Reading Time: 2 min In David C. Baker’s excellent book “The Business of Expertise“, he encourages curiosity. In fact, he demands it. If you want to stay relevant in what you do, you need to stay curious. I work hard to stay curious, and David gives an analogy that I found to be very accurate. I find that when […]
Learning versus live tweeting
Reading Time: < 1 min When people attend a conference, I find that they often fall into one of two categories. Those that take deep notes, and try to gather all of the knowledge that they can. Those that live tweet throughout the event, sharing as much as possible. Both are great, for sure! They’re different goals and they bring […]
More consumption doesn’t mean you’re better informed
Reading Time: 2 min The latest episode of the Cortex podcast was quite long (a bit over two hours), but had some fascinating bits in it. Myke has decided to leave Twitter, and much of the discussion was around that. Leaving Twitter is an interesting discussion in and of itself, but it was the higher-level discussion they had about […]
Don’t let your content be vapor
Reading Time: 2 min I recently finished reading the book “The Business of Expertise” and it was fantastic. If you’re in a creative field, I highly recommend it. As I’ve shared before, I try to carefully track the books I read and work to know why I’m reading a particular book. In this case, my notes show that my […]
Cause blindness can lead to bad things
Reading Time: < 1 min As preached all throughout the book “The Infinite Game“, having a stated cause for your company is essential. However, if you become too confident in your own cause, you can see your competitors as being inferior and you might miss ways that you could improve. From the book: Cause Blindness is when we become so […]
Mistakes versus carelessness
Reading Time: < 1 min Many times when reading books, little things pop out at me that simply help me clarify how two words relate to one another. I’ve talked about a complaint versus a problem, social networking versus social media, interpersonal empathy versus social empathy, routines versus practices, attunement versus empathy, precision versus intent, knowing versus understanding, and dozens […]
It’ll be interesting to see how you guys figure this out
Reading Time: < 1 min Bo Burlingham’s book “Small Giants” covered 14 businesses that chose to stay small, as opposed to being bought out or going public, and the things they did to help them succeed. There were a ton of great lessons in the book, and I encourage you to check it out for yourself, but a great one […]
Make the charitable assumption
Reading Time: < 1 min It’s easy to make assumptions about other people. If someone is short with you, they might be a jerk. Or maybe they just lost their job, or lost a friend. It’s hard to know for sure, but if your initial thought is always that they must just be a jerk, that’s generally a bad outlook […]
I find time in the week, not time in the day
Reading Time: < 1 min My schedule can vary quite a lot from day to day. As of this writing, I was swamped yesterday (and will be tomorrow), but today was much more quiet so I was able to catch up quite a bit. In trying to publish every day, these kinds of days are essential. As I’ve mentioned before, […]
The output of courage is curiosity
Reading Time: < 1 min It’s something I’ve never really thought about before, but in many cases it’s difficult to express curiosity without some degree of courage. On a recent episode of “The Long and The Short Of It” podcast, they unpacked this quite a bit. While it can be seen in a handful of different ways, Jen summed it […]