“Cable Channel” Presidents

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I recently listened to an interesting podcast interview of Chris Rock.  One phrase he mentioned was that George W. Bush was the first “Cable-Channel President.” What he meant by this is that you used to have candidates and presidents that attempted to appeal to the entire country – similar to Network television – but now you have presidents and candidates that try to appeal only to their audience – like Cable channels – and don’t care about nationwide approval.  

This is an interesting concept, because if you try to appeal to everyone – like a Network show – you tend to appear successful or correct only a fraction of the time to most voters, but if you focus on a niche, you’ll be loved by some and strongly disliked by everyone else.  The highs are higher but the lows are lower.  

You can definitely see this play out in American politics today.  Instead of trying to appeal to everyone and find a middle ground, candidates simply talk to their niche and alienate everyone else.  In most categories such as music, film, education, etc. I love this as it allows me to find exactly what resonates with me, but when you’re trying to run a country, i don’t think it works.   




Steve Jobs Biography was Great

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I just finished the Steve Jobs book and it was probably one of the most enjoyable books i’ve read in a long long time. I might say the past 10 years.  Here’s why:

Steve Jobs really cared about his products, deeply.  He had an intuitive feel for what the consumer wanted, and what he wanted.  He truly wanted his products to be close to art.   Even though very few in the industry believed him, even after the Macintosh had been around for over 10 years, he continued to hold on to this belief.  Each button, CD tray, color, and line was important to him. There’s a great passage in the book when he found out that the CD-ROM drive of a Mac was a tray instead a slot and it brought him to tears.

It was also fascinating to hear about the infant PC industry.  I had no idea how the PC industry started. I knew there was Apple and i knew there were was IBM but i didn’t understand how it emerged.  The narrative of the hobbyists building the board in garages makes sense to me, and i now understand.

I also didn’t understand how Jobs could get kicked out of his own company by a CEO and board that he selected.  But, after reading the story, i’m surprised he didn’t get kicked out sooner.   To hear of his return and his path back towards success was riveting.  Just a great story.  I highly recommend this book to anyone who’s enjoys Apple even a little bit.  Most people didn’t revere Jobs that much when he was alive (except, obviously the fanboys) but looking back at his accomplishments and commitment to excellence and innovation, we have to place him in the pantheon of business and product innovators.
I do think the world is a better place for having him here and i wish more people followed his path and held on to their dreams and reached for the stars.  It’s a great thing when it happens and actually works.




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” →

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