from the outside, so I can pull them out as I need them. And I can easily add cash or even other cards to the middle section using the super cool flip motion, which magically traps your less-useful valuables inside.

If you’re dealing with wallet frustrations, I highly recommend taking a look at what’s really kicking around in there. Do you need everything? Can you stand to live without carrying around that expired driver license or that small amount of foreign currency? Auditing your wallet every now and then can really make a big difference.

Then, take a look at the wallet itself. You need something that’s thin and can fit comfortably in your front pocket (sitting on your wallet is so George Costanza). More importantly, you need something that can give you easy access to your cards and your money. I think a simple flip wallet is a great solution, but depending on what you need, you might need something different.

Ultimately, the first step is admitting you have a problem. Stop ignoring your wallet. Open it up. Lay out it’s contents. And begin to make a plan. You may be surprised by what you find.

Here's to you, 2013.

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 21:08:50 -0800

As I mentioned last year, I don’t set out to make New Year’s resolutions anymore. After 25 years, I’ve learned enough about myself to know that I can’t be that easily motivated to spend a year sticking to a plan I made in a day.

Instead, I find it’s often a lot more productive to look back at the most meaningful experiences I had over the year, the experiences that taught me, stretched me, and improved me.

A lot happend this year. Too many to list in one place, but launching Shoflow deserves special mention. It was by far one of the most exciting and rewarding things I’ve done professionally. It taught me how difficult and fulfilling it can be to build something from scratch and get people to use it. Bringing even the simplest ideas across the finish line isn’t as easy as it looks, and answering questions like “When is this thing finished enough to be called an MVP?” is really more art than science.

For the first time, I started to feel what it was like to be completely invested in my work, as though it was a part of me. I forewent social activities to work on it. I even got frustrated when I couldn’t make time for it. That’s when I realized my work no longer felt like work, and that’s such an incredibly good feeling to have.

Here’s to more of those feelings in 2013. It’s going to be a great year.

"We’ve come a long way. Today we understand that a startup is a temporary organization designed to..."

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 16:24:05 -0800

“We’ve come a long way. Today we understand that a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. And that what we are doing when we iterate or pivot is that we are firing the plan before we start firing executives.”

- Steve Blank

Vision Vs. Hallucination - The Accelerators - WSJ
(via fred-wilson)

What Marissa Mayer is Doing Right

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 12:21:00 -0700

Creating a successful business is hard. Scaling that business to the size of a company like Yahoo! is even harder. But bringing Yahoo! back into the mainstream after everything it’s been through could considered impossible. There’s just so much to fix.

It would be easy for a new CEO to come in and begin cutting failing products, cutting unnecessary operating expense (e.g. employee morale activities), and even cutting what Wall Street might consider a bloated work force.

But Yahoo! has already had so many new leaders come in and do just that, and they’ve failed. Yahoo! is no better off then when the spotlight was first shone on them back in early 2008 when Microsoft offered to buy them for 62% more than they were worth at the time, and 108% more than they are worth as of this writing.

If you count two interim CEOs, Yahoo! has had 5 CEOs since Microsoft originally put in its offer, and the result has a continuous decline in shareholder value and an almost annual ritual of employee layoffs. Further, each of these executives have come in with a ton of promise and experience leading big companies to success.

So why do I think Marissa Mayer has a chance at actually turning Yahoo! into the icon it once was?

Simple: It’s because she can inspire people to do great work.

In the tech industry, executives aren’t successful because they manage expectations with Wall Street and keep an eye on the balance sheet. That stuff definitely helps and shouldn’t be overlooked, but the single most important thing a tech CEO can do is inspire his or her team to build amazing products that delight and improve the lives of customers.

Tony Hsieh, founder and CEO of Zappos, once said:

I view my role more as trying to set up an environment where the personalities, creativity and individuality of all the different employees come out and can shine.

This is why it’s so encouraging to see Marissa Mayer focusing on her employees before focusing on her investors. Because investors will always come around once you rebuild momentum in the market. Steve Jobs regularly pissed off his shareholders by doing things like refusing to pay a dividend, but that didn’t stop the stock price from continuing to climb into the stratosphere.

I applaud Marissa Mayer for what’s she’s doing here. It isn’t easy to invest more money in a business that isn’t growing. But as the past has proven, if you continue to cut, you’ll continue to get smaller.

Apple pulls their 'Genius' ads

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 18:34:57 -0700

Apple pulls their 'Genius' ads:

I think it goes without saying that I think this is a good call.

It does feel good to have moved from the bottom of this list to...

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 23:56:53 -0700

It does feel good to have moved from the bottom of this list to the top. #soundcareerchoicesFTW

I have to admit that I agree with the cacophony of criticism...

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 10:41:00 -0700

I have to admit that I agree with the cacophony of criticism about Apple’s latest round of TV ads. In fact, I almost had an allergic reaction to them when I first saw them air during the Olympics opening ceremony on Friday.

They looked and felt like ads that my former employer, Microsoft, used to release in attempt to position themselves as being relevant.

So many issues abound:

They don’t show the product. This is a product ad, not a brand ad or a perception ad. And Apple has always impressed me by the way that they have (almost) always made the product the star of their product ads. Consumers need to see what’s being advertised in order to understand the messaging in a tangible way.
They don’t explain the product. Apple doesn’t always show the product in its ads. A great example of this is the Mac vs. PC campaign that ran through the first half of the 2000s. But that campaign still made the product the star by focusing on each ad on a discrete feature or set of related features, and explaining how they work. That’s something that this campaign utterly fails at doing. In the ad above, the Genius asks the shopper, “It came loaded with all the great apps like iMovie, iPhoto, Garageband… Not ringing a bell?” The consumer at whom this ad is targeted doesn’t know what these apps are. As a result, he doesn’t know why he should care that he doesn’t have them. And if the ad doesn’t tell him that, he’s just going to hear marketing noise and tune out.
They make the target audience feel stupid. This is Apple’s first real effort going after a less tech-savvy group of computer buyers, and this ad makes it clear that they really don’t know how to talk to them at all. The people in this segment are not idiots, in fact, a lot of them are doctors, lawyers, teachers, and otherwise very smart people.They just don’t think about the latest technology all that much, and this ad basically calls them stupid for not buying a Mac. When consumers buy PCs, they are usually doing it after lots of research — after all, it’s a big purchase for most people — and this ad is essentially telling them they made the wrong decision despite all the thought they put into making what they thought was the right one.
They make the Geniuses look like unsupportive know-it-alls. In a similar vein, the Apple Genius in this ad comes off as a true embodiment of the elitist stereotype many have attributed to Apple’s core customer. When Apple first introduced the Geniuses, they worked because they weren’t that stereotype. No one wants to buy a computer from a cocky teenager who thinks their questions are stupid and that they’re wasting his time.
There’s no clear call to action. I’ve alluded to this a little already, but the most important thing missing from this ad is that there’s absolutely zero payoff. No moral. No happy ending. Nothing to tell the consumer what they should take away and do next. They don’t even explain that these “friendly” Geniuses can be found right by where you live at your local Apple Store. This is a product ad targeted at people who don’t know anything about the product, and Apple fails in the most fundamental way by not telling them anything about it or even where to buy it.

When I was with Microsoft, I saw vapid creative like this get created and published all the time. It wasn’t because people at Microsoft didn’t know what they were doing. There were and there continue to be a lot of extremely talented people at Microsoft.

Collateral like this happens when there is no creative vision coming down from senior leaders. When leaders delegate the vision downward, middle managers end up having to make the final call, but in almost all cases they don’t have the power to do so alone. So, they go about securing buy-off from multiple teams, and the result was leadership by committee. Not exactly the Apple way.

There’s been much said about whether Tim Cook can steer the great ship that is Apple into another decade of innovation. While he may still be getting his sea legs, this ad along with other marketing blunders over the past few months make it clear that this is no longer Steve Jobs’ Apple, for better or for worse.

How I make time to learn Chinese

Sat, 05 May 2012 15:57:00 -0700

Over the past two years or so, I’ve been learning Chinese on and off using various methods of adult learning. I tried Rosetta Stone, I tried buying a textbook with CDs and teaching myself, and I even signed up for a class. I was definitely picking up some of the basics, but I was doing so at a painfully slow rate.

In late January of this year after about 18 months of bouncing around between various Chinese language learning options, it finally dawned on me that I needed to make a change. I’d began my attempt at learning after a trip to China to visit my then-fiancée’s in-laws in Hangzhou. None of them speak a word of English, and I’d promised them—using my soon-to-be-wife as an interpreter—that my Chinese would be “much better” the next time I return. Now, I was less than 9 months away from our next planned visit, and while I’d made some progress, if you look at the amount I’d learned relative to the amount of time spent learning, you’d have to draw one of two conclusions:

I must have some extreme learning disability, or
I haven’t been trying all that hard.

Neither of these were conclusions I’d want my new in-laws to arrive at, so I knew it was time for an action plan. I was trying to learn Chinese with a full-time day job and a full-time night job, and for the latter I was also teaching myself how to code, which is a topic for another blog post. Add to that having a social life, and I had more than enough to occupy my time when I didn’t feel like studying Chinese.

Then it occurred to me that the only way I’d succeed at this is if I came up with a system that made me want to learn. I needed a system that was both fun (i.e. interesting enough to be something that I enjoy spending my time doing) and flexible (i.e. able to fit into my busy schedule).

To start, I thought about the core elements of Chinese that I needed to focus on from a learning perspective. Others might bucket these differently, but these were the most logical groupings for me:

Pronunciation and vocabulary
Reading and writing
Speaking and sentence structure

Then, I needed to think about ways to learn and practice each of these things in a way that’s both fun and flexible. This is where I found that having spent 18 months essentially doing trial and error on various methods actually helped me out. If you’re currently getting started with learning Chinese, or any language for that matter, I highly recommend spending some time—maybe not 18 months, but some time—trying a bunch of different methods of learning and reflecting on whether you think they’re enjoyable and sustainable based on your lifestyle.

To give you some ideas, here are some things that have worked for me. I’m still far from fluent, but I’ve been following these methods consistently for the past 3 months, and I’ve already picked up way more Chinese and feel far more confident speaking it than I did after all of my 18 months of trial and error.

Pronunciation and vocabulary (30-45 minutes / day)

When learning any language, you need to have a baseline vocabulary and knowledge of how the words are pronounced if you want to start speaking it. For a Westerner like me, pronunciation is even more complicated in Chinese than in other Western languages because of tones.

I won’t get into what tones are and how to use them, but there are a lot of resources out there which introduce the concept and offer various exercises for practicing how to identify and pronounce each tone. If you’re starting from zero with Chinese, it’s definitely a good idea to familiarize yourself with the tones—here’s a great place to get started—but don’t spend too much time on this step. Knowing the tones is only useful if you know the words they go with.

My method
This is why I highly recommend using a service like Quizlet, which lets you create your own vocabulary flash cards, and it pronounces them for you, too. I’ve been using the key vocabulary from my Chinese textbook to create flash card sets for each chapter.

I spend about 30-45 minutes every day in Quizlet’s “Learn” mode with “Speak it” turned on so that it reads me the Chinese word after I guess it correctly based on its definition. Quizlet’s Chinese pronunciation puts Siri to shame, and I’ll usually repeat the word aloud 2-3 times after correctly guessing the word to make sure I’ve got it. This helps me remember both the meaning of the words and their pronounced at the same time.

If you’re interested in getting started with Chinese, you can check out my flash cards, here.

Reading and writing (30-45 minutes / day)

Unlike Western languages like English, written Chinese usually doesn’t contain any information about how the words should be pronounced. Instead, Chinese characters focus more on meaning.

A basic example is 好 (pronounced hǎo), meaning “good.” 好 is really just two other characters mashed together: 女 (nǚ, meaning “woman”) and 子 (zi, meaning “child”). There are a few explanations but a popular one is that people tend to think it’s a “good” thing for a woman to have a child, hence the meaning of the word.

In any case, it’s impossible to learn Chinese characters without writing them by hand. Writing them by hand helps make sure you’re paying attention to the detail and the nuance behind each character. The problem is that the traditional way of doing this is by filling pages upon pages with the same character until it has been committed to memory. You might do this if you’re in school and you have to, but if you’re an adult with a life, you’ll probably bail on this for more enjoyable activities before long.

My method
I’ve found that mixing it up can be hugely helpful here. If you can learn a handful of new characters at once for over a longer period of time, rather than focusing on a single character per day, for example, it’s easier for your mind to stay interested in practicing.

It’s also very important to leverage frequency lists wherever possible. There’s a never-ending list of characters out there for you to learn, so you need to prioritize the ones you’re going to see most often. I’ve been using the Word Tracer iPad app, which is especially great because, in addition to sorting characters by frequency, it also shows you each character’s stroke order (i.e. how to write it).

Using this app, I set out to commit one page (each page contains 15 characters) to memory every week. Every day, I will copy each word 15 times, enough to fill a single line of graph paper per word. It usually takes about 45 minutes when starting a new page, and by the end of the week, I can typically get through it in about 20-30 minutes. By that point I’m usually good enough with the characters to move on to the next page. This method has allowed me to pick up 60 characters per month with under an hour per day of work.

What’s even better is that every day I look forward to doing this. There’s just enough variety in the characters that it doesn’t feel repetitive and boring, and there’s just enough repetition in doing them every day for a week that I’m committing them to memory.

Speaking and sentence structure (all the time)

When you’re spending so much time focused on learning the raw materials, it can be easy to forget that you need to put them all together if you want to get to fluency. Chinese has a lot of idiosyncrasies in how it’s used in everyday speech, and you can really only learn these things by using them with someone who knows Chinese reasonably well.

My method
As I mentioned earlier, I’m lucky enough to have a wife who speaks Chinese, and since more recently, I’ve started randomly injecting Chinese into our conversations, whenever I know the words to communicate what I want to. We don’t stick to any schedule or regimen, I just switch into Chinese whenever the wind takes me there.

If I find myself in a sentence that I don’t know how to complete in Chinese, I’ll fudge it and come up with some horribly incorrect guess at what the actual Chinese word is by taking an English word and making it sound Chinese. My most recent favorite is “fù” (meaning “fool”, or “crazy”). It’s completely wrong, but whenever I do things like this my wife and I have a good laugh about it which turns practicing Chinese into more of a game than a task.

If you don’t happen to have a spouse who speaks Chinese, I recommend the following (in priority order):

Find a friend who speaks Chinese and is willing to practice with you
Sign up for a class that meets at a convenient time for your schedule
Look online for a speaking partner you can connect with via video chat

Each of these are great options for practicing speech, but again it’s really important that whatever option you choose is fun and flexible. If you sign up for a class and you aren’t joking around with them and having fun every now and then, you probably won’t stick with it. If you get a friend to coach you but he or she can only meet at times that require you to pass on important obligations, you probably won’t keep meeting with them for long.

No doubt about it. Learning Chinese is hard, and learning any language while working full time is never going to be an easy task. It requires lots of commitment and dedication, but most of all, it needs to be something you want to do.

This is the method I’ve found that works for me. If you’re also trying to get started into Chinese, hopefully there’s a tip or two in here that helps you along your way. But no matter what language you might be interested in learning, you’ll ultimately need to find a system that you find both fun and flexible if you’re going to master it.

Learning shouldn’t feel like a chore, and if you work at it a little, it doesn’t have to.

The Shoflow Team Blog: Where to watch your favorite shows

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 23:20:27 -0700

The Shoflow Team Blog: Where to watch your favorite shows:

shoflow:

Whether online or on TV, there are no shortage of places to watch your favorite shows. For the Shoflow Team, it seems like we’re often taking advantage of all of them. This is why we’re super excited to announce the introduction of “where to watch,” the easiest way for you to see where your…

"I’m sometimes called a serial entrepreneur, but that’s only because, before Zynga, I failed to..."

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 18:23:18 -0700

“I’m sometimes called a serial entrepreneur, but that’s only because, before Zynga, I failed to create a sustainable company.”

- Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga

Growth vs. Security: Facebook vs. Microsoft?

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:51:47 -0800

Growth vs. Security: Facebook vs. Microsoft?:

Interesting quote from Reuters today… No further comment of course. :)

“At the end of the day, if you have a small amount of money that you are in a position to lose a chunk of it and you want to speculate on Facebook, go ahead,” he added. “But don’t use money that you really need to save to do it. I would put it in Microsoft, which is dirt cheap right now.” - Scott Schermerhorn, Granite Investment Advisors

"We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services."

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:26:46 -0800

“We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”

- Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s S-1 Letter

Totally inspirational read that lays out a super motivating way to think about business, that reminds me of Jeff Bezos’ approach in a lot of ways.

On the road again. (Taken with Instagram at sound transit light...

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:49:21 -0800

On the road again. (Taken with Instagram at sound transit light rail)