Karen Cheng learned to dance in a year. Here’s a video of her progress, from just a few days in to her final number:
Here’s my secret: I practiced everywhere. At bus stops. In line at the grocery store. At work — Using the mouse with my right hand and practicing drills with my left hand. You don’t have to train hardcore for years to become a dancer. But you must be willing to practice and you better be hungry.
This isn’t a story about dancing, though. It’s about having a dream and not knowing how to get there — but starting anyway. Maybe you’re a musician dreaming of writing an original song. You’re an entrepreneur dying to start your first venture. You’re an athlete but you just haven’t left the chair yet.
The interesting thing is, Cheng basically did the same thing in her professional life as well.
I decided to become a designer, but I had no design skills. I thought about going back to school for design, but the time and money commitment was too big a risk for a career choice I wasn’t totally sure of.
So I taught myself — everyday I would do my day job in record time and rush home to learn design. Super talented people go to RISD for 4 years and learn design properly. I hacked together my piecemeal design education in 6 months — there was no way I was ready to become a designer. But I was so ready to leave Microsoft. So I started the job search and got rejected a few times. Then I got the job at Exec.
The first few weeks were rough. Everyday I sat in front of my computer trying my damnedest and thinking it wasn’t good enough. But everyday I got a little bit better.
I have a friend who’s a mechanical engineer. He used to build airplane engines for General Electric, and now he’s trying to develop a smarter pill bottle to improve compliance for AIDS and cancer patients. He works out of a start-up ‘incubator’, in an office space shared with dozens of web companies. He doesn’t have a lot of patience for them. ‘I’m fucking sick of it,’ he told me, ‘all they talk about is colours.’
Web start-up companies are like play-companies. They stand in relation to real companies the way those cute little make-believe baking stations stand in relation to kitchens.
Take Doormates, a failed start-up founded in 2011 by two recent graduates from Columbia University whose mission was to allow users ‘to join or create private networks for buildings with access restricted to only building residents’. For that they, too, raised $350,000. You wonder whether anyone asked: ‘Do strangers living in the same building actually want to commune? Might this problem not be better solved by a plate of sandwiches?’ (The founders have since moved on to ‘Mommy Nearest’, an iPhone app that points out mom-friendly locations around New York.)
A lot of the stuff going on just isn’t very ambitious. ‘The thing about the advertising model is that it gets people thinking small, lean,’ wrote Alexis Madrigal in an essay about start-ups in The Atlantic last year. ‘Get four college kids in a room, fuel them with pizza, and see what thing they can crank out that their friends might like. Yay! Great! But you know what? They keep tossing out products that look pretty much like what you’d get if you took a homogenous group of young guys in any other endeavour: Cheap, fun, and about as worldchanging as creating a new variation on beer pong.’
Part of the behavior is I don’t know the answers. And at first that seems a little bit glib. But after awhile people get that I really don’t know the answer to a lot of these things. So we set it up so that the management really doesn’t tell people what to do. We discuss, we debate, [but] people start to refer to ‘the management’, and I say come on guys, there’s three of us, we’re all in this together, and then we’re very open and honest about the problems.
Lasseter and Jobs get all the press, but Catmull deserves more credit than he gets for Pixar’s success. (via df)
[1] I don’t know why I put it like this. If something is good or interesting, who the hell cares when it’s from? [Shouldn’t you just delete it then? -ed]↩
Because of “the evolving experience in the stores” (aka live music is too expensive), after 27 years of playing the piano at Nordstrom in the Tacoma Mall, Juan Perez was let go in January.
Perez remembers his audition at Nordstrom, one morning in January 1986.
“There were five of us. Four beautiful young ladies, and me. They were carrying music books.”
They were dressed, he said, as if they had shopped at Nordstrom. He was not. They were carrying sheet music. Perez did not, and does not, read notes. He plays by ear.
“I was the first one to play,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting they would hire me, and I was dressed in a regular shirt. I started playing and playing as the store opened up. I didn’t even have an application.”
After playing, he drove home.
“My wife said, ‘They called. They want you to start tomorrow.’ I almost cried.”
Perez arrived in the US with $300 to his name and through hard work at the piano, has put seven of his children through college, with two more currently in college and one more attending private high school. (via brooks review)
Update: Here’s a quick update on Perez. After leaving Nordstrom, he quickly got some other gigs, including one at an upscale steakhouse and another at the Space Needle, but was also diagnosed with cancer and had to undergo surgery.
On that last Sunday in the store, Perez ended with “Piano Man” and “How Great Thou Art.”
And “Unforgettable” was the first song he played following a five-surgeon, 10-hour surgery last July to remove a tumor tangled near his heart.
A round of radiation followed surgery, and Perez has continued playing at El Gaucho, and at the Space Needle, Bellevue Square, the Bellevue Hyatt Regency, the Tacoma Yacht Club, Tacoma Golf & Country Club, the Old Cannery in Sumner and the Weatherly Inn and Narrows Glen retirement homes in Tacoma.
Recently, the management and co-workers at El Gaucho decided to help Perez with medical bills and other expenses. Management would donate half the house receipts one Sunday night, and the servers and other staff would offer all their tips.
Total raised: $31,000.
A co-worker established an online funding request.
Total raised: Nearly $12,000 at the time this story was written.
“I’ve known him for 25 years. He’s a beautiful man,” said George Lund, a 40-year Nordstrom employee who is now retired.
“Juan was the face of this store. He was the personality of this store. He could be the mayor of this city,” Lund said. “It was a magical time for a lot of customers. He made them feel comfortable, relaxed.”
After 20 minutes of greetings, of hugs and embraces, Juan returns to the piano. Four friends gather behind him and sing along to “Edelweiss.”
Then Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.”
The crowd fills the aisles between women’s shoes and fine jewelry. Shoppers ascending on the escalator look down and smile.
Toes tap.
“He is a blessing,” says Patricia Reynolds of Steilacoom. “He is helping people with his music.”
Perez shifts from a swift boogie-woogie riff into “Canon in D” by Johann Pachelbel.
“He just brings such beauty into people’s lives,” says Maria Fleischmann of Tacoma.
“I don’t even have words for this,” said Juan and Susan’s daughter, Agnes.
The internet is going through a bit of a thing with standing desks right now, fueled by yesterday’s The Wirecutter article about them. One of the most famous standing desk enthusiasts was Ernest Hemingway.
A working habit he has had from the beginning, Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu — the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.
Most articles I’ve seen on standing desks recommend anti-fatigue mats to help with foot pain, but of course Hemingway would go with the hide of an African antelope that he likely killed himself.
Other famous users of standing desks included Winston Churchill, Lewis Carroll, Donald Rumsfeld, Charles Dickens, Otto von Bismarck, Henry Clay, Thomas Jefferson, John Dos Passos, and Virginia Woolf. (thx, megnut)
The fantastically obsessive Mark Lukach just spent an outlandish amount of time researching stand-up desks and shared his findings at The Wirecutter. Even if you have no interest in standing on the job, The Wirecutter is worth a visit for their concise and excellent guides on what to buy from headphones to juicers. (via nextdraft)
Note: This post is from Dave Pell’s NextDraft email newsletter, hopefully the first of many. Dave and I are going to be trading content back and forth on a more-or-less weekly basis, so keep a lookout for that. If you like what you see, subscribe to NextDraft whydontcha?
When talking about Zuckerberg’s most valuable personality trait, a colleague jokingly invokes the famous Stanford marshmallow tests, in which researchers found a correlation between a young child’s ability to delay gratification — devour one treat right away, or wait and be rewarded with two — with high achievement later in life. If Zuckerberg had been one of the Stanford scientists’ subjects, the colleague jokes, Facebook would never have been created: He’d still be sitting in a room somewhere, not eating marshmallows.
“Early retirement” sounds wonderful. It certainly did that cold night in Pittsburgh. I was going to use my time to conquer the world.
Boy, was I wrong. Now I find myself in music chat rooms arguing the validity of Frank Zappa versus the Mars Volta. (If the others only knew Walkingpnumonia was the screen name for a former All-Pro football player and not some Oberlin College student trying to find his place in the world.) I wrote a book. I set sail on the picturesque and calming waters of Bodymore, Murdaland. And when I’m in dire straits, I do what any 8-year-old does; I kick a soccer ball against the garage hoping somebody feels sorry and says, “Hey, want to play?”
With millions of Americans out of work or doing work for which they are overqualified, I consider myself lucky. But starting from scratch can be unsettling. If you’re not prepared for it, retirement can become a form of self-imposed exile from the fulfillment and the exhilaration of knowing you did a good job.
Very interesting talk by Bret Victor on the power and effectiveness of organizing your work around a guiding principle. Victor’s principle is “creators need an immediate connection to what they create” and he shows some really cool ways he’s exploring that idea.
At the end of this month Jeff Atwood is leaving Stack Exchange, a company he cofounded with Joel Spolsky. In a post on his blog, he explains why:
Startup life is hard on families. We just welcomed two new members into our family, and running as fast as you can isn’t sustainible for parents of multiple small children. The death of Steve Jobs, and his subsequent posthumous biography, highlighted the risks for a lot of folks. […] Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange have been wildly successful, but I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure.
In his post, Jeff points to a similar post by another entrepreneur, Brad Wardell.
In the last several years, the company has been successful enough to generate a substantial amount of capital. And with it, I have been fortunate to bring in people with great talent. And so I started thinking of all the amazing things we would do. I would put in crazy hours to do it, of course, but we would go and do amazing things.
Then Steve Jobs died.
And suddenly I realized something. What is the objective here? My oldest child just turned 15. My other two are no longer little either. And I have been missing out on them.
For a long time, work was my only thing. I worked evenings, weekends, and Christmas. At those rare times when I wasn’t at work in body, I was there in spirit, unable to speak or think of much else. I wanted so badly to climb the mountain that I stopped asking why I was doing it.
I admire [Jobs] for the mountains he climbed. At the same time, I wonder if he missed the whole point, becoming the John Henry of our time. He won the race, but at what cost?
Me? I may turn out to be a failure in business, but I refuse to fail my kids.
This mirrors my main reaction to Jobs’ death and Isaacson’s book as well. I wasn’t working 80 hours a week or leading a growing company or even spending very little time with my kids but I was pushing pretty hard on Stellar, pushing it towards a potential future of insane working hours, intense stress, and a whole lot less time with my family (and selfishly, less time for myself). Since Jobs died, I’ve been pushing a little less hard in that direction.
Four is hardly a trend but it is interesting that the death and biography of the greatest businessman of our generation — someone who was responsible for so many world-changing products and ideas, who shaped our world through sheer force of will & imagination, etc. etc. — is inspiring some people to turn away from the lifestyle & choices that made Jobs so successful & inspiring in the public sphere and to attempt the path that Jobs did not.
What jobs did people do in medieval Europe? Here’s a list, broken down by category. Criminals had jobs too:
silk-snatcher - one who steals bonnets
stewsman - probably a brothel keeper - “since the words stew and stewholder both mean a bawd, I’m guessing that a stewsman would be a brothel-keeper as well. Whether bawdry counts as a criminal activity varies at different times and places.”
thimblerigger - a professional sharper who runs a thimblerig (a game in which a pea is ostensibly hidden under a thimble and players guess which thimble it is under)
The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I’m talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.” During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.
The new offices of Foursquare and Buzzfeed (where I work from) are a perfect example of the New Groupthink Cain refers to….rows and rows of people sitting next to each other in open spaces. Much of this is because of NYC’s insane rental market, but Fog Creek’s offices are a nice counterexample:
Every developer, tester, and program manager is in a private office; all except two have direct windows to the outside (the two that don’t get plenty of daylight through two glass walls).
The Atlantic asked their readers to tell them what other people don’t get or appreciate about their jobs. Here’s what they said, from Army Soldier to Zookeeper.
What people don’t understand about my job [as an IRS employee] is that chances are you are not the person I’m examining. I examine doctors who expense three Cadillacs, insurance brokers who claim jet skis for business use only, and real estate agents who haven’t paid taxes in eight years. The public doesn’t realize that tax auditors are the only people between a balanced effective tax rate among all social classes and the bourgeoisie stealing what isn’t bolted down. Don’t kid yourself; these people are stealing from you. This money helps pay for schools, roads and with any luck can keep mortgage interest deduction alive for a few more years. I read a report on NPR that Italy has 40% of its population evading taxes. Imagine our debt crisis if we had the same problem. (Our tax evasion rate is estimated between 8-18%).
So if you’re one of those “Joe the Plumber” people who take time out of work to throw teabags at me on my way into the office in the morning: You are the middle class! I’m helping you!
Two other factors often undervalued (and often ignored) in the workplace? Family and time. Architect Iris Regn and artist Rebecca Niederlander have been working to bring these into the conversation by exploring the intersection between creativity and family life in an ongoing collaborative effort they call Broodwork.
Don’t be put off by the awkward name. Broodwork suggests that, far from being the hindrance it’s often presented as, incorporating family into work can have overwhelmingly positive effects. Regn is trained as an architect but is open enough in her thinking to understand that in the scheme of things, the adjustability of her desk isn’t going to have an impact on her creative process nearly as much as what her daughter might say tonight at the dinner table.
“The first impetus [of Broodwork] was to get people to acknowledge interweaving of creative practice and family life,” she told me. “Not to have to hide [your family] when you have to go pick up your kid while at a meeting, for example. That raised eyebrow is going away. Yes, you’re juggling. That’s just part of the deal. When you talk to other parents, everyone knows the deal so why is it that in a professional setting that can’t be brought to the table?
Finally, he leaned forward and fired his best shot, what he came to call “the hard question.”
“I’m going to give you five minutes,” he told me. “When I come back, I want you to explain to me something complicated that I don’t already know.” He then rolled out of the room toward the snack area. I looked at Cindy. “He’s very curious about everything,” she told me. “You can talk about a hobby, something technical, whatever you want. Just make sure it’s something you really understand well.”
UBS: If we were playing Russian roulette and had one bullet, I randomly spun the chamber and fired but nothing was fired. Would you rather fire the gun again or respin the chamber and then fire on your turn?
I’d rather get the fuck out of your office and run away very fast. What the hell are you people on? Haven’t you heard of email? Or official dispute procedures? Jesus.
Based on his answer to P&G’s “sell me an invisible pen”, I’d hire Turnbull in a second if I were selling invisible pens.
Bunnies must allow enough time before going to their assigned rooms to report to the Bunny Mother for appearance inspection. The Bunnies’ hair, nails, shoes, makeup and costume must be “Bunny-perfect” and no Bunny is permitted to begin working unless appearance specifications are met. Demerits may be issued for carelessness in this regard. When the Bunny reports to her scheduled room, the Room Director, too, will note her appearance and suggest improvements if necessary.
NSFW if having “PLAYBOY BUNNY” on your screen in huge pink letters is not safe in your workplace.
Two million patients pick up infections in American hospitals, most because someone didn’t follow basic antiseptic precautions. Forty per cent of coronary-disease patients and sixty per cent of asthma patients receive incomplete or inappropriate care. And half of major surgical complications are avoidable with existing knowledge. It’s like no one’s in charge-because no one is. The public’s experience is that we have amazing clinicians and technologies but little consistent sense that they come together to provide an actual system of care, from start to finish, for people. We train, hire, and pay doctors to be cowboys. But it’s pit crews people need.
My situation is blessed and I rarely let a day go by that I don’t say a silent prayer in thanks for the position in which I’ve found myself, but good gracious is this hard.
The most frustrating part is that it is difficult to get into a rhythm in your work when you have no real understanding of the next steps you need to take. There’s no opportunity for flow if both outcome and process are foreign experiences. There’s just a lot of poking around and mystery and inadvertent negligence.
Svpply has been open to the public for six months now. Our progress has been slow for a variety of reasons. We have not launched as many new features as I would expect, or even drastically improved the ones we launched with. I own these problems, they can be traced directly back to my inabilities and inexperience, sometimes directly, other times in the form of my not having anticipated or recognized situations for what they were as soon as I could have.
Charles Schwab had a mill manager whose people weren’t producing their quota of work.
“How is it,” Schwab asked him, “that a manager as capable as you can’t make this mill turn out what it should?”
“I don’t know,” the manager replied. “I’ve coaxed the men, I’ve pushed them, I’ve sworn and cussed, I’ve threatened them with damnation and being fired. But nothing works. They just won’t produce.”
This conversation took place at the end of the day, just before the night shift came on. Schwab asked the manager for a piece of chalk, then, turning to the nearest man, asked: “How many heats did your shift make today?”
“Six.”
Without another word, Schwab chalked a big figure six on the floor, and walked away.
When the night shift came in, they saw the “6” and asked what it meant.
“The big boss was in here today,” the day people said.
“He asked us how many heats we made, and we told him six. He chalked it down on the floor.”
The next morning Schwab walked through the mill again. The night shift had rubbed out “6” and replaced it with a big “7.”
When the day shift reported for work the next morning, they saw a big “7” chalked on the floor. So the night shift thought they were better than the day shift did they? Well, they would show the night shift a thing or two. The crew pitched in with enthusiasm, and when they quit that night, they left behind them an enormous, swaggering “10.” Things were stepping up.
Shortly this mill, which had been lagging way behind in production, was turning out more work than any other mill in the plant.
The principle?
Let Charles Schwab say it in his own words: “The way to get things done,” says Schwab, “is to stimulate competition. I do not mean in a sordid, money-getting way, but in the desire to excel.”
The desire to excel! The challenge! Throwing down the gauntlet! An infallible way of appealing to people of spirit.
James Somers noticed that his equity derivative-trading roommate was the only one of his young professional friends who comes home from work “buoyant and satisfied”, so he accompanied him to work one day to see what his job entailed. Turns out he basically plays video games all day.
A trader’s job is to be smarter than the market. He converts a mess of analysis and intuition into simple bets. He makes moves. If his predictions are better than everyone else’s, he wins money; if not, he loses it. At every moment he has a crystalline picture of his bottom line, the “P and L” (profit and loss) that determines how much of a bonus he’ll get and, more importantly, where he stands among his peers. As my friend put it, traders are “very, very, very competitive.” At the end of the day they ask each other “how did you do today?” Trading is one of the few jobs with an actual leaderboard, which, if you’ve ever been on one, or strived to get there, you’ll recognize as being perhaps the single most powerful driver of a gamer’s engagement.
That seems to be the core of it, but no doubt there are other game-like features in play here: the importance of timing and tactile dexterity; the clear presence of two abstract levels of attention and activity, one long-term and strategic, the other fiercely tactical, localized in bursts a minute or two long; the need for teams and ceaseless chatter; and so on.
Athleticism and competitiveness are often downplayed when we talk about white collar careers but are essential in many disciplines. Doctors (surgeons in particular) have both those traits, founding a startup company is definitely competitive and can be as physically demanding as running, teachers are standing or walking all day long, and even something like programming requires manual dexterity with the mouse & keyboard and the stamina to sit in a chair paying single-minded attention to a task for 10-12 hours a day. (via @tcarmody)
We talked to experts Alice Twemlow, Eric Abrahamson, Massimo Vignelli, David Miller, Kurt Andersen, Soren Kjaer, Alfred Stadler, Jennifer Lai, and Ben Bajorek and creates an historical and relevant film about the relationship between the worker and the desk and how this reflects on personality and habits.
I think it comes down to the fact that, for some people, work is personal. Personal in the same way that singing or playing the piano or painting is personal.
As a creative person, you’ve been given the ability to build things from nothing by way of hard work over long periods of time. Creation is a deeply personal and rewarding activity, which means that your Work should also be deeply personal and rewarding. If it’s not, then something is amiss.
Creation is entirely dependent on ownership.
Ownership not as a percentage of equity, but as a measure of your ability to change things for the better. To build and grow and fail and learn. This is no small thing. Creativity is the manifestation of lateral thinking, and without tangible results, it becomes stunted. We have to see the fruits of our labors, good or bad, or there’s no motivation to proceed, nothing to learn from to inform the next decision. States of approval and decisions-by-committee and constant compromises are third-party interruptions of an internal dialog that needs to come to its own conclusions.
In 1958, Hunter S. Thompson sent a job request to the editor of the Vancouver Sun. Like much of Thompson’s writing, it was unconventional.
By the time you get this letter, I’ll have gotten hold of some of the recent issues of The Sun. Unless it looks totally worthless, I’ll let my offer stand. And don’t think that my arrogance is unintentional: it’s just that I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you.
I didn’t make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham. The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him and everything he stood for. If you asked him, he’d tell you that I’m “not very likable, (that I) hate people, (that I) just want to be left alone, and (that I) feel too superior to mingle with the average person.” (That’s a direct quote from a memo he sent to the publisher.)
In this profession, it’s critical to have a break-out area where you can think without the computer looking over your shoulder; where you can do your most valuable work without the siren song of an IDE. For the same reason that getting up and even walking to the bathroom can provide new perspective on a heretofore intractable problem, it’s in your own best professional interests to do as much of your work as possible before you handcuff yourself to your desk each day.
And:
The potential of iPad is to decouple as many tasks as possible from my work environment — and to keep me away from that environment when I’m doing things that don’t actually require me to be there other than to use a computer.
I do a lot of reading and light writing for this site and I’m hoping that the iPad will allow me to do that somewhere that’s not my desk. At least for a few hours a week. (via jb)
Kevin Fanning has worked in HR for the past 9 years so he’s dispensed a lot of job search advice to friends over the years. Now he’s collected all that knowledge into a new book called Let’s All Find Awesome Jobs.
Whenever someone I knew was engaged in a job search, I would do whatever I could to be helpful. Tell them about the mistakes I’d seen, tell them what common pitfalls to avoid. They said my feedback was helpful, so I started writing it down. I collected it into a PDF that circulated amongst my friends for a few years. I kept adding to it, and eventually it became this book.
Management is the ideal technology if you’re seeking compliance — getting people to do what you want them to do, the way you want them to do it. But in today’s workforce, which demands much more in the way of creative and conceptual capabilities, we don’t want compliance. We want engagement. And self-direction is a far better technology for engagement.
Therein lies the best career advice I could possibly dispense: just DO things. Chase after the things that interest you and make you happy. Stop acting like you have a set path, because you don’t. No one does. You shouldn’t be trying to check off the boxes of life; they aren’t real and they were created by other people, not you. There is no explicit path I’m following, and I’m not walking in anyone else’s footsteps. I’m making it up as I go.
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