Having had a benign spot surgically removed from my head last week, skin ailments are top of my mind. Carly at First Round caught my attention with this heartbreaking skin disorder she came across.
Yes, those are his hands. It all started with a single wart. Here’s an excerpt from a documentary on him.
I’m loving the songs by Fleet Foxes. They get raves for their live performances, too.
I used to read Edge.org religiously (an ironic thing to say about this most irreligious of online communities), but went for years without visiting. I just went back last night for the first time in ages, and there’s still great content.
I got sucked into this back and forth of debate about whether Google is making us stupid, spurred by this original cover story by Nick Carr in the Atlantic. I have various thoughts on Carr’s argument, most of which I found well represented by the brilliant minds in this stream. The clearest counterpoint to Carr’s semi-pessimistic take is Clay Shirky, for whom the collapse of traditional literary power structures is an event to celebrate. He deliberately pushes Carr’s buttons, directly calling him a neo-Luddite. I’m sure I have occasionally sounded similar revolutionary themes, and been similarly discounted as a result.
My favorite response was actually David Brin’s, whose writing has had a big impact on me this year as I’ve researched online reputation. I’ll just quote the rousing finale to his “stop the madness” tirade:
No, what’s needed is not the blithe enthusiasm preached by Shirky… or Sanger’s grouchy nostalgia. What is needed is a hard, pragmatic look at what’s missing from today’s web. Tools that might help turn quasar-levels of gushing opinion into something like discourse. New versions of what worked for the Enlightenment—markets, democracy etc—so that several billion people can do more than just express a myriad shallow rumors and shallow ideas, but test them, compare them (like shoppers, or voters or scientists or lawyers) and actually reach some conclusions, now and then!
What kind of tools might help a storm of opinion turn into discourse? There are several key features of markets, democracy, science and law that the Internet has never provided, for all of its notable fecundity. Simple tools and services that might add a little depth and traction to its usefulness as an arena of problem-solving.
But what matters is stepping back from yet another tiresome dichotomy between fizzy enthusiasm and testy nostalgia.
One of the most affecting albums I’ve heard lately is Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago. <3
This is a fan tribute video I found on YouTube. Not much going on here other than paint on trash, but it’s not so bad.
From Brad Feld comes a recommendation for a new book, “My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley
It seems there are more and more of these teenagers authoring hits, starting companies or otherwise taking matters into their own hands when they find things that don’t work for them. But this one is the best of all; a kid who took his frustration with chemistry class and turned it into a game that he unveiled at TieCon alongside the Marc Benioff, Tim O’Reilly and other veterans. You should really watch this kid do his elevator pitch. But here are some quotes from the VentureBeat story:
Samar argues that textbooks are boring and kids would rather spend their time battling enemies, blowing things up with bombs, and yes, even giving their opponents lead poisoning. So he created a fantasy role playing game that combines the rapturous teenage joys of competition and carnage with the exciting properties of the periodic table of chemical elements.
Here’s how the game works: You command an army of chemical elements, compounds and catalysts — represented within a 66-card deck (the fire and brimstone card at left is for “Sulfur,” for example). Your opponent has his own deck with the same number of cards. Your goal is to battle your competitor and reduce his IQ down to zero. Pit your oxygen card against your opponent’s iron card, for example, and you learn that you create rust. Score one for oxygen. Kind of like rock-paper-scissors, but with chemicals, dice and 66 impressively illustrated cards featuring monster-themed caricatures of chemicals.
Perhaps geek parents are the new stage mothers.
Aside: I should mention that ikram-zidane, the designer of this blog theme, is a brilliant designer at the tender age of sixteen.
If you’re a political fanboy like me, it’s a helluva lot easier to obsess over the strategems of beltway game than search for evidence of actual leadership in candidates. This is particularly true at this stage in the election cycle when our electoral system focuses the national debate more on the reactions of corn farmers in Iowa to ethanol subsidies than it does on the Great Challenges of Our Time.
Articles like this one in the NYTimes (”Al Gore Has Big Plans“) about Al Gore reminded me of what real leadership looks like. It retold Gore’s history, emphasizing his long, steady history of beating the drum on global warming. It paints a picture of leadership as taking the hard road, articulating an issue when no one else wants to hear about it; a leadership fermented over years of hard knocks and binding with other true believers suffering through the ignorance or antagonism of their peers.
Gore is a gifted, and remorseless, explainer. Over the last three decades, he has been trying to explain a complicated and unattractive idea that scarcely anyone wanted to hear — that mankind has threatened its future on the planet by massively increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now, thanks in part to Gore himself, fewer and fewer people dispute this premise. But winning the argument — the smoking-causes-cancer part — is only the beginning. Gore and the country’s major environmental groups have now embarked on a three-year effort, for which Gore hopes to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, to persuade the American people, and the political parties, to take drastic action to curb greenhouse gases. It is a campaign of such vast ambition that you could almost imagine passing up a run at the presidency in order to pursue it. “The central challenge,” he said to me later that evening, as he was waiting to go onstage at the University of Miami, “is to expand the limits of what’s now considered politically possible. The outer boundary of what’s considered plausible today still falls far short of the near boundary of what would actually solve the crisis.”
He knows that the only way to get the appropriate level of response is to harness the same kind of nonlinear change that global warming itself demonstrates. So he’s working on turning the climate threat into a pressing reality–priority–for the masses through his Alliance for Climate Protection. One of the organization’s next efforts is something I hadn’t heard of til now, the Live Earth Concerts, brought to life by the peeps that brought us Live 8. It’s not like the intended audience isn’t already aware of global warming, but events like this can help galvanize the latent energy into active involvement.
It’s just a concert, but taken with everything else this is just the kind of authentic and visionary leadership I think we’d all love to see running the country. But it would be a damn shame to see his laser focus attention diluted by the requirements of that most compromising of positions.
I really liked his disarming response to the Gore in ‘08 pestering as well:
When I asked Gore why he hasn’t dismissed all the speculation by issuing a Shermanesque refusal to stand, as he did in 2002, Gore said, “Having spent 30 years as part of the political dialogue, I don’t know why a 600-day campaign is taken as a given, and why people who aren’t in it 600 days out for the convenience of whatever brokers want to close the door and narrow the field and say, ‘This is it, now let’s place your bets’ — If they want to do that, fine. I don’t have to play that game.” This sounded a lot like “I can get in late.” (Indeed, the buzz among the former aides is that Gore could jump in at the end of 2007 should the current contenders show significant weakness.) A few moments later, he said: “I’m not issuing a Shermanesque statement because that’s not where I am. I’m not ruling it out for all time. Although I cannot presently foresee any circumstances, such circumstances could emerge.”
I knew Flora when she was an unemployed dot com dropout.
Back in 2001 she was really struggling. Couldn’t figure out what she wanted to do next, whether it was another tech job or something she hadn’t thought of. You could tell she was something special, that the wheels were spinning in her head. But it hadn’t congealed into a recognizable shape yet.
It didn’t take her long to go back to her roots. She was doing landscape work a few months after losing her job, a job she’d done before coming to the Bay Area. She wasn’t sure she’d be doing it for long, but it was a comfortable old friend, this gardening business. A few more months went by and she’d met Saul, who became her business partner, then the opening of Geurrero Street Gardens. It was then that we all got a glimmer of the visionary that Flora is.
It’s not just that she has a unique perspective on garden design and landscaping. She does, from her heavy bias towards non-flowering succulents and other hardy plants to her eye for alternative materials. What really struck me then was how thoroughly she’d engaged the richly talented people around her, many of which were distinct talents in themselves. And also, her complete willingness to reject the oppressive conventions of her industry to create something special.
Her company, now renamed Flora Grubb Gardens, has just opened a phenomenal new facility which is an order of magnitude or two bigger and more impressive than her last joint. But it has the same DNA, imbued by her wholly unique vision. It comes through in everything she does, from the architecture (recycled, innovative, surprising), to the plants (a distinct array of native and exotics), to the embedded cafe (Ritual Roasters) that turns the design area into a social/creative/play space. The opening party also roped in the same carnivalesque cast of characters that made Geurrero Street so much fun. There was Cyclecide’s Bike Rodeo, clowns, djs, and an accordianist. It made the place feel less like a landscape design store and more like the home of a wealthy local eccentric with a fanatical passion for plants.
Flora is my kind of entrepreneur, and her brilliant career celebrates the kind of retail that is above all a personal statement. A big, shiny new building (solar powered!) is the cherry on top.
Flora Grubb Gardens from Thor on Vimeo
Quick note: I’m now blogging about the philosophy and process of building my new company and product from Demand Satisfaction. Swing on by sometime!
I prefer to avoid new years resolutions–for me, they’re too tactical a response to the turning of the calendar. I prefer to select a unifying theme to guide me through the tumult of daily life. A strategic north star, a melodic refrain, a mantra. I limit it to one word, and make sure it is filled with as much personal meaning as possible. It has to last a year, after all.
A few years back, when Amy and I decided to sell our house in Napa and move our family of three back to the urban jungle of San Francisco, we christened the year “Renaissance.” It really felt like a complete renewal of our lives after the dulling effects of exurbia.
Last year, knowing we’d be expending considerable effort to build out our company, putting it on the map, I struggled somewhat to find the perfect theme. The word popped into my head only a half hour or so before the balloons dropped, as fireworks that sounded like a cluster bomb tore through the night–”Blitzkrieg.” It’s a word that means “lightning attack” in German, and it evokes to me a rapid breakthrough advance through territory that is not your own. With a clear image in mind, we pushed Rubyred into the limelight and surpassed our own marketing and financial goals for the year.
This year the theme took no effort. The word is “Satisfaction.” It’s a pregnant word for me for several reasons.
1. I’m taking a calmer, more balanced approach to my affairs. I’m more disciplined and productive with work. I’m reading and writing more, partying less. Spending more time with family and friends, less with strangers.
2. Things that have been challenging are becoming increasingly effortless, be they personal finance, parenting or managing a product development team. This means that time once spent on the nuts and bolts of life is increasingly spent on richer, more strategic or creative activities. I can achieve David Allen’s Mind Like Water.
3. Finally, Rubyred is refocusing its business on a new product inspired by this theme. More on this in due time…
Happy new year, and may you and yours share in the satisfaction.