One thing you learn as a parent is how different one child is from another and as result what works for one kid doesn’t necessarily work for another. An example in our house: we have 1 kid in private school and 2 kids in public school.
I think there is a tendency in startup land to believe that…
More unsolicited positive press for Philip Carmichael and pcpartpicker.com Fantastic example of focusing on the product and letting press and perception take care of itself!
> Next, we’ve decided to use PCPartPicker to put together our builds. We ? > love it, and think you should use it too—it gives you more flexibility in > your part buying, helps you eliminate possibly incompatible components, > and makes sure you get he best prices for the items you plan to buy, even > if it means you have to buy them from different retailers. Whole Article: http://lifehacker.com/5840963/the-best-pcs-you-can-build-for-600-and-1200
Source: Lifehacker
Great point. Some times it helps to take a step back and realize that your initial project has succeeded beyond your wildest dreams. What’s more - you are doing yourself harm by not realizing it.
Just read a brilliant blog post from Umair Haque on HBR[1]. It gets to the core of why I believe building a massively profitable business can still leave you feeling unfulfilled in spite of the wealth accumulated.
“a reason is not a purpose” - This is a crucial distinction being lost on the hordes of young minds enraptured with the cult of the modern day entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is the new black and it is a world view that is slipped into your mind camouflaged as a path to freedom and financial independence. This is dangerous; a world view should be consciously chosen not accidentally acquired. Entrepreneurship is not a reason, it is a purpose. The reason has to come from within before the purpose can be manifested in its entirety.
Or as umair says it…
Absolute clarity. A reason is not a purpose. Priya’s real mistake is that she’s confused a purpose — writing books — with a reason: why the books must (not should, but absolutely, totally, must, or else your whole life will feel empty, wasted, pointless, over) be written. Imagine you were a master stonemason. Your purpose might be to build a great cathedral. But your reason might be to approach the divine, to leave a legacy, or simply to do great work. A purpose, then, is a set of accomplishments — but a reason is the animating force behind them; it is the “why” that gives sense to the “what”; and without it, all our “whats” may end up being empty, barren, senseless in the terms of a life that feels well lived. Priya, like many people I know, is a stonemason with a blueprint — but no incendiary, unstoppable, inescapable reason to begin building.
The distinction is important and it comes through in the product or company that you build. It always comes through whether you like it or not. Having a reason not only fulfills your pursuit but it speaks clearly to the people you serve through your purpose (your customers in business speak). I think this is why great entrepreneurs are so.
Links:
[1] http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2013/04/how_to_create_your_reason.html
[2] Related TED Talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html
Poka-yoke (ポカヨケ) is a Japanese term that means “mistake-proofing.” A poka-yoke is any mechanism in a lean manufacturing process that helps an equipment operator avoid (yokeru) mistakes (poka). Its purpose is to eliminate product defects by preventing, correcting, or drawing attention to human errors as they occur. For example, I once read about an x-ray film that dramatically reduced incorrect diagnoses by putting “THIS SIDE UP” on the film itself. Doctors wouldn’t accidentally read the film backwards because the label cued them instantly to the correct orientation. A very simple fix to prevent what could be a dangerous misdiagnosis.
You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. And if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen.
And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can’t make electrons do. There are certain things you can’t make plastic do. Or glass do. Or factories do. Or robots do.
Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. And it’s that process that is the magic. — Steve Jobs
My summary:
OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) reports that the FreeMind download is damaged. We found out the problem is rather security related (checksum or certificate could not be verified). Here is the solution: System preferences > Security & Privacy > Allow applications from anywhere. Open Freemind. Change the security & privacy back to its original setting. Freemind will always open once you’ve approved it the first time.
I needed to export a small (330 so “manually” was not an option) number of emails to text for analysis. I could group them together using a gmail query. The top google search results often pointed to using imap or pop, combined with the native export functionality of an email app (like thunderbird). This was not suitable for me.
Luckily, i found a quick work around. It took me about an hour and assumes rudimentary coding skills. Below is an outline of what I did. Get in touch with me* if you want specifics.
What the function does: It searches through your gmail account for threads matching a specified label. It then pulls out the first email in every thread and saves it as a google doc in your drive account. The name of the doc is set to the subject line of the thread. This worked for me since all of my threads were single email threads. You may want to modify this.
Function:
function myTestFunc() {
// Log the subject lines of the threads labelled with <<label>>
var label = GmailApp.getUserLabelByName();
var threads = label.getThreads();
for (var i = 0; i < threads.length; i++) {
docname = 'mesg ' + i +' ' + threads[i].getFirstMessageSubject();
doc = DocumentApp.create(docname)
// assumes that only the first email in the thread matters
doc.setText(threads[0].getMessages()[0].getBody());
doc.saveAndClose();
}
};
me = amar dot rama at gmail
Silicon valley does tech for the sake of tech. New York focuses more on using tech to change other business models. I dig the NYC scene :)
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