f2f2s |

I can’t stop listening to this song.

A+ work again Atlanta music scene.

Rob Burnett is the executive producer for “The Late Show With David Letterman” and did a short interview with CNN about the Super Bowl advertisement featuring Letterman, Oprah and Jay Leno.

Given all the back-and-forth amongst late night hosts recently it was certainly a surprise to see these two get together and do a good-natured commercial.  Burnett pretty much sums up the situation in one sentence though.

The bottom line is, if you’re a comedian and you have the chance to do something funny in front of 100 million people, you should do it.

Incredibly simple, and yet more than a little insightful.

Book four actually tricked me.  I had planned for this latest Mitch Albom book to be a fiction story, like his last few (I had read For One More Day a while ago).  Turns out, that little “A True Story” tag on the front was actually correct.  So much for maintaining my balance with fiction/non-fiction.

The book is similar to his most famous effort, Tuesdays with Morrie, in that it’s basically a story of two people (one in Morrie’s case), told through Albom’s interactions with them over a period of time.  There’s also enough back story thrown in when necessary that you get a good picture of who the characters are.  The two people the book focuses on are Albert Lewis, or “The Reb” as he is known in the book, who was Albom’s lone rabbi for the first 50 years of his life and Henry Convington, founder of the I Am My Brother’s Keeper ministries in Detroit.

Most of the book talks about struggles with faith, who has it, who doesn’t, who loses it, and how some regain it.  The conversations with The Reb were enlightening if you’ve never talked with someone who was secure enough in their faith to discuss it without being defensive.  Meanwhile, Henry’s story was more about falling prey to the temptations that come with growing up poor in a bad neighborhood, trying to turn your life around (a couple times) after hitting rock bottom, and, in my favorite couple pages, doubting that it’s possible to ever redeem yourself after having done so much wrong but still doing as much good as you can to try.

If you liked Tuesdays With Morrie, odds are you’ll also like this and it will probably make you cry once or twice.  If you didn’t like that book or find Albom’s style of writing to be off-putting, then you’re not going to get anything here.

Have a Little Faith: A True Story

I’ve always had an interest in education.  I grew up with a mother who was a high school math teacher and is now an elementary school counselor.  Her father was a professor at University of Kentucky, Tulane University, and University of Georgia.  My aunt has been a teacher for as long as I’ve been alive.  And obviously there was my summer internship at Flat World Knowledge where I got to work with a company that is designing open-source college textbooks.  There’s a lot of history to explain why I’m so close to it.

Lately, however, I seem to be spending even more time thinking about the education system and ways to change it.  I’ve also been reading a lot more articles that have been linked to me about schools and students and the challenges they face.  Here’s a collection of some in case you’re interested:

A Peek at Apple’s Plans to Re-invent Textbooks (Gizmodo)
Apple iPad vs. Kindle DX: Which is Better for Education (PC World)
5 Reasons Why the iPad Won’t Change Higher Education (PC World)
Annual Poll of Freshmen Shows Effect of Recession (NY Times)
Open Educational Resources (Opensource.com)
CC Salon NYC: Opening Education (Creative Commons)
An Educational Extinction Event (Dr. Dick Lipton, GT Professor)
Free Education Can Be Profitable (The corridor of uncertainty)
Universities Find Free Classes Don’t Hurt Enrollment (Ars Technica)

Whew, that’s a lot.

I’m not really sure if I’ve been actively searching these out more, or if it just so happens that more are showing up in front of me.  I’m also not sure if it really matters since I end up reading them all anyway.  Whatever the cause, I find myself pushing a lot more in that direction so maybe I’ve finally picked an industry to work with.

The third book in my quest also doubles as the first book I had to read for school. There will be a few more of these (and a couple I read that I don’t count) but they probably won’t be as interesting as this one.

Guy Kawasaki is pretty well-regarded for what he does, which is basically tout the value of companies he likes. He started doing it at Apple and now he does it to help promising young companies raise venture money. I read a piece by him recently where he jokes about how often he gets mentioned as an entrepreneurial thought leader even though he’s never started a company. I’m willing to be that in private he’ll admit that he deserves a little more credit than that, because the things he shares can be eye-opening for people new to the game.

This book does a great job going over what needs to be in your DNA to start a new venture. It’s obviously written for the standard startup company, but we were supposed to read it as an instruction manual for non-profits/social enterprises. So, from that perspective, here are a couple passages I found enlightening:

Q. What is the starting point of evangelism?
A. The starting point is a great product or service (DICEE) that empowers people and improves their lives. Customers must be able to say, “This is good. This makes the world a better place.”

This comes from the first FAQ in chapter 5, “Make Evangelists, Not Sales.” Honestly, I could have copied this entire chapter because it’s that good and relevant to both for-profit and non-profit enterprises. When you can create evangelists you create salesmen. Only they’re salesmen who don’t want to get paid and feel as though it’s their duty to change the mind of anyone who disagrees. Sure, that could be annoying for the non-believers, but it’s great for you as the owner of the company.

This is a prime example of the principle, “Don’t ask, just watch.” When you ask people what they want, they think about how they should answer; they want to look smart; and they are influenced by what other people say.

I wanted to write a whole other blog post about this topic. I was gonna title it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Marketing to prove by nerdiness and pontificate on my choice to study marketing when there is so much research out there that shows people are too messed up in the head to get anything worthwhile out of it. Oh well.

I’d say this is the best book I’ve read so far, but that’s mostly because of how directly it relates to the things that interest me. Also, I’m pretty sure I was the last person on this bandwagon so I doubt you haven’t read it if you’re interested in this space. However, if I’m wrong, let me try to be the final person to push you over the edge.

Rules For Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services

I  have nearly 800 “favorited” items in my Google Reader.  That’s absurd.  There are not 796 blog posts I’ve read in the past 3 years that a) I need to have cataloged for quick reference and b) I can’t remember enough about off the top of my head to find through a basic web search.

I want this to be more of a collection of posts that are the best written, most informative, etc.  Not just the collection of funny posts, cool products for sale, and soccer highlights that it has become.

The goal is to get it down to 100 favorites or fewer.  It may take a few passes.

Also, I’ve set up a separate page to track my book reviews for the 50 books I’m reading this year.  If, for some unknown reason, you want to go back and see some of the books I read you can always check it out here.

I’m sitting in the lobby of my usual oil change location thinking about a handful of different things. Things like “why is it so hard for these people to track customers?” I have to fill out a new slip probably 30% of the time I come here. Outside of how inconvenient that is for me and them, it could probably help their inventory to know the an Audi comes in every few months and to have the air filter on hand. Instead, now I’m sitting here waiting for it to get delivered.

Now, I’m not one to think I’m so important that I shouldn’t have to do anything as the customer. I understand how things work and don’t get bothered by a little inconvenience. However, I do know damn well that no business I ran would ever be making these kind of mistakes.

But they’ve always been pretty low key on the whole “you have to buy more services or your car will explode!” salesmanship, so I guess I put up with it. Either way, I’m looking at buying a new car pretty seriously right now (sell it right before it starts having major problems) so this will probably be my last time here in this car and maybe ever depending on what perks come with the new ride. They probably don’t care what I think.

Great, albeit short, post over on lifehacker.

“One thing at a time. Most important thing first. Start now.”

Originally from Skelliewag

I first heard about this book by Gretchen Rubin in a Fred Wilson blog post from January 1st.  The topic of the post was New Year’s resolutions, which I don’t really find that interesting even though I force all 5 of you to read about mine, but something about it caught my attention.  See, what does interest me is why we think the way we do and how we can control how we act/feel.  You will see more of that as my reading list plays out because there will be a whole host of books that fall in to this genre.

My purpose behind reading about how the mind works is that I want to be able to use mine better.  I want to know why I’m angry or upset and be able to make those feelings stop.  I want to know how someone is trying to make me believe one thing and not fall for their tricks.  The crazies part is that almost all of these findings are the same no matter who you talk to.  It spreads across borders, across cultures, even across time.  There are fundamentally flawed systems in our brain that cause us to act in ways we don’t want to.  That’s fascinating!

But that’s not the topic for now so on to the book.  I really enjoyed this book and apparently so have a lot of other people as it’s up to #23 on the Amazon best seller list.  Since there are a lot of reviews out there that rehash the overall theme of the book I’m going to focus on the one piece I enjoyed most.  Not surprisingly it is from the November section of the book subtitled “Keep a Contented Heart” which is something I’ve been actively trying to do for the past couple weeks.  Quick tangent on that note: yoga, somehow both harder and easier than you’d think.

When I examined my reactions to other people, I realized that I do often view people who make critical remarks as more perceptive and more discriminating.  At the same time, though, it’s hard to find pleasure in the company of someone who finds nothing pleasing.

So there you go, discerning information for people who want to either be happier and make friends or become a world famous critic.

Just based on what I learned, I definitely recommend reading the book regardless of your current happiness level.  I think there’s a lot to be gained by simply understanding some of the underlying reasons for happiness.  And if nothing else, it’ll probably make you a lot more interested in someone like Benjamin Franklin, Saint Thérèse de Lisieux, or Samuel Johnson.  Click the link, buy the book.

The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

OkCupid is a dating site, but they have an awesome blog that breaks down some really interesting demographics of its users.

They’ve done some really interesting research about things like

Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back
Rape Fantasies and Hygiene by State
and Flowchart to My Heart

but the one up now I really like and is called The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures.

It looks at users’ profile pictures compared to how many unsolicited messages they received and how often their initial messages were replied to.  This is basically the most interesting kind of research in the world to me, and I hope I can find a way to wrap this stuff up under the guise of “customer behavior” to get a cool job analyzing what makes people act on some things but not others.

Anyway, I won’t go in to all of the findings (they do a good job summarizing it all, give them the web traffic) but needless to say I’m pretty sure this MS Paint re-enactment would be the greatest profile picture of all time.

1. Looking off into the distance. Not smiling.  Not showing full face.  OMG SO MYSTERIOUS!!
2. Really ripped abs.  Obvious.
3. Animals. Girls dig animals apparently.
4. Silver medal.  What for?  No idea.  Shows your interesting and can talk about stuff.

There you go guys.  A fool-proof plan for scoring all the chicks you can imagine on OkCupid.