I Really Like “Like Crazy”

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I went a great man-date with Julian last week and saw “Like Crazy” which stars Felicty Jones and Anton Yelchin as two college students who fall in love.  It’s not a rom-com but rather a romance.  Here are some thoughts…

The film is a very realistic portrayal of 20’s romance.  Anyone who has ever been in a long distance relationship in their 20’s will relate to this film.  You feel high on the relationship one second and then it drags and disappears.

Great use and progression of cell phone technology. Finally we see the impact texting can have on a character.  It always bothers me that this doesn’t happen more in movies. Also, the technology was pretty accurate – from the clamshell to the iPhone, it was some very realistic mobile movie footage. Continue reading “I Really Like “Like Crazy”” →

Moneyball and Big Data

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I just had an interesting breakfast with Tom Higley which i try to do once a month but ends up being about every other.  He sat down this morning and said, have you seen the movie “Moneyball” and then we got into a very interesting talk about what that film means in today’s world.  Here’s a few thoughts we had.

Aaron Sorkin can take any story and make it interesting.  He took a horrible book about Facebook (Accidental Millionaires) and wrote a fantastic and Oscar-winning script for The Social Network, and here he took a stats-filled non-fiction book about baseball and made an interesting movie.
The story of the Oakland A’s is not as simple as it was told.  They did not just find high on-base percentage players and ride that to a successful season.  No sir.  One thing that always beats good hitting is good pitching and there’s no mention of pitching in this entire movie. Why? Because it didn’t fit the narrative. Was their staff good? Hell, yes. The had a trio called “The Big Three” of Barry Zito, Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder.  Zito was their ace.  He went 23-5 and won the Cy Young award that year.   Mulder won 19 games, and Hudson led the league in shutouts.  That seems pretty relevant to me – you might want to mention it. Continue reading “Moneyball and Big Data” →

Steve Jobs is Shocking in his Biography

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I’ve got the mp3’s of the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson and i’ve been listening on my daily commute for the past few weeks. So far, i’m 25% through the book and loving it. Here’s what i like about the book so far.

  • Describing the social, music, and industry scene of Silicon Valley in the late 60’s and early 70’s is fascinating. The confluence of hippies, technology and drugs must have been amazing.
  • The hobbyist movement around electrical engineering. What people thought of computers and how the PC emerged from microprocessors and silicon. It’s so hard now, in a world where there’s a computer on every shelf, to imagine how people didn’t logically think of the PC.
  • Steve Jobs vs. Woz. It was an interesting partnership and highlights how you need different people with different talents to get a business off the ground.
The main plot of the book is around Steve Jobs and his rise as the leader of Apple. I’ve been pretty shocked about what i’ve read so far. I’m shocked by his demeanor and his behavior. The book does a good job of showing his passion, and his attention to detail. But i’m amazed about the amount of abuse he dished out to his colleagues. The book describes how each engineer, although degraded and demeaned regularly by Jobs, holds up that period as one of the most memorable is his life. The book attributes this to Jobs. I disagree. These guys were at the perfect moment of time where technology was making this type of a product possible- and were designing a product that didn’t yet exist. The market was poised to explode and did. What Jobs did was bring the right list of specifications but did it for a product that the world was clamoring for.

So far this book has increased my respect for Jobs ability to intuitively know what people want but i’ve also amazing how bad he was as a manager, friend and as a person. He seemed so erratic and awful.

I’ve yet to read about his exile, his days at Pixar and Next days, or his Apple comeback. i’m sure he gained perspective and some humility but man, in those early days of Apple he seems brutal.


How i get stuff done

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A few people asked me this week how keep track of things i need to get things done.  So, let me tell you.

First, I keep an ongoing Task list. I have a big list and then i have a line in that list that i put each day of the things i want to accomplish that day.  This way i can move things up and down that list.  I actually have two lists – a personal list and a work list. I find that it’s helpful to keep them separate as i try to accomplish the work list when i’m at work and then when i leave, i consider my time to get those tasks done as over.  Then i’m on personal time.  It’s helpful to keep them separate.  How do i keep these tasks? I use Google Tasks.  It’s nicely tied into both my email and my calendar.  Also, there’s an app (I use GooTasks) that synch with the Gmail version so i can grab tasks when i’m on the go.

Second, i have a “one-touch” policy.  I’m not sure who told me about this but the idea is that you should touch things only once.  If you can read, process and reply all at one time, it’s better than filing to do later.  I do this with physical mail and i also try to do it with email.  I’m not as good as some, but i’ve found that the more you do this, the more you get done. My business partner Toby is actually a master of this.

Third, i subscribe to the “Daily Inches” mantra of consistency. This is best expressed in the Al Pacino speech in “Any Given Sunday” (listen to it here). The idea is that if you really want to make big changes – this could be your life, your work or whatever – the best way is to make progress daily.  You don’t ahve to do it all at once, but just make a little progress every day and you’ll get there.  For instance, if you want to increase your arm strength in the gym, you don’t want to go on a weekend and try to lift weights for 20 hours straight.  No, it’s better to work out a little bit each day for an extended period of time.  Make a little progress, every day.

There it is.  My three easy steps to getting things done – Lewis-style.  Most of it is common sense, but thought i’d share.  Tasks, one-touch, and daily inches.   What is your philosophy for getting things done?


Love the new animated GIF movement

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If you haven’t noticed, there’s a new movement on the web to animate GIF, but to only animate them a little bit and to do it in a way to make them appear 3D.  I’m really loving it.  Take a look at the Steve Z image below and tell me you don’t like it.  I dare you. 

 


My thoughts on Steve Jobs

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I’ve been reading all the news about Steve Jobs’ death these past few days. It’s one of the few stories that i can’t get enough of.  Because of all the articles, i didn’t want to post anything about it and be just another post about a topic that everyone knows about.  But i’m going to anyway.  I’m going to post for myself and because i think it’s important to write about people that impact you.

Steve Jobs was a hero of mine.  Not in a childish Superman-y way, but in a real day-to-day way. I spend my days discussing, inventing, reviewing and managing the production of online products.  This is what i do.  Every day.  Lots of people do this.  I’m friends with hundreds of them. Steve Jobs also did this.  But Steve did it differently. He was able to make products that came directly from his imagination and make them real.  This is something that is amazingly hard to do.

I also admire him as an entrepreneur.  He had a passion and a vision that was rare.  He envisioned 30 years ago a world where hardware and software met.  A world where the public can get excited about technology, where technology achieves cult status.  He got fired for thinking this way.  Seriously, read this article.  This thinking got him canned.  The CEO who replaced him said this of Steve’s thinking in the 80’s,

But Steve was thinking about something entirely different. He felt that the computer was going to change the world and it it was going to become what he called “the bicycle for the mind.” It would enable individuals to have this incredible capability that they never dreamed of before.

He got fired and regrouped.  Talk about a 2nd act.  First Pixar and then NEXT and then back to Apple.  His passion and focus made him successful every step of the way.  You can’t be an entrepreneur and not be inspired by his story.

I remember the first time i put the iPhone in my hand and used it. I was sitting at the Washington Nations game with Drew Mowery.  He had one and showed me.  Using it was like a window into the future.  That’s a rare feeling to have. It happened over 4 years ago and i still remember it.  I feel lucky to have been alive when he was around and building products.

As an innovator and as an entrepreneur, I’ll miss Steve Jobs.

 


50/50 is the best movie of the year (so far)

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Last weekend, I did a doubler at the local cineplex (with D, Jules and Abbie) of Moneyball and 50/50.  We were thinking Moneyball was going to be a our big “oh wow” movie but I was shocked when i left the theater totally floored by 50/50 instead.

50/50 is yet another cancer movie and i was expecting a tearjerker along the lines of Stepmom, A Sweet November, My Sister’s Keeper, or Life as a House.  These are good films but none of them would be tops of my end of the year list.

50/50 is different.  Unlike most films like this, it’s a comedy and its mix of earnetness and comedy makes it a special film.  The story of the real-life writer of the film who is a comedy writer is a great one to learn about, but even if you don’t know that, this is a film worth putting on your list. Continue reading “50/50 is the best movie of the year (so far)” →

Cute Denver Mailboxes and Behavior

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Over the past two years, I’ve found that Colorado and Denver in particular to be filled with really nice folks.  The interactions here remind me of my childhood in Minnesota where you get a heavy dose of “Minnesota Nice” in each conversation.  While people here aren’t quite that nice, they are still extraordinarily friendly.

My first month here, i got pulled over by a Denver cop for rolling through a stop sign.  He asked me why i did it and i replied that i was lost and looking at my iPhone map.  Instead of looking at me like a moron (which i am) and writing out a ticket, he instead asked me for the address of where i was going, jumped into his car, pulled up along side me and said, “follow me, i know where it is.”  Yep, that really happened.

Today i saw these photos below of mailboxes in and around Denver. I thought they were pretty cute and a good example of the vibe you can get from this city.   Enjoy:

Continue reading “Cute Denver Mailboxes and Behavior” →

The Real Deal with the Recession and Jobs

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I hear a lot these days about job creation and growth and the economy.  I really do worry about people who have have been out of job for over a year.  Not working is totally destructive to a persons self-confidence and self-worth (not to mention bank account) and anyone out of the workforce for extended periods of time are in a really bad place. 

It seems that there are two recessions going on:  (1) the usually cyclical one and (2) the loss of factory jobs to the internet and overseas workers.   #1 will return, but #2 is gone forever for the US.  It’s not coming back.

Instead we should focus on the future.  I read a good post today by Seth Godin where he writes about this very topic.  He states:

When everyone has a laptop and connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory. Instead of coming together physically, we have the ability to come together virtually, to earn attention, to connect labor and resources, to deliver value.

Stressful? Of course it is. No one is trained in how to do this, in how to initiate, to visualize, to solve interesting problems and then deliver. Some see the new work as a hodgepodge of little projects, a pale imitation of a ‘real’ job. Others realize that this is a platform for a kind of art, a far more level playing field in which owning a factory isn’t a birthright for a tiny minority but something that hundreds of millions of people have the chance to do.

Gears are going to be shifted regardless. In one direction is lowered expectations and plenty of burger flipping. In the other is a race to the top, in which individuals who are awaiting instructions begin to give them instead.

The future feels a lot more like marketing–it’s impromptu, it’s based on innovation and inspiration, and it involves connections between and among people–and a lot less like factory work, in which you do what you did yesterday, but faster and cheaper.

This means we may need to change our expecations, change our training and change how we engage with the future. Still, it’s better than fighting for a status quo that is no longer. The good news is clear: every forever recession is followed by a lifetime of growth from the next thing…

Job creation is a false idol. The future is about gigs and assets and art and an ever-shifting series of partnerships and projects. It will change the fabric of our society along the way. No one is demanding that we like the change, but the sooner we see it and set out to become an irreplaceable linchpin, the faster the pain will fade, as we get down to the work that needs to be (and now can be) done.

This revolution is at least as big as the last one, and the last one changed everything.

 I like that. Let’s move forward rather than trying to bring back the past. 


I love it when sports matter

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When there’s something serious on the line, that’s when players try their hardest – and THAT is definitely the best time to be watching sports.  

You see it in the NBA playoffs, in March Madness and you’re seeting it now in the last few games of the MLB season.  Two teams – the Boston Red Sox and the Tampa Rays – are battling for the wild card spot.  Last night, they were tied with 2 games left.  They both won by 1 run last night to keep it tied with 1 final game left.   Both those games were tight with tension.  Both teams lettign it all hang out.  Let me share some things that happened last night (posted here in ESPN): 

So, all of this happened on Tuesday in two games in the American League, where all that’s at stake is a playoff spot, one team trying to avoid a colossal collapse, the other team trying to prove that small-market franchises can slay the wealthy dragon, maybe an MVP award, and the pain and suffering of an entire Nation:

  • A triple play. It may end up as the most important triple play in major league history.
  • A rookie catcher, in the biggest game of the season, making his first career start behind the plate in the majors.
  • That catcher — Boston’s Ryan Lavarnway, only the third Yale player drafted since 1965 to reach the big leagues — throwing out a baserunner trying to steal third base and then hitting a three-run home run, the first of his career. And then hitting his second career home run.
  • An intentional walk … to bring Alex Rodriguez to the plate.
  • The Red Sox hitting a guy cleanup who has never started in the cleanup position before.
  • Nick Swisher doubling off the center-field wall, but Mark Teixeira not scoring from second base on the play.
  • Jacoby Ellsbury showing why he may be the AL’s Most Valuable Player with another clutch home run.
  • Adam Jones, fouling off pitch after pitch from Jonathan Papelbon with the tying run at second base in the bottom of the ninth, Orioles fans standing like they had a playoff berth on the line.
  • Matt Joyce, Matt Joyce, Matt Joyce. You made Tampa Bay fans very happy.

Like i said, I love it when sports matter.  These things happen. 
 


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