Tumblr makes it so easy to set-up new sites. The idea-to-implementation timeline on Haiku Pickup Lines was less than an hour. I’m also making use of the Google Font Directory, which is a handy addition to the internet. You should follow along on Tumblr or RSS.

I’m settled in to a hotel in Virginia Beach (yay for free wifi, Hilton Garden Inn! You get it!) for a week of vacation. I hope it’s well-earned, but I hope my team sees it that way, too.

I’ve been trying to shift my thinking over the last year—less about me, more about us—to find out how we can leverage the team best. I still think rest is massively important for both individual and team health, but I’m framing more and more through the lens of team lately.

As I put down roots (physically and mentally) and commit to moving forward with a group of like-minded folks to build something great, I’m acutely aware of how my personal lack has a blast radius beyond my task list(s) and projects. How do my shortfalls pull us down? Destroy our reputation internally? Affect the health of the organization? Am I making excuses or blame shifting? Where am I pulling my weight? Where am I just dead weight?

Here’s to resting… And to working damn hard not to be the weak link when you’re done resting.

You can learn more about Eric on his site or by watching other videos.

No one would have bought subprime loans if they were called non-credit worthy loans.
—David Rubenstein

Rubenstein’s quote sounds pithy in retrospect, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. When you call something what it is, it better enables on-the-spot decision making. If you dress it up with different clothes, clever names, and branding bell and whistles it’s still the thing—you’re just making it more difficult for people to know it on first pass. You can’t build long term trust by misleading people.

Quote, “They can’t print what we paint. They print in pixels.” Up There is a gorgeously shot (and told) short documentary on the dying industry of big city, big scale, hand painted “out of home” advertising. I especially love the bits about apprenticeship and the passing on knowledge.

The old print vs. web debate [is] as tedious and pointless as it’s always been. Different mediums have different strengths. The web is just better than paper at delivering time-sensitive news. It’s idiotic to pretend otherwise. And paper is still good at things the web is not, especially in getting people to actually pay for it. The solution is to use each medium for what it’s good at.
—Derek Powazek, How To Save A Newsweekly in 5 Easy* Steps

Powazek is spot-on here. If companies are savvy enough, they can make changes in content delivery and survive. But most of what I see from the magazine industry is a desperate attempt to continue trudging through strategies that just don’t work anymore.

If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.
—General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, Retired

Fortunately, it seems like some big corporations, or at least individuals in those corporations, are starting to get the drift. Derek updates his article with this gem from Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek:

We have had it backwards. We produce a magazine all week, we close it Friday and Saturday, and it begins to go out online…. It’s probably time to flip that. You are solely focused on the digital, and by the end of the week you take the best of … then you print that magazine.
—From a Daily Show interview, Part 1 and Part 2

I love the internet. And I love magazines, maybe even more than the web. It doesn’t have to be either/or, but unless more magazines realize their future is in deciding what content fits best in which medium, and curating it well, I fear my love of editorial design in print will have fewer and fewer places to show off.

College works on the factory model, and is in many ways not suited to training entrepreneurs. You put in a student and out comes a scholar.

Entrepreneurship works on the apprenticeship model.

—Caterina Fake, excerpted from Want to be an entrepreneur? Drop out of college.

The world is changing so quickly, it’s difficult to put too much emphasis on how irrelevant typical college educations are for a growing segment of the population. Formal higher education certainly has its place for certain specialized fields, but we are well into a season where “you have to have a college degree to succeed” is a dangerous myth*.

*Spoken like a true college dropout