May 19th, 2008, 1 Comment »
It’s not the most cogent article in the world, but there are some interesting ideas in this New York Times piece about habits:
Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives…
“The first thing needed for innovation is a fascination with wonder,” says Dawna Markova, author of “The Open Mind” and an executive change consultant for Professional Thinking Partners. “But we are taught instead to ‘decide,’ just as our president calls himself ‘the Decider.’ ” She adds, however, that “to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities.”
My spell check says that ‘innovational’ isn’t a word, but my dictionary gives it a pass. I should make a new habit of using that term.
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May 11th, 2007, 4 Comments »
Back in March, inspired by Tara Hunt, I wrote a post which, in part, imagined what Shakespeare’s Twitter account might look like. I thought it was marginally funny, but there was a germ of an idea there. I got to wondering…
What would God’s Twitter account look like?
I got to chatting with my friend Heather about the idea, and we started working on TwitterAllMighty.com. We’d skin a Drupal site so that it looked like a Twitter page, write a few funny tweets from famous people, and invite site visitors to submit their own.
Why is my first instinct to satirize new tech trends? More on this later, maybe.
We registered the URL and got to work, but we rapidly got really busy, sick, busy some more, moved to Malta, and so forth. The idea died on the vine.
Here’s what it might have looked like (click for larger version):
Thanks to Rob for Archimedes’s line.
Laziness and the Completion Threshold
I have a fair number of random ideas like this. Some get started, a few get completed and the rest just float around in the ether. I was thinking about why I finish the projects I do, and came up with this graph (click for larger version):
Yes, my busyness and laziness have something to do with my success rate, but I think it’s mostly driven by the quality of the idea. If I think an idea is great–like GetaFirstLife.com–and friends respond really positively to me when I pitch it, then I’ve got a lot of inertia to get it done.
On the other hand, if I’m not overly excited by the idea, and it only gets a lukewarm reception from colleagues, then I’m far less motivated to get it done. That’s pretty much what happened with TwitterAllMighty.com (it’s about half done). It was a marginal idea, so I didn’t cross the threshold of completion. That said, I obviously think it’s good enough to share the skeleton of the idea with you kind folks.
What would your historical figure tweet about?
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