The Steve Jobs way

One thing people don't understand about Steve Jobs is that he never sold a product he didn't have. At rollout, the iPhone couldn't run apps. So at rollout it he didn't talk about them.

Another thing most people don't get. Developing platforms even before you roll them out, takes a lot of time. People think about platforms as if you could imagine a movie like Titanic one day, and have it in the theaters in a month or two. Platforms take time.
-Dave Winer.

The 10x Lesson

The 10x programmer, the 10x strategy expert, the 10x surgeon.

This is something we are always in search of. The human who is playing at a different level, generating work that changes everything.

The thing is: a 1x contributor can’t become a 10x merely by working ten times as hard. The physics of time won’t allow it, certainly, but it’s also because 10x doesn’t work on the same axis. It’s not about more effort. It’s about more insight.

In order to make that forward leap, you need to trust yourself. To create space. To have the discipline to say no to distractions or even to projects that put you back into the 1x mode.

The reason that there are so few 10x contributors isn’t that we lack innate talent. It’s that our systems and our self-talk seduce us into believing that repeating 1x work to exhaustion is a safer path.

-Seth Godin.

Destiny is all

A video by Matt Mahurin.



“You start at the end. You start with emptiness. You start with nothing. You start with the void… I lost my mother when I was 14. I learned so much from her vanishing. I wish it had never happened. I wish that I had been older. But as a young teenager staring hard into that void, this is where a certain life-force gathered pace in me. Where a certain defiance began. To defy the odds. To defy people’s expectation. To defy death itself. To rob it of it’s power over me or anyone else…
-Bono.

For Silke after Heidelberg

The dance of the possible!

“Nobody tells people who are beginners, and I really wish someone had told this to me… all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.… there’s a gap… for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good…. It’s not that great.… It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you…. A lot of people never get past this phase.… they quit.

And the thing I would say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years [of this]…. Everybody goes through that…. And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work… it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.”

-Ira Glass, host of This American Life, explaines how these skill gaps work against us.

Agile 2018

Back in 2001 when the word agile appeared it was a manifesto – a set of ideas, the term “agile” also served to group a bunch of tools and techniques which could make software development “better.” It painted a picture of a shining city on a hill we all wanted to live in.

Agile was a place you wanted to go, it was a journey you wanted to make, it offered hope. More important as the tools – sprints, stand-ups, etc. – and approaches – just in time, last responsible moment, test first – were the stories agile people told. These were stories of a better world, of that shining city on the hill.

Today everyone is agile. Nobody is promoting traditional (“waterfall”) working. Not being agile is about as popular as leprosy.

Agile won the war. Agile is respectable and everyone is agile now. Big business rush to be agile, Governments want to be agile, consultants will sell you agile.

But agile lost the peace. While many say they are agile, few software developers live in a shiny city. The place they live in might be better than the place they came from but it doesn’t quite live up to the dream.

11.11.2018

100 years ago.


And I am thankful that my freedom today was earned by so many who risked, and in many cases suffered, death in order to defend it.

Who decides?

Always the Money: without control over money, it doesn’t matter how much you talk or dream of improvements, or how many grand designs you may imagine, because nothing will come of it when you don’t have financial sovereignty. Someone else will always make the final decision.

U2 are back home for four shows in Dublin at 3Arena.