Some products merely try and make experiences more convenient for their users. But I think the great ones, the ones that really capture people’s attention, make their users strong where they were once weak.

Instagram is an obvious and often mentioned example. People suck at taking photos. Instagram turns everyone into at least as good as a photographer as the kid at the theme park taking your picture in those retro photos where everyone looks like they’re from the 1800s.

Another weakness most of us have is how terrible we are at spelling.

Git, something software professionals use to manage version control, attempts to aleviate how bad I am at spelling.

git chckout

git: ‘chckout’ is not a git command. See ‘git –help’.

Did you mean this?
checkout

This is just a convenience of git. But look at how well Google has turned a weakness of mine into an absolute strength. Auto...

Michael Jordan has always stood out out as someone who deeply understood the value of practice. He got great, not by constantly playing basketball, but by drilling, practicing and conditioning.

Here’s an interesting video, if you didn’t know much about Michael’s interest in practice and strength conditioning.

How many of us can say that we practice much?

We want to get better at our work. But often we just continue to do work. We don’t practice being better leaders or software developers or whatever it is we do.

Just like Michael didn’t just become great by playing over and over again (his job), we can only get so good at something without some kind of practice.

Practice is something that allows us to fail. We can try new things. We can see what works and what doesn’t and then improve.

When we continue to work without practice we often just do the same thing we were doing...

I’ve been a fan of literature on improving the mind for some time. I wouldn’t say I’m an expert in the field or anything, but I do know a bunch of bits and pieces. Like speed reading. Or techniques to take unrelated things and make new combinations in order to generate more creative thinking. Or how to use meditation.

A lot of these techniques have been incredibly useful. Speed reading is one of the coolest things I’ve learned. It’s helped me plough through a ton of books that I didn’t used to have time for.

But one technique that has always puzzled me in how to take advantage of is a “memory palace”.

Just a tiny bit of background on what a memory palace is.

You probably feel you or at least most people are mediocre at remembering things. At best. However, memories aren’t all the same. We’re actually, as a species, much better at remembering things spatially.

For example, if you...

The richest guys I know all listen more than they talk.

— Chris Sacca (@sacca) June 29, 2012

I was in a cab yesterday with my wife and the cab driver sneezed. After he sneezed, I participated in a custom I’ve done automatically for many many years.

I said, “bless you.”

The cab driver said, “ahh-choo.”

Did I hear that right?

He sneezed again. I said, “bless you.” He said, “ahh-choo.”

I found the exchange a funny reminder of how easy it is to misunderstand people and ideas. Was the cab driver saying the word “ahh-choo”. As in, maybe when he was learning English, someone taught him about this English phrase and custom of saying “bless you” after someone sneezes. And when someone sneezes they usually go, “ahh-choo.” The cab driver must have learned or remembered the order of the custom wrong and thinks “ahh-choo” is a word that he’s supposed to utter when someone says “bless you”...

When I was 11 and in grade school, I wanted to be 14 and in high school. When I was in high school, I wanted the freedom college was going to bring. When I was in my first post-college job at 21, I wanted to have the experience and confidence a 30 year old had at the company I worked at.

Youth is wasted on the young.

George Bernard Shaw

“What do I want to be when I grow up?”

At almost every stage of our life, we think about growing up. What’s the next and better thing we are going to grow into.

It doesn’t stop at a personal level either. People love to ask this of non-human things. Business folk and investors love to ask companies: What’s your business going to be when it grows up. I’ve done this over and over again.

The problem with asking this question is that we ask it before we know who we already are.

So a more useful question is to ask yourself: What would remain if...

Some folks have been interested in where I find blog ideas and ideas in general.

If some of this type of thing interests you, keep your eyes open for future posts. Today I just want to share a tiny little bit about where I get ideas from.

One thing I’ve noticed about myself is that a lot of things interest me.

I’m not entriely sure this is a thing that can be taught.

But if it can be, I hope sharing some bits about how much even little things interest me can inspire the behavior in others. Because when folks become interested in many many things, I see awesomeness happen. People listen more. People come up with more ideas. People are more tolerant of the differences in others.

I believe it was when I was about 14 when I was sitting alone, it’s raining outside, and I was manning a golf course pro-shop my dad used to own. I realized I had started making a habit of daydreaming about...

Have you ever read something you wish you hadn’t because it changes the way you see the world? And now things look just a little bit…“off”?

I’ve been designing and helping design websites for years, but I’m not very strong at it. So I’d thought I’d take a crack at learning more things about alignment, positive/negative space, the difference between fonts and typefaces, etc.

I picked up a book called Bootstrapping Design by Jarrod Drysdale. I’ve found it to be very enlightening in a concise package. My kind of book.

Now it has me looking at things with a different eye. Which can be a bit of a curse.

I’m a big fan of 37signals and how they design things. For me, what they do is usually the gold standard. After reading some of Bootstrapping Design, I’d thought I’d take a peek at the new Basecamp homepage to see it with some new eyes.

Huh. That’s interesting.

So here’s the...

Self-efficacy is a person’s belief in his/her own competence, i.e., as the belief that one is capable of performing in a certain manner to attain a certain set of goals. It is believed that our personalized ideas of self-efficacy affect our social interactions in almost every way. Understanding how to foster the development of self-efficacy is a vitally important goal for positive psychology because it can lead to living a more productive and happy life.

Wikipedia

It amazes me how much our moods can change and how they are so easily swayed by our current perspective.

I was in such a foul mood a couple weeks ago on some random Saturday evening. No idea why. A good night’s sleep later, and I was back to my merry self about everything.

This occurs frequently in my creative work. One day or moment and I feel that everything I see or touch seems like an opportunity. An opportunity to...

No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on - it’ll come back around to be useful later.

Emma Coats (storyboard artist at Pixar)

I’ve been learning acting for a bunch of years now. Things seem to be going pretty well. I finally decided to kick up my acting hobby a bit and start getting more serious about auditioning and finding roles. So I took a 9 week monologue class recently, as doing monologues is invaluable for auditioning.

Each week we’d perform a new monologue. So each week I’d work my ass off preparing the next monologue for class. I’d work it and work it. Memorizing the material was the easy part since I practiced it so many times. After one week of working so hard on a particular piece, I was feeling great about it. This should go over well in class.

The opposite happened.

The piece was a dud.

Instead of, “Nate, that was awesome. Great job.” It...

I live in a pretty busy part of Chicago. There’s some dumpsters alongside our building. A consequence of this is that many people seem to think: “if it’s close to the garbage, it’s just like the real thing.” In other words, we seem to collect a bunch of things AROUND the dumpsters, but not actually contained inside where our trusty garbage service can easily move the waste to their trucks.

The result is gross.

There’s constantly broken bottles as I step outside our front door. Extra points because there’s a bunch of dogs and children in the building. Who doesn’t love to play with broken glass?

My wife and I find ourselves cleaning it up. Very. Frequently.

One tremendous day awhile ago someone decided to “throw” out a large glass dining room table. It of course sat outside the dumpster and shattered. Glass everywhere. That took some time to cleanup.

So this last Saturday… I heard...