In Over Your Head

Month: March 2010

  • The Human Element

    Why is the human element important? Why should your business care? You can compete with price. You can compete with design. You can compete with reliability. So why would you want to compete on the human front? Why is it important that you win this particular war? Feeling cannot be given a price tag, so…

  • Quick Update Re: My Caveman Diet

    Since Chris, Lynette, Brian Clark and a few others seem to have become interested in the Paleo diet I’m doing, I figured I’d give you guys a lowdown about how it happened. I started doing Crossfit seriously on January 1st, 3x/week and was seeing strength and endurance gains but no body composition changes. I wanted…

  • Moon, Planets, and Stars

    While doing a SXSW talk with Chris last week I stumbled upon this analogy for channels and popularity. Here’s how it works. Everything has gravity, but most objects don’t have enough gravity to bring in other objects. Likewise, the web is filled with personalities that have a kind of social gravity, where some are dragged…

  • 30 Days is Nothing

    I’m on day 12/30 right now of trying a new diet. When I returned from Cuba I got inspired by Andrew Hyde and made a 30-day commitment to avoid grains, sugar, flour, dairy, and a few other things. It’s not that I feel fat at all– I just wanted to lean up a bit and…

  • Why Things Need Twitter

    So, as I asked yesterday, what happens if every object has a status message? You never again leave the oven on– it sends you a message when it’s on with nothing on/inside it. You never get up to go to the washroom in a restaurant and see the bathroom is occupied. Is the milk off…

  • Introducing PO

    Happy Monday. 🙂 I would like to use today’s blog post to introduce you to a thinking tool created by Edward de Bono— the word PO. Here is the basic idea (here’s a great book review if you need more): NO is a tool of logic. You use it to refute and prove things false…

  • Here There Be Dragons

    Jehovah’s Witnesses came to my door for the first time the other day. They started on their “Kingdom of Heaven” stuff and I was like, “ok, you can go.” They left. I thought about it for a long time after that– how can people wake you up, come into your house and annoy the hell…

  • Incentive vs. Character

    The fine for smoking at the New York Marriott Marquis is $250. Feel free to do it; they’ll just charge your card. Smoke in your friend’s house, however, and he just won’t let you back in. These two examples display the difference between two kinds of repercussions– financial and social. If you don’t smoke in…

  • Thinking about Cuba

    I just came back from a beautiful vacation in Havana, Cuba. Awesome city. Have you ever been to the developing world? It’s amazing how you can revert to a simpler time, technologically, and be totally fine within a few days. Your lifestyle adjusts. You can actually relax, if you let yourself. By the end of…