Author: Mike P. Lewis

"Just Enough" is the new "Big" – but can it work?

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They should draw an equation: What level of fame do you need to achieve to keep doing what you want? Because you don’t want any more than that.

if you get too famous, you have people wanting to take a picture of your butt on the beach.

(Tina Fey

These are quotes i read from Grant’s blog and this blog post which discusses that being big enough to do something interesting without burdening yourself is what’s hot right now…

In the 1950s, it was one size fit all: gigantic or nothing at all. We wanted groaning buffet tables. We celebrated the “good life:” by consuming heroic quantities of sugar, salt, fat, nicotine, alcohol and sun (and as much carbon as possible). We wanted cars the size of a 1958 Cadillac, block long conveyances, fins and all. We wanted more shoes the Imelda Marcos. We wanted homes the size of a small town.

The world used a Denny’s model: all-you-eat plus 3000 calories more. “No one leaves this place with an empty plate.” A Martian would wonder at this. Denny’s had given us more food than we could possibly eat. Food was being wasted.

We are hearing a “just enough” sentiment more and more. It’s as if we are as a culture working on a new definition of what’s enough.

You see it with the Green movement and in music. It’s not all about being The Beatles. This makes complete sense to me. As they say in Batman Begins, “with great power comes great responsibility.” And responsibility is exhausting if you’re a celebrity, sports hero or when you’re running your own business.

In the case of an entrepreneur, “just enough” is about control. Staying small(ish), staying private, supplying your own capital, all these mean calling your own shots. Venture capitalists and Wall Street can drive someone else crazy. The just enough entrepreneur can take his or her own chances. When it comes time to choose between interesting and profitable, you can go with interesting. Just enough in this case is about control.

One problem i see with this model is that if you don’t achieve some scale or critical mass you won’t be successful. As the world becomes advertising-based, this means the person with the most engagement, page-views, etc is the one that gets the business and can continue to operate and innovate. The smaller guy doesn’t get the PR and mindshare and thus loses the users to the bigger guy. For web applications dependent on ads, can they survive in a long-tail world?

For bands does this work – can you be a medium-sized “just enough” band and still pay the bills? Ani Difranco, Clap Your Hands, and Tori Amos would say so.

My new favorite radio station

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I was always hearing from my friend Gum that there is this kickass radio station in Minneapolis called The Current. Living in DC, i never got into a station as they were all basically Clear Channel crap.  Seriously all the channels in DC play a limited playlist of Top 40 or mainstream music.  This is not interesting to me.

Recently though, i’ve been driving around LA and i have to say that i’ve grown to LOVE the station Indie103. Not only do they not have set playlists, but the DJ’s sometimes throw up just random good stuff. I was happy to see that Rolling Stone magazine agrees with me when they recently ranked 103 the best radio station in the country. Here’s what they said:

More like the adventurous rock stations of the Seventies than its current ultracorporate competitors, Los Angeles’ Indie 103.1 has challenged the city’s alt-rock powerhouse, KROQ, with broader playlists, fewer commercials and DJs who have cool taste and a distinctive point of view. The station, which also broadcasts online at indie1031.com, gives listeners the early jump on artists such as Tokyo Police Club and Black Lips, and also offers up NPR favorites like Feist and Bright Eyes, and album cuts from veterans including Morrissey and the Smashing Pumpkins. The station’s most popular shows are hosted by Henry Rollins, the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones, the Crystal Method and actor Danny Masterson, all of whom select their own tunes. “People wanna hear good music, and in the past few years, Indie 103 has become the only station that matters out here for good music,” says Masterson, who hosts Feel My Heat on Monday nights with his friend Brent Bolthouse. “I think it’s the best station on the planet, actually.”

So if you listen to music online or are in LA, you should check it out

Be careful out there

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Keep in mind that 15% of all female chickens have penises.  That’s right, they look like males but aren’t.  If you’re a professional chicken sex-finder, you get paid $700 buck a day and have to have keen sight and a steady hand.

I thought the bar scene was rough – imagine being a chicken

When you are old

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I read this passage on the plane this morning and it got me thinking…

When You Are Old

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars
– William Butler Yeats

Here’s a woman looking back on her life thinking of herself and past loved ones. Did the woman reject love at one point or has it just passed her by?  I love the thought of Love fleeing and hiding its face amid a crowd of stars.  To me this is either because its a perfect love in an absolute sense or because its gone and now out of reach.  I like the former thought but i tend to think its written as the latter.  Anyone else with me?

Facebook let's you add to your mini-feed

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Lots of folks do stuff around the web that is outside of Facebook. For instance, i post lots of Flickr photos and i save web sites to delicious. I’ve always loved the Facebook News Feed as it does a good job of letting me know what my friends are up to. Today it got even better because Facebook now allows me to add Flickr, delicious, Yelp and Picassa actions into my mini-feed. Nice

This is great for a variety of reasons. First, it shows that facebook isn’t the walled garden that AOL was. Facebook is a walled garden, but only for certain things (social graph, photos, social messaging, etc.). For everything else, they are willing to open up and reciprocate. They made a platform to allow users to interact with their assets (people) and have a messaging feature so emails can come in and out but not replace. If they were a basketball team, they may not go around the country and play everyone but at least now they’ll let other come to their court and play a game.

Second, it shows they aren’t trying to be everything to everyone. It could be very easy for Facebook to believe that they can build better products than everyone else and try to compete. This is what AOL did for email, video, destination sites (Sports, News), communities, photos, maps, music, etc – and they lost big. Facebook is clearly maintaining its focus on social activities and even recognizes the difference between their photo app (social photo sharing, not for storage) and Flickr’s (photo blogging, archival) and embraces that. Kudos to them.

Speaking of handing out kudos, you should watch this video (below) of Andrew Bogut’s high fives after his free throws. Not everyone is that eager to congratulate someone.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc11PUnFgkQ]

My Love of TripIt Grows

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I’ve been traveling a lot lately and for each trip i make sure to throw my airline, car and hotel details into TripIt as it does a great job of building an itinerary.  You can share the trips you set up with other travelers and all collaborate together.  It also gives you an iCal link which you can put inside your Google Calendar so all your trip information is integrated right into you digital life. It’s a great application and i’ve thought so for a while

I’ve always had one complaint for TripIt and that is it’s a horrible application to access on the road.  My iPhone interface takes a long time to load and i’ve had a few times where i stood staring at an Avis employee making small talk while my TripIt page loads on my phone so i could get my confirmation number.  Those days are over as TripIt Mobile just launched and now a custom, fast-loading site has launched.  I couldn’t be more excited

Grandmaster Flash's Science

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Everyone’s a pioneer in their own way.  This is from a quote i picked up in this month’s Wired Magazine.  In 1973 Grandmaster Flash invented Turntablism:

The DJ’s at the time were picking up the arm and dropping it down exactly on the break of the song. But i was dancing, and i noticed everybody’s head was bobbing at the same time, and then suddenly everyone’s head would go in disarray, and then come back together again.  I found this to be very strange.  From that moment, i decided to come up with a science that would allow me to have full control to manually edit the beat.  I came up with the science called Quick Mix theory. It consisted of me having to do something that DJ’s at the time never did: placing my finger on the vinyl. I was ridiculed for a long time. I was told that i ruined needles, ruined styluses, ruined records, and also that placing my fingers on the vinyl was something DJ’s never did because I’d make the record filthy. But i knew that i had to do it to have full control over the vinyl

In Defense of Boredom

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In the latest copy of The Week, i read a great article about boredom. My favorite lines:

To be bored is to stop reacting to the external world, and to explore the internal one. It is in reflection that people often discover something new, whether it is an epiphany about a relationship or a new theory about the way the universe works. Granted many people emerge from boredom feeling that they have accomplished nothing. But is accomplishment really the point of life? There is a strong argument that boredom – so often parodied as a glassy-eyed drooling state of nothingness – is an essential human emotion that underlies art, literature, philosophy, science, and even love.

If you think of boredom as the prelude to creativity, and loneliness as the prelude to engagement of the imagination, then they are good things. They are doorways to something better, as opposed to something to be abhorred and eradicated immediately

I agree – solitary time whether hiking or running or just thinking is a great thing. With my cell phone, Tivo, iPod, work, and busy schedule, it doesn’t happen as often but i do think it’s important. You agree?

To further illustrate this last point. Check out this quote from JK Rowling talking about her experience sitting board on a train:

It was extraordinary, because i had never planned to write for children. Harry came to me immediately, as did the school and a few of the other characters such as Nearly Headless Nick, the ghost whose head is not quite cut off. The train was delayed, and for hours i sat there thinkig and thinking and thinking… The irony is I almost always have pen and paper; I write all the time. And on this one occassion when i had the idea of my life, I didn’t have a pen. For hour hours my head was buzzing. It was probably the best thing, because I ended up working the whole thinking out before i got off the train