You are what you read.

I’m always very intrigued by what the people who inspire me read. So I scour the internet to find hints of what books guys like Marco Arment, Jason Fried or Notch might be reading.

I’d also be very interested in seeing a Twitter news stream like they see it. Who’s inspiring them today? What bits of information are they glancing at that I might have missed in my own stream?

Twitter used to make this easy to do. There was a feature to read someone else’s Twitter stream. No more apparently.

However. Twitter publishes not just the people that follow someone, but everybody they follow. Their “followees”.

And there are lists. Twitter lists allow you to read a different news stream that’s just made up of tweets from people in that list. So I can go through the followees of someone and add each of them to a list.

The problem is that it’s a shit-ton of clicking...

“What the f*$ are carrot jeans?” I asked myself while looking online recently.

Ah I get it. I guess they look like these.

They make your legs look like carrots. Huh.

Reminds me of something.

About 15 years ago I was sitting around a dorm room chatting with a friend of mine about a concept.

Why can’t pants be square?

If you can’t imagine what I’m talking about, let me explain.

Pants traditionally make your legs look a lot like cylinders. That’s because the material wraps around your leg in a circle. But who’s to say it can’t be a square.

What if you could wear pants that made your legs look a bit more like Gumby? (Spongebob wasn’t a thing anyone knew about yet.)

I loved the idea. I thought about it constantly and talked to everyone I knew about it.

I remember telling a friend of my mother’s who’s awesome at sewing. She listened to the concept and laughed. But she...

Working on a new product. Design guidelines: This design would have worked in 1998, too.

Jason Fried (@jasonfried) September 24, 2012

I recently picked up Steve Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability” for a re-read.

The examples are hilariously old. Almost on page one is a redesign the author did of Flooz, the virtual currency startup that was famously touted in 1999 by Whoopi Goldberg and burned through 10s of millions of dollars in a couple years before shutting down.

It’s funny then how a book written in 2000 is still so full of wisdom we should be paying attention to when creating websites. But probably aren’t.

This really resonates for me with one of his first pieces of advice:

One of the most crucial items in the persistent navigation is a button or link that takes me to the site’s Home page. Having a Home button in sight at all times...

I’ll never get tired of folks innovating on things that the rest of us overlook, take for granted, or simply treat as a commodity we can’t differntiate from competitors.

So on a bunch of levels, I love seeing this recently in a recipe newsletter my wife and I have been subscribing to for awhile.

just returned from an intensive salad seminar for food recipe developers in Carmel Valley, California, hosted by Dole Fresh Salads. During the course, we learned about some of the latest salad trends and tried some truly innovative ways to incorporate healthy greens and vegetables into all our meals and snacks, including arugula in our pineapple mojitos…

The Scramble

Dole. King of something most people don’t think too hard about.

Salad. Lettuce. Greens.

That’s a quick part of the grocery store for me. I need spinach. It’s there. It’s in the cart. No thought at all. What’s cheapest.

...

I spotted this in a restaurant here in Chicago. Most people might not recognize it. But the million people that ride it each day would.

It’s a drawing of Chicago’s elevated train. Our “L”.

I love that an artist was able to elicit these feelings and pride about Chicago and its train from taking something as complicated looking as its map, and recasting it with just a handful of imperfect lines.

It’s also an interesting reminder to me that I don’t always have to create pixel perfect train maps when creating things. It’s easy to get bogged down in designing something that’s perfectly laid out, and must contain so many bits of information because EVERYTHING I have to get into this project is so damn important. But sometimes the job you’re trying to do doesn’t really warrant the layers of complexity you’ve convinced yourself you needed of the finished product.

Sometimes a...

A quote often attributed to Ernest Hemingway.

If you take the quote too literally, you’ll miss the power of what he was trying to teach.

Hemingway realized that we aren’t always the same person. We have at least two sides to us when it comes to creating something. Sometimes our brains see endless possibilities, where we feel we can create anything our minds conjure when hearing that whisper from our muse. And the muses are everywhere we look.

Other times, our brains are great at tearing down all the bullshit, and finding the kernels of what’s efficient. What’s practical. What’s actually good. And usually that brain doesn’t like what it sees of my other self’s work.

When I create, I try to take Hemingway’s advice.

To begin a new blog post, or even a new software feature, I’ll start when I feel I have a thread of something with tons of possibility. I start from a book I read that...

(Comic from xkcd)

There’s a lot I don’t agree with on the internet. I’ve got opinions coming out of my ears.

There’s this comment I saw on Hacker News that I vehemently want to rebut. There’s this company that pissed me off recently online. There’s a few people that were pretty rude on a bus ride in Chicago last month.

I could write some flaming pile of words about how someone has done something terribly wrong on the internet, and I could share an opinion where we could all get really enraged as we go to work.

But then I looked at my website analytics recently and saw this:

This reminds me of something very important that I think goes missed by a lot of folks trying to get more traffic to their blog or project.

Celebrate others.

There’s all sorts of negative stuff I have an urge to write.

But seeing the above screenshot reminds me of something I’m super proud of. I often...

Entrepreneurs often hear, “Your startup idea is stupid. The market is saturated. Move on.”

Of course it’s tough to work on products when you have oodles and oodles of people trying to compete. It looks daunting. If you fail, it’s easy for people to armchair quarterback the experience and point out that you went the wrong way, the market was just too saturated.

So what really excites me are the companies that figure out how to show everyone around them that while, yes, it is a crowded market, you’ve been looking at everything all wrong.

There’s a much better way.

Often cited examples you’ll find in a lot of books on innovation are Cirque du Solei, Southwest Airlines, Whole Foods. And of course Apple. Where they defy the fact that computers are coming out of our ears. The mp3 player market was totally saturated. The cell phone market was completely owned by Nokia and Blackberry...

21 years ago I couldn’t do a single pull-up.

Shit, 3 years ago I still couldn’t.

But the experience 21 years ago was awful. I was a freshman in high school and we had to do a “fitness test”. This involved all sorts of ick. The worst was the fat test. All of us had to stand around a pool in our school issued speedos and get pinched with those body fat calipers. Why would kids get subjected to this?

We also had to see how many pull-ups we could do. I could do zero. I wasn’t alone. Still, I’m not entirely sure what lesson I was being taught by making a 13 year old try to do a single pull-up and failing in front of a bunch of people.

I tell that story because it really etched into my brain my complete inability to do a pull-up.

Even after that experience and years of playing sports and exercising, I still reached my 30s and I still couldn’t do a friggin pull-up.

But something...

Many businesses create innovation by simply moving time.

They take time that’s usually spent doing things or waiting, and shift that time to other places in the process or to other people. The result usually at worst still feels original and novel to customers, but more often is a much more efficient and productive process. Here’s a few examples.

Keurig makes those single cup coffee machines. I’ve always been intrigued and now I finally use one at the office. They took the time I used to spend preparing a new filter basket with grounds, collecting water for my pot of coffee and heating the water, and just moved the time.

Now someone else at a factory has to prepare the coffee in a little single serve cup. And now instead of sitting there waiting for the water to heat in my coffee maker just before I want the coffee, the water in most Keurig machines is pre-heated many minutes...