One thing I’ve noticed about many of the people whose creativity inspires me is that they seem to be obsessed with something.

A few random examples are folks like Jason Fried at 37signals and his obsession with cars. Or there’s Monet and his obsession with water lilies. Or the folks at OXO and their obsession with hands & gloves.

Sometimes the obsession is completely tangential to what they usually work on, but somehow eventually it finds its way back into their work. Often as inspiration.

Sometimes as gold.

One of my very favorite examples of this is Aaron Draplin and his obsession with graphic design heritage from the last 100 years. Especially old manuals, vintage ledgers and agricultural memo books.

I started finding out he was a collector of these types of things from some post of his. If I remember correctly, he was talking about going to an estate sale and going into some...

On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest.

-Brian Clark @copyblogger

No idea where Brian got this number from or what kind of testing went into the statistic. Regardless of knowing its accuracy, I can attest that I would have had a much better reaction from a blog post I wrote last week, if I had followed his rule of thumb.

So. Last week I wrote a post I was hoping would further the thought in people’s minds that we use way too many masculine metaphors for courage. We don’t use racist metaphors for achieving more success or being smarter, so why do we still so often read advice like “You need to have the balls to be a great designer”?

I went ahead and tried to get clever with the title of that post, not so much as to bait users into reading, but I thought that the title would lead to a clever dramatic irony, since the post...

Nice article, aside from the fact it should be proofread.

-MrDavidChan

I hate to nitpick, but it’s very difficult to not get distracted by the horrible punctuation and spelling.

-sneak

I want to share a a few things that have helped me be more creative, and more importantly more authentic, in my writing. I’ll address a couple of my vocal critics soon.

First, I’d like to share a story about a kid I met a little over a year ago.

I was volunteering for an organization here in Chicago where we helped high school kids prepare for their college applications. These kids were part of the program because they were usually the first in their families, often underprivileged, to be applying to college. We were there to help them through the college application process.

So there’s this one Saturday I met a student who wanted help writing and editing his college application essay.

We went...

Please let me set the stage.

Ad re-targeting is driving me fucking crazy.

For those who don’t know this term, re-targeting is the process advertisers and ad networks use to track you on the internet so that if you land on a website, say for example Coca-Cola’s site, you’ll then start seeing Coca-Cola ads on a ton of other websites you visit that show ads from that same ad network.

Since Google and its Adsense block are on a ton of websites, it ends up feeling like Coca-Cola is EVERYWHERE. Even though if your friend visited those same websites, they might not see those Coca-Cola ads, if they’ve never visited cocacola.com.

My problem isn’t that re-targeting exists. In fact, as a marketer myself and as someone who has spent thousands and thousands of dollars on ads from places like Google and Facebook, I know very well how powerful something like re-targeting can be.

Re-targeting...

It’s odd how often the phrase “growing a pair” or “do you have the balls?” comes up when talking about courage. Especially in the fields of business, technology and entrepreneurship. Things like ‘Do You Have The Balls to Make it?“ or "It takes balls to build the best product ever. Grow a pair” are often the titles of advice we read or hear around us.

The phrase is usually a slang term defined as:

to act with fortitude, strength, determination; “man up”.

-The Online Slang Dictionary

Of course it’s figurative. But what strikes me the most about this phrase is how ridiculous it would be for me to say something about changing the color of your skin or the shape of your eyes, in order to achieve a highly desired goal of humanity.

I’d likely get punched in the face (and rightly so) if I stated things like: “You want to be more successful? Change the color of your skin” or “To be a...

This is a screenshot of a friend’s public Fitbit (a fitness tracking website and pedometer device) profile.

I wonder if the language is intentionally funny.

The picture reminds me again of how important personality can be to a company’s success.

8 years ago I wanted to use an email newsletter service to help my mom market her flip flops and other things she makes. There were a ton of options. Companies like ConstantContact and Aweber were real popular. But there were so many others I could choose from or even run from my own computer. You’d be crazy to create a software company to do email marketing.

Then some crazies did just that.

Companies like MailChimp and MadMimi.

Both of these companies bleed their personalities into their products.

MailChimp has odd quirks regarding monkeys all over the place. Some days you try and login, and it's… Star War’s day!?

Happy Star...

Barry Schwartz’s 2004 paper, “The Tyranny of Choice,” we learn that people are most satisfied when choice increases from zero to one. Satisfaction then tends to increase proportionately to the number of options. However, he cautions, only to a point. When there are too many choices, satisfaction drops precipitously. In brief, enough choice is good—too much choice is bad.

His research divides people into two groups: maximizers and satisficers (satisfice is a portmanteau of satisfy + suffice). According to Schwartz, when looking to buy a new car, maximizers would have to see every car option available on the market before they could make a decision. Satisficers, on the other hand, define minimum criteria for choice; for example, they have $16,000 to spend on a two-door coupe. When they find the first car that meets those specifications, they simply buy it.

The research (backed up by...

I was curious if anyone was using HTML5 features like the appCache or localStorage to create some kind of client side cache of rendered pages of a dynamic website, and then using a technology like Firebase or a WebSockets implementation to invalidate the cache.

It seems like this particular type of caching maybe hasn’t been explored enough?

Projects like Rails have taken full advantage of server side caching of pages and fragments of pages. They’ve even helped you do browser side caching with things like Etags. However, Etags still require a round trip to the server to get the Etag in the response.

Then there’s things like Cache-Control headers to tell your browser to cache pages. But Cache-Control doesn’t seem to be accessible from a javascript API to invalidate. And finally, there’s things like HTML5’s appCache and its manifest, but it seems more suited to store static assets.

Of...

At the bottom of most posts here, there’s a phrase with a link to my Twitter account. I had originally added this as an informational message, but it ended up being more effective than I expected.

-Dustin Curtis (@dcurtis)

Arguments you might have in your head before you even read this post

• Uggh, I hate braggart posts about your stats.
  I know. I’m sorry. That isn’t my intention. It’s just that I was surprised at what happened. I basically had been making a mistake and wanted to warn some folks not to do the same.

• Yeah, you did this because you got lucky and on the front page of Hacker News 3 times this week.
  That’s very true about the Quantity of new followers I got in such a short time, but what’s important is to judge the conversion rate that I improved on. If I had done what I always do when I blog, I would have gotten a ton of visitors and traffic, but ZERO new Twitter...

i’m going to teach a course for first-time startup entrepreneurs called stop fucking around and get back to work.

— Paul Stamatiou (@Stammy) April 23, 2012

Here is an awesome interview on Mixergy, and I like a ton of them on there. This one is Jason Cohen who has been popular in the startup community for awhile. There’s a lot of gems in this interview, but the one that stood out the most was his bit about how much a founder’s time is worth. I’ll summarize it for you here, but it’s worth watching the entire interview.

Most folks starting a business will assume their time is worth whatever their hourly rate was before staring a business. If you were making $100 an hour doing consulting before, well, that’s what your time is worth now.

So any calculus, done on the opportunity cost sacrificed when you screw around and don’t work on things that will actually get your business to start...