dangerouslyawesome

Working with the team at Red Tettemer has been about seeing the “little things”.

Today I decided to add one of my own little things by replacing the typical Lorum Ipsum that we splatter across our web pages before we get content for them with something a little more…infectious. I mean entertaining. I mean fun.

Since we use Textmate whenever we’re not elbows deep in Flex Builder, it seemed like a quick and obvious place to start, creating a Textmate Bundle that adds the Tab Trigger for the word “ipsum”.

Simply download and install this bundle, which I’ve decided to name BetterIpsum, and try it for yourself. Never more be plagued by barely pronounceable latin garble, and instad, get a tune in your head that you won’t be able to get out.

I’m thinking about creating a TextExpander version of this to make it less IDE dependent, but only if people are having as much fun with this plugin as we are at Red. And if there’s a way to do this for Photoshop (macros, I suppose?), I know our designers would love it as well.

Over the weekend, and late into Sunday night, I was scrambling to get some software put together to host ~50 people over the next 12 weeks. More on why I was scrambling another time.

Today, I want to take you on a trip. Hold on.

Rewind.

Late last year, Amy Hoy and I decided that it was long time that we sit down and actually do something together. Despite having been friends for a number of years, having supported and unstuck each other numerous times, and even working in close proximity, we hadn’t really worked together.

Amy had a landslide 2009. Setting the personal goal to “quit consulting” and live on revenue from products and services, and she nearly made it. No small feat, but she also decided to share her story on a 3 hour conference call back in December.

The feedback after her conference call from the participants was “we want more” on how to hustle our way to independence. Quite a call to action.

While visiting Amy and Thomas over new years, we postulated how we might finally work together, taking the call of “we want more” and blending it with my year of Unstick.me sessions, and came up with a course.

Rewind.

I’m a college dropout. I don’t hide this fact, I’m not proud nor ashamed. It was a decision, and I stand by the fact that I made the right one. College wasn’t the right fit for me, mostly because I had different aspirations. I didn’t want a job, I wanted to work. I didn’t believe in the business theories that were being taught. I couldn’t stand 10+ year old technology courses. I couldn’t handle apathetic professors (and misdirected students). I couldn’t operate in the bureaucracy. I didn’t understand theory without application and context. I valued fun over anything else.

Drexel University just wasn’t the place for me at the time.

That said, I’ve always had a special place in my heart for education. Mostly, alternatives.

See, I love to learn. And I’m lucky as a duck that I’ve got a bunch of crazy-smart friends, mentors, and peers to learn from.

Fast forward.

I’ve long believed that there’s a better way to educate than piling ideas on a person, than filling a person with facts. One of my best friends in the world and one of the smartest dudes I know, Matthew, is an actual professor at Rice University.  At SXSW, he expressed concern that the world was quickly filling with people who knew ABOUT a lot of things, but didn’t know a lot of things. Information vs. Knowledge. The Wikipedia generation, if you will.

I have to agree with the sentiment.

A generation of people who are full of good ideas, but lack the skill to synthesize, to make the rubber meet the road.

That skill is teachable, though.

Creating these people is the job of education, formal or otherwise.

Rewind.

So in Vienna, Amy and I talked about what specific powers of synthesis we might be able to help people with. We’d both launched a number of products, services, efforts, etc over the years prior, and found ourselves often mentoring first time “shippers” on getting from an idea to an actual viable product worth their time creating. And the “Zero to Launch” course was born.

Covering the walls of their home office in Vienna, Amy and I storyboarded out a number of our experiences, and the lessons we’d learned. We crafted the story arc, the consistencies across experiences, that helped us succeed. We refreshed our notes on what had inspired us. On how and what we’d learned.

And we put together the a 12 week course to help others do the same.

The Pragmatic & Profitable Approach to Ideas (like therapy for your dreams)

Dig Deep: Doing the Research (get real, learn what ideas to steal)

Your Idea’s Darwin Test (will it get kicked off the island, aka go broke?)

Define Your Shippability (how to determine your minimum viable product)

Create your Roadmap (without one, how could you drive forward?)

Look for Shortcuts (they always pay off)

Carve out Your Audience (do it now!)

The Price is Wrong (and how to make it right)

Maintaining Momentum (with a “day job”; without strangling yourself)

Talking about Yourself (you gotta do it)

Keep Your Cool (again with the no strangling)

Your First Launch (how to run it, & the aftermath)

Fast forward.

This week, we kicked off that course with just over 50 students from around the world. We’re conducting the course 100% virtually, with a composite of weekly lessons, workbooks, reviews, conference calls, and forum discussions. Already, its clear that we have an incredible 12 weeks ahead of us, and I’m beyond excited to be involved in education again.

The Future

It would be arrogant of me to think that what we’re doing is the future of higher education. But I think what we’re doing is a part of it, not replacing it.

Thinking back to University of the Arts’ President Sean Buffington’s Ignite Presentation about making (art)work that matters and “what does it mean to educate an artist”. Sean theorizes that there’s a need for education to update itself to for the medium it is attempting to teach. Most importantly, Sean suggests that you can equip students with the ability to learn for themselves.

That’s the entire approach to helping the students taking Amy and my Year of Hustle: Zero to Launch course: guiding our class towards the rubber meeting the road, with the outcome being not another information-saturated member of society, but instead, a knowledgeable and empowered  contributor to society, and hopefully, a life of success.

A couple of weeks back, one of my clients sent me to the Engage Expo and Toy Conference in NYC to study some aspects of the online virtual world industry. I admittedly knew very little, both about the technology and the industry, but I was excited about attending a conference where it’s not the same people I always see talking about the same things they always talk about to the same people who are always listening.

Among the things that really interested me was how the toy industry runs on a very interesting set of pattern metrics called “play patterns”. In short, there are massive amounts of research put into slicing and dicing demographics into popular patterns for engagement: what kinds of things do people (not just kids) like to do, what things have them come back often (addicting) or play for long periods of time (immersive). Knowing this information and who you’re targeting helps de-risk toy design. I saw some really interesting correlations to this and marketing, but that’s for another time.

One particular panel stuck out in my notes, where moderator Nicole Lazzaro showed slides and some related theses that there were 4 keys to “fun”.

From these patterns, the elements that jumped out to me as the most concise were:

Hard Fun – Reward lies in challenge and mastery

Easy Fun – Reward lies in expressions of creativity and discovery

People Fun – Reward lies in social, peer to peer interactions

Serious Fun – Reward lies in creating value

Nicole theorizes, and goes on to explain and illustrate, how balancing these keys increases the likelihood that games are popular, fun, and ultimately create experiences worth sharing. As I’ve pointed out before, experiences worth sharing are most crucial component for effective word of mouth marketing.

Motivators

The first thing that stuck out to me was that these four keys are all rewards, and all rewards based on intrinsic motivators. For those who saw my recent Ignite Philly presentation, I brought up the notion that intrinsic motivators are extraordinary, and often overlooked in business and management.

Related, it reminded me a lot of Dan Pink’s thesis from Drive, and his TED talk, of the operators of the “new workforce”, are based in the intrinsic motivation associated with autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Seeing as how I spend far more time looking at the trends of business than of play, I realized…for me (and many others), work is a type of play.

From Nicole’s Four Keys of FUN, I’m proposing the Four Keys to Business.

1) Hard Business

There’s intrinsic reward about overcoming business challenges. This is often a ‘make or break’ attribute of entrepreneurs, business leadership, and good management.

In a recent article in Inc, Omniture founder Josh James talks about highs and lows of building the company and ultimately selling it to Adobe for a buttload of money. One of my favorite quotes from Josh:

There were times when I lay down on the floor at night, close to crying, and said, “I’m done. I can’t make payroll.” Then my wife would come over and kick me and say, “Get up and figure it out.”

One time, I got a customer to prepay us. Another time, I came into the office and said, “Oh, by the way, we’re changing payroll dates.” That bought me 10 days.

That’s hard business. That’s the reward in hard business: overcoming challenges and finding solutions.

2) Easy Business

Some people would argue that there’s no such thing as easy business. Ignoring things like “savvy” and “knack”, but still considering things like “luck”, you find yourself thinking: “How do some people make this look so easy?”. The part that they make look easy is usually an ourward expression of creativity and exploration in our business. Why is this considered “easy”? Because if you’re willing to open your mind up, the sky is the limit. True creativity and exploration means you can sidestep the constraints of reality, even if it is only temporary. Sometimes, though you realize that the constraints you thought were constraints were more in your head than anywhere else.

Easy business is letting your mind wander, but always coming back to reality with whatever you’ve found along the way.

3) People Business

Not everyone is a people person, like Tom. But business success is all about people because, lets face it, businesses are made up of people.

As rewarding as social interaction is in gaming, it is among the most universally gratifying aspects of business. Think about why coworking is a most popular trend; despite what the press wants you to think, it’s not about cheap desks. It’s about the social experience in the workplace. Coworking provides a vehicle for People Business, the social aspects to business, without  giving up independence.

I think that more people are interested in People Business than any other kind of business. The evidence for this is in the vast swaths of business networking events. For some, networking is a vehicle for business and for others, business is a vehicle for networking. One isn’t necessarily right, but the more I experience, the more I know I’ve found more effective. Being a good business person has helped me build an extraordinary network, one that I’m not sure I could have built simply by going from networking event to networking event.

4) Serious Business

Often the most discussed attribute of business is still only one part of the four keys, but it needs to be there, and that is creation of value. Since ultimately the purpose of a business is to generate revenue, the most direct path to revenue is the creation of value.

The importance of serious business, creating value, is not just to generate revenue but to find sustainability. If you’re continually creating value, you will always have the resources and the opportunities to fuel the other key aspects of business and achieve them successfully.

The real key is balance

The takeaway here is not to change your focus on business, but instead diversify and balance them. I like metaphors and similes, as many people know, so think about the keys I’ve described as literal keys, allowing you to open new doors. If you’ve only been unlocking one door, opening it, and walking through, you’re not experiencing the success in business you could be if you tried each of the different doors.

Which door will you unlock first?

Did you spend your time writing about things worth doing, or doing things worth writing about?

“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” – Roy Disney

Hat tip to Theresa Stigale, one of the partners that owns the building that IndyHall resides in.

This post is actually a slightly adjusted version of a comment to this thought-provoking commentary. I thought it was a compartmentalized thought enough that I wanted to post it here for my own record.

The prompt, from Ashley’s essay, is:

“We’re taught what to think, not how to think”.

Therein lies a problem. The education model being experienced today (K-12 & much of higher ed) has been built on top an old process designed to produce two things: workers, and more academics.

If we’re willing to put aside the “more academics” part and focus on the “workers” part of the product of education, we need to consider what’s changed. Through at least one lens, changes exist in workplace and the expectations it has.

Rather than go down the road of “I paid six figures for a college education and now I can’t get a job, EFF YOU America” that many young professionals are doing right now, there’s a huge, huge, HUGE missed opportunity to improve the educational system using mentorship, and refocusing on learning skills instead of just the learning of skills.

When the industries with the highest demand were focused primarily on manufacturing, someone who came out of school not only had basic skills, but had the proficiency to learn some more basic skills in order to accomplish a task. Manufacturing and the industrial workplace provided a very specific, guided ladder to continue learning skills, leading to promotions, opportunities, better pay, hours, so on and so forth.

Times be-a changing.

Now, with another industrial shift fully swinging away from manufacturing (sorry Detroit) and towards knowledge work, the ability to just learn new tasks isn’t enough.

You’re expected to synthesize new, unmarked tasks.

You’re expected to create, not just produce.

If you can’t create, you’re going to have to try a LOT harder to get a great job. And that thesis ignores the increased likelihood that you’ll work for yourself, start a company, be a great leader of your industry or workforce. Maybe more.

And speaking of great leadership, mentorship seems to have been lost almost everywhere with the exception of artisans, and craftsmen (craftspeople, for the gender sensitive). And even there, art schools are stacking students high with skills, and until the last minute, very little REAL WORLD practicum.

Take a look at this video from IgnitePhilly I, where University of the Arts’ President Sean Buffington eloquently explains how as a university administrator he KNOWS that things are fucked up, and even how, but doesn’t know to go about making steps in any new direction.

From IgnitePhilly2 (4 months later), Chris Lehmann of the Science Leadership Acadamy talks about how schools need to stop being run like businesses, find new metrics for success, and a general lack of responsibility and accountability in the system despite the quality of the educators. Science Leadership Acadamy is an empowerment-based educational system, experimentally created in partnership with The Franklin Institute. One of my favorite points he makes is: you can’t learn when you feel the subject is more important than you are.

“What happens when school is real life, and not just preparation for real life”.

I haven’t written a post about Twitter in a good, good long while. That’s not by accident, either. There’s PLENTY of blog buzz for Twitter, and it doesn’t need mine.

In fact, even in all of the seminars, panels, and presentations I’ve given in the last year, I’ve done my best to avoid discussing Twitter. Recently, I openly asked the audience to stop asking me questions about Twitter (and social media in general) and ask me interesting, hard questions. I might have turned some people off, but I think the majority of the people appreciated it.

So why stray from a good habit?

Something interesting happened in social media, for a change.

This past week, Twitter rolled out a new feature called Lists. Lists are a way to arrange people besides following them. When you create a new list and give it a title, the people you add to that list are quickly and easily associated not just to that title, but to the fact that you applied that title to them.

This is an interesting way to get normal people to arrange other normal people, apply metadata (the name and context of the list), and for people to discover each other thanks to these new, suggestive contexts.

Sounds pretty complicated. I threw in a bunch of big words for effect. What does this boil down to?

Now, I think this is exciting. It’s going to freak a lot of people out. Maybe that’s why I think it’s exciting.

Let’s take a look at the lists I’ve been added to. Check this out:

I took all of the words used to describe me via lists, cleaned them up, and pumped them into Wordle to illustrate prominent terms in my lists just a few days after launch. I’m interested to see how this cloud changes over time.

There are some oddball anomalies, like social media and design, but I’ll take it.

What’s prominent in your list cloud?

Check out Alex’s “Zero-to-Launch” how to ship your first ANYTHING course, a collaboration with Amy Hoy, beginning March 22nd.

Autonomy – The urge to direct our own lives

Mastery – The desire to get better and better at something that matters

Purpose – The yearning to do something that we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

Dan Pink outlines the three key components of the new “operating system” that supports creative work forces.

Traditional management is great if your goal is compliance.

This is some really great mind-candy. Enjoy.

My insanely talented (and insanely geeky) friend Bre Pettis, along with Kio Stark, drafted 12 bullet points that might help explain to you how, and more importantly why, I’m always working on something (and in most cases, more than one thing).

From Bre’s blog:

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

This is “Agile” for everybody else. What are you getting done?

Last night I was at National Mechanics for the PANMA spring social, and fashionably late as usual. That didn’t keep me from staying late and having some great discussions. One of them was with Aaron “Shaggy” Hoffer-Perkins. Shaggy (best nickname ever. jinkies.) is a partner in a new startup here in Philly, and studying entrepreneurship at Temple. Turns out, Shaggy isn’t just an entrepreneur, he’s a geek who rivals my own geekdom: he’s part of a program called “The Wayfinder Experience“, which is basically a kid’s “gaming camp” that teaches team building, leadership, and communication skills through role playing games and improvisation. His tagline is “building community through play”.

LARPing meets summer camp, with a purpose. It’s ideas like this that are crazy enough to work.

Finding out more about Shaggy, he explained his background in theater, specifically improv, and that he teaches an improv class as well. I’ve always wanted to take an improv class, not that I think my communication and improvisational skills are poor, but I think it’d be a lot of fun. This is when things got interesting. Shaggy told me the 3 guidelines for improv, and how they’ve shaped him as an entrepreneur.

• Accept and Build (yes, and…)
• Make your partner look good
• Dare to be average

Accept and Build: The “yes, and…” principle is something I think I heard first from Jason Tremblay during a brainstorming session at IndyHall. The concept lets you get all of your ideas out in the open, without worrying about them being shot down or flopping. If everyone in the circle is using the “yes, and…” principle, you can be fairly confident that someone else’s riff can pick up your dud of an idea and make it a stud. This ties into the core value of openness and sharing: don’t be afraid your idea isn’t good enough to share yet. Every time I hear someone share an idea while being open to feedback, that idea comes back 10x better.

Make your partner look good: there’s a pretty obvious tie to guideline #1 here. In fact, one really doesn’t work without the other. Your partner needs to be open to being made look good, and you need to always be looking to utilize them as an out in a way that helps them look good. I also see this as a small but crucial social capital deposit: be it for your business partners, your vendors your clients, your new leads…everyone.

I don’t get the “sabotage” mentality in business. If you’re working to make everyone else look good instead of just yourself, you end up inherently look good and at the same time open the door for others to make you look good, too. Never point fingers.

Dare to be average: This one’s a bit tough to swallow, considering my mantras include “do epic shit” and “go big or go home”. But that’s not what this is about. This is about finding uniqueness in yourself, rather than going for the obvious thing that you’re 100% sure will get the laughs (or, the users, the funding, etc). By not waiting for the “perfect idea”, or for it to be “fully baked”, you let down your guard and expose some of yourself. People are mortified of having a piece of themselves in their business, and so they are reluctant to have this kind of fundamental bond with their idea. But it’s these ideas, the “first thing in your head” ideas, that will be unique because it’s you, your voice, based on your background and your experiences.

The counter-intuitiveness is that by letting yourself “be average”, you open the door to being extraordinary.