Good Monday morning, internet. Let’s start your workday off right, with a wonderful live version of Vicente Amigo’s Tres Notas Para Decir Te Quiero. If you like, I’d suggest watching more videos of Vicente or picking up the album Ciudad de Las Ideas.

1. We shop online. We buy most of our vitamins and home care stuff on Vitacost. Great prices, and $4.99 flat shipping. I really dig AmericanApparel’s Tri-Blend Track Shirts, but they run $22 in the store. Or $10 on Amazon.com. Whatever you want, you can likely find online for cheaper. Stop paying everyone’s overhead for their physical stores.

2. We use Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap. We dig the peppermint. It replaced soap, shampoo, conditioner, body wash, etc. for me (and Mrs. Blankenship.) Huge savings, and less of me knocking 20 bottles of random concoctions off the shelves every time I shower.

3. We have a Sam’s Club membership. Pick your poison (Sam’s, Costco, etc.), but we made back the cost of our membership the first time we bought toilet paper. We don’t buy a lot in bulk, but the warehouse retail places are great for larger kitchen items like olive oil that’ll run big bucks in the grocery store.

4. Speaking of which, we cook at home. Don’t know how to? Neither did we. After two years all our friends think we hung the moon when they eat at our house. It’s simple, go to the library (free!) and checkout some cookbooks. Follow the instructions. Repeat until you dominate all things culinary. Bonus: it’s healthier, too.

5. We dry our razors off after we use them. Razors get dull from use eventually, but most of the time they just get dull because they’re left wet and the blade oxidizes (e.g. rusts). I use Mach3 blades, shave well once or twice a week, and I haven’t bought a new box of blades since I lived in Dallas. In 2007.

[We] didn’t hire you so that you would ask me a thousand questions and be unsure about what you are doing. We hired you to produce amazing work. And you are fully capable of doing that. So, if you have a legitimate question, ask me. If not, just produce amazing work. And if you get it wrong, I’ll show you where, why and how to fix it, and you’ll grow.
— Justine Foo, Brains on Fire

What a fantastic work culture! Eric Dodds recounts this early interaction with Justine in an article on giving employees permission to fail and says, “I think part of my problem was that our society views failure primarily as a negative concept.” I think he’s completely right.

It’s not about failure for the sake of failure; I’d much rather learn from my successes. But if I’m trying new things, I won’t always succeed. I have to get used to failure being an integral part of the process of finding great solutions. I have to embrace that. Otherwise fear of failure will freeze me in my tracks before I can make anything extraordinary.

Avoidance of failure isn’t the same thing as success. If you want to change the world, but your company culture thinks success = no failure, it will not go well for you. Don’t underestimate the cultural peer pressure to silence disruption and avoid failure in most organizations. The human desire to never be wrong is the biggest enemy of innovation.

Again with the character design changes! Why can’t moviemakers leave well enough alone?

Up top you see a screenshot from the Japanese trailer for G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra with a glimpse of “Cobra Commander” (I use that term lightly here) having a chat with Destro. Then you see cartoon CC pointing (and likely laughing) because Destro is essentially Dr. Who with a Scottish accent. And cartoon Destro laughing because Joseph Gordon-Levitt Cobra Commander (henceforth referred to as JGLCC) is wearing a hightech SARS mask and a bad suit.

It’s not really the casting I take issue with. (Though Garry Oldman is Cobra commander in my mind.) It’s the incessant need for Hollywood to think they know better, and that they must change things. It’s rarely a good idea.

This is the second in an ongoing series of posts about bbbbrands.com, a new project I’m working on with my good friend and fellow brand loyalist Noah Stokes. If you missed it or just need a recap, here’s part 1.

As Noah and I began to talk through the initial gist of bbbbrands and I started some sketches and typography explorations for an identity, I also began the task of thinking through taglines. Not every brand needs a tagline, but in this case it made sense to craft a line of copy that described the site’s core functionality to the user and helped us have a clear mission as we design and build it. A statement of purpose helps the user know exactly what value we’re providing to them and it gives us a main identifier for decision-making (e.g. does X or Y feature fall into what the tagline describes us as? If not, kill it.)

Here’s the first round of tagline attempts:

All of these more or less describe what the site will be full of, but there are problems with them, too. There’s way too much “brand” in there. The site name already has it, so repeating it in the tagline, especially twice, is overkill. These choices are passive. They’re a description of something, not an action or a call to participate. Some of the language of each individual tagline doesn’t hold up. What’s a label recommendation (#2)? What if they aren’t actually new recommendations (#4)? Are they really the best (#5)? All of these fall short.

As Noah and I bantered back and forth on IM (this is a bicoastal operation we’re running here) we settled on the concepts of sharing and discovering as the main verbs we want our users to engage in. Are you looking for recommendations for a new messenger bag? We want you to discover trusted brands on bbbbrands. Do you absolutely love your new American Apparel Tri-Blend Track Shirt? We want you to share that on bbbbrands.

The passivity is gone, but #6 still suffers from word overkill, #7 feels awkward, and #8 is just too long. #9 is close, but stops just short of what we want for users—sharing and discovering the brands themselves, not just the reviews of the brands. And then there was #10. Short, sweet, active, bold, truthful. If we do our job to build a site that attracts like-minded brand loyalists, then they’ll naturally share the best brands with one another. And over time our catalog of brand recommendations will become a playground for discovery.

On a design note, I initially fought myself on #10. Then I realized I was doing it for the wrong reason; I simply liked the typographic lock-up of the lowercase serif “from” in there. I liked how it looked. But this isn’t solely about letters and aesthetics, it has to act as a rudder and identifier. Ultimately, the content has to be more important than the form, even if it hurts.

We want our users to share and discover the best brands, so that’s our working tagline. But is it the best? Are we missing a better opportunity? We’d love your feedback.

…And in our time, when a man dies—if he has had wealth and influence and power and all the vestments that arouse envy, and after the living take stock of the dead man’s property and his eminence and works and monuments—the question is still there: Was his life good or was it evil?…Envies are gone, and the measuring stick is: “Was he loved or was he hated? Is his death felt as a loss or does a kind of joy come from it?”

I remember clearly the deaths of three men. One was the richest man of the century, who, having clawed his way to wealth through the souls and bodies of men, spent many years trying to buy back the love he had forfeited and by that process performed great service to the world and, perhaps, had much more than balanced the evils of his rise. I was on a ship when he died. The news was posted on the bulletin board, and nearly everyone received the news with pleasure. Several said, “Thank God that son of a bitch is dead.”

There was a man, smart as Satan, who, lacking some perception of human dignity and knowing all too well every aspect of human weakness and wickedness, used his special knowledge to warp men, to buy men, to bribe and threaten and seduce until he found himself in a position of great power. He clothed his motives in the name of virtue, and I have wondered whether he knew that no gift will ever buy back a man’s love when you have removed his self-love. A bribed man can only hate his briber. When this man died the nation rang with praise and, just beneath, with gladness that he was dead.

There was a third man, who perhaps made many errors in performance but whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good in a time when they were poor and frightened and when ugly forces were loose in the world to utilize those fears. This man was hated by the few. When he died the people burst into tears in the streets and their minds wailed, “What can we do now? How can we go on without him?”

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Somewhere around 9:00pm today, I turned 30.

I’m strange; I adore getting older. I love that I am better at life now than I was a year ago. I hope I am more wise and less rash. But most of all I want for those changes (and others) to be felt in the lives of those closest to me. I want to be a man, “whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good.”

Onward and upward (albeit with a little more gray hair and a slightly slower gait).

1. Taking the long way
2. Sleeping in
3. Super sizing it
4. Not moving
5. Taking off my shirt

We bought a cow. Or more specifically, four families split a cow. So technically we bought 1/4 of a cow. In this video, however, you see the full beefy.