These two blogs are the killeriet blogs on the tubes, if you don’t have them in your rss reader you’re seriously losing out. I promise, read them for a week and see if your mind doesn’t explode.

Seth Godin

Seth Godin’s blog articles are quick and short about marketing, they make you think. He empties your head of any marketing garbage that is in there and fills is with straightforward opinions about reaching people in a real way. A no-nonsense blog that every entrepreneur should be reading. He posts an article everyday, no bs and no fluff. Seth’s books are killer too. He’s not supplying information about being good, he nudges you in the direction of the light.

Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary, Gary, Gary, watching/listing your blog is like drinking 15 espressos in a row, mixed with crack and shot out of a cannon into your mouth. Gary is so freaking awesome, he makes my veins pump FRESH blood. Gary breathes confidence, so much so that he makes you KNOW you can karate chomp a tree down with your bare hand. I haven’t been a long time reader/watcher of Gary and I regret it. Daily after I watch his vlog, I stand up and do a triple air punch and double air kick combo because I am so pumped from it. It’s safe to say I have a “man crush” on Gary and my wife is cool about it.

I was a hell of a kid, not a bad kid, but it seemed I was always doing really dumb things. When I was 10 my Dad told me something that really stuck. He said "You can obey me out of fear or out of love but you're going to obey me". Rarely does 10 year-old boy remember anything let alone something that makes them think. I've always thought about this and observed people in authoritative positions to me.

Love and Fear are two totally different paths, but a successful leader must follow one of these paths.

I played college football and had many coaches through the years. Most of the coaches I had didn't have a path and weren't successful. The coaches that got the best result out of me were the ones I loved. I obeyed the feared ones just enough to not make them mad. But I would have put my head through a brick wall for the ones I loved. The coaches I loved weren't overly nice or even close to easy on us. But they made you feel like you could be better around them. They made you feel, with them, you were a better football player. They gave to you, pushed you, encouraged you to be something more. It's an amazing feeling to feel like someone brings the best out of you. My wife and business partner do this for me; I love them both.

Being in-charge is weird for me. Having employees and having children is uncharted territory so I look for others to show me things. My family owns car washes; the employees aren't used to having an employer care about them. My Dad has had employees quit and come back, some have worked for him since I was a child. He wants his employees to love him and they do. They don't fear losing their job and they yearn to make my Dad happy.

Love isn't created by being easy on a person. It's not from being their buddy. It's not about overpaying them and letting them walk all over you. It's created by being real with them, caring about them, gaining their respect and making them hemorrhage with passion. Like @garyvee says, give (unselfish) love and have it come back 10x in return...this is how love is created.

A really great day must consist of the majority of this list.

1. A good breakfast (I love eggs)
2. Good music, Amy Winehouse, Regina Specktor, some killer 80’s music or late 90’s. Today it’s “Ace of Base”, don’t laugh they rock.
3. Being really productive, surprising productive. You know the days you look back and you’re like wow, I got a ton done today.
4. Inspired for (at least) a couple hours during the day. Being inspired is my drug.
5. Laughing a lot (I love bad jokes).
6. Working out and sweating for 45 minutes. My body isn’t a temple but I do work out.
7. (Mandatory) Playing with my son in the evening. He’s my priority, the reason I work.
8. Designing in the zone for a couple hours.
9. Talking to positive upbeat people. Perpetual negativity will wear you down.
10. Few or no iChat Video crashes. Love Apple, iChat is fickle.
11. Seeing something outside of work that makes me smile/think.
12. (Mandatory) Talk to my wife about her day and the next day’s activities.

What makes a good day for you?

Taken from an email written by a good friend of mine about the number of downloads for our open source social network platform, Lovd By Less:

Talking to you on Thursday it was obvious that you were genuinely surprised by the success of LovdByLess. The fact that you were surprised is shocking to me. Take the single-most sought out feature in one of the hottest languages of today and have one of the best Rails shops in the country build the functionality, design the site, and bundle it all together for no cost.

Obviously flattering, but from our perspective very far from the mark. We have been genuinely surprised by the number of people who have tried, downloaded and contributed code back to Lovd. There is no guarantee of success. We had an interesting idea have executed well.

Our recipe for success is:

1. Have a good idea.
2. Work really, really hard.
3. Be lucky.

We have been blessed with a lot of good ideas, a really strong work ethic, the ability to see what’s important and stick to it, very understanding families, and luck. Our parents have always supported our careers and have guided, mentored and inspired us. We have occasionally been called arrogant or self-promoting, but truly what we have is a fear of failure. We self-promote because we don’t have any expectation that someone will do it for us. We succeed or our families don’t eat. Just like the rest of you.

Last year I worked over 4000 hours. This year I am trying to keep the number close to 3000.

We work hard. We participate in open source. We blog a lot. We write and act honestly. We try to make things easy for our users and ourselves. Any measure of success that we have or will have comes from these things. We don’t expect to succeed. We just keep trying.

And we are grateful. We are overjoyed that people enjoy our opinions enough to read and subscribe to our blog. That people like our work enough to use our products and ask us to work on their products. That people download our software and contribute back.

Thank you all for allowing us to share ourselves with you. And while we don’t expect it, we do appreciate it.

In the past couple of days LovdbyLess has taken off. Thousands of downloads, tons and tons of emails, the google group is getting a bunch of activity. So tonight, I'm thinking about things....

Wow... no really, WOW, I'm a partner of a successful, very profitable web shop that has cool clients with good budgets. We turn down client work daily, how lucky/blessed are we? I work with the killerist people on the Internet! It seems this is the place we've worked for, we're living the dream right?

But still we (Steve and I) are faced with tons of stress, tough business decisions and general life stresses. It's so easy to think, "oh when I make X amount of $$ my life will be awesome. When I go freelance everything will be better. When I move to a bigger house I will be happier. When I get that new car I'll be satisfied." Well, with more money you'll be able to value size that #3 combo meal, but you'll have new, different stresses.

It's so easy to dream about the grass on the other side of the fence. About being a freelancer and working from home, about being your own boss, about having better clients about having a bigger salary. But, life is stress, life is work, life is tough. You will always have hills to climb and things to overcome.

Live in the moment, sure, dream about the future but again, be thankful. Realize that hard work pays, good things come to good honest people and its better to be loved than feared.

I was at SEED Conference in Chicago, walking to my hotel, the snow was falling on my head and I was freezing. A young girl walked up to me with clipboard in hand. "Do you care about the environment?" Immediately without breaking stride, I replied "Nope." Now I do care about the environment, but at that second I didn't. In life, timing is everything, the release of your product, the timing of your call to a client, everything is about timing.

Being Aware
This same girl was stopping people in a hurry about to cross a busy street. Why wouldn't she walk ten steps to the Barnes and Noble where 25 customers were outside under the cover of the building smoking? Ask them, they have time to kill, they're just standing there.

Realize your target's situation
People in a hurry and being snowed on don't want to be bothered about surveys. I hate when people call me early or late in the day, it's usually when I am reading through emails or wrapping up my day. I'm on central time, I've had head hunters call me at 7 AM on my cell. Why?

Be aware of your users', clients', friends', familys' feelings/situation and realize that timing is more important than the message you bring.

I wanted to jot down some things we (less everything) work towards to keep our personal lives in balance with our work. Our industry is unique in the fact we love what we do and sometimes we feel it's acceptable to work 80+ hours. While some weeks you must kick out some work, overall it's not a positive thing to be that unbalanced. In the past months, we have added a few company rules.

1) First, no one is productive for +80 hours a week (except Steve, he's a freaking machine, 110+), something isn't right if you spend that much time working. If you can't make a living working less than 80 hours a week, you need to change careers.

2) Around 5pm you must be looking for a place to pause work. Many of us have small kids and they go to bed early. If you must finish a task do it once they're in bed. During evening hours, family time is #1, work is far down the list of priorities. We usually do three to five hours of more work after the kids go to sleep

3) Dinner time is important. This follows the first rule of stopping around 5pm, take a few hours, play with your kids, interact with them. Talk to your wife, family, parents something but get away from the computer and be social with the people important to you. Talk to someone besides your co-workers.

4) Leave the house. It's imperative that you get out of the house/office or place you work. Personally I have been trying to go to beautiful places, parks, lakes, any place I can take pictures of. It's another form of creativity that lets my mind feel free. Creativity isn't something I can turn off but I can be creative without staring at pixels.

5) Try to do something to get the blood pumping. I'm fat and lazy but I try to ride my bike around the neighborhood while pulling my son in his baby trailer. This is a time that I can have complete silence and clear my thoughts, plus sweat a little.

Remember that work is your tool to make money, it's not your life. Money is only a temporary justification for not being there for the people you love. Time is fleeting, memories are priceless, choose life over work any chance you get. As long as you get your work done. ;)

I purchased this book because we love Seth's blog. Seth Godin posts these short powerful blog posts, they're a great way to start the day. "The Dip" is about quitting, it's about how quitting is good and how it frees you to do the things you're good at or the things you can succeed at.

This is a great book, here's how I can relate to it. I played division 1 college football at University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB). I played offensive line and was one of the better linemen on the team. College football is an 80 hour a week job that wears you down both mentally and physically. I devoted 7 years of my life to football, winning numerous awards in high school (All-State, All-Star Games). I quit football my junior year in college because it literally owned me, my grades suffered because of it. It pulled me away from my true passion, ballet and rhythmic gymnastics. Okay bad joke, my passion is business, design and technology. I didn't have the time to allocate to both, so I picked my passion which wasn't bashing my brains in everyday. Looking back I made the right decision, I probably would have never learned anything and I wouldn't have had time to explore my passion. My advice and I think Seth would agree - try everything, quit most, find your passion and run with it.

I am sure you've heard the expression, "he's a jack of all trades and the master of none". Fast food restaurants are "jacks," they carry everything under the sun, salads, burgers, shakes, pies, ice cream, coffees, breakfast burritos etc. And it's all crap... "Five Guys Burgers" is a franchise burger joint that has a great product, unique setting and a business model that screams less. They have burgers (cheese, bacon or plain) and they have fries (cajun or regular); I believe you can get a hot dog too. But that's it, they know they can make a killer hamburger loaded with the toppings and they can do it fast and well. Because their menu is small, the ordering is fast, the cooks have less to learn, less to prepare and less food inventory to store.

Now let's relate that to our industry. I've met a lot of freelance designers or freelance developers that try to do too much. Their skill set is one thing and they try to do it all. I've seen programmers spend days on a horrible design instead of getting a designer to do it for a couple hundred dollars. Do what you do well and don't pretend to do it all. There's no shame in asking for help or getting someone to fill in your project's gaps. Your code will look like crap to your users without a well designed UI. Designers, your designs won't fly without good code behind them. Right now if your thinking "hey I can do both" your probably not good at either.

There are a lot of people who are really good programmers who never reach that “top .1%,” or whatever, level. Of late I have been thinking of one of the things that sets the best programmers apart: Discernment. I’m not talking about discerning a good technology from a bad one, but rather the ability to discern a good choice from a bad one. To be able to see the consequences of this path versus that one. In short, to know which rabbits to chase.

When writing software we face a million billion choices every day. Having the talent to make good choices is crucial to being productive. It’s the reason we can launch a product in seven hours.

Here is an example: Recently, one of my guys was refactoring some bad controller code we inherited. He was very excited to show me how he had abstracted and cleaned some of the bad controller code into a library so all of the controllers could call these methods instead of duplicating this bad code all over the place. At first glance it was clear to me that this abstraction was the beginnings of a new library that would be almost identical to Make Resourceful. Once I showed him where his path was leading he agreed that this was probably not the right time to write a Make Resourceful clone, especially when what was really called for was just making the bad code proper, not writing a support structure for it. This reminds me of what Malcom Gladwell was talking about in Blink: The ability to know instantly. (Perhaps to know truth instantly.)

I’m not talking about syntax here. Obie Fernandez and I have fairly different coding styles. He prefers to have the code be more explicit and readable while I prefer my code to be more terse and succinct. Neither is right or wrong, and neither is the reason we are both able to look at a problem and immediately prune it to its core and see clearly where the different paths take us.

This isn’t just true of code, I have seen Allan do the same thing with design. We were working with a designer who was very headstrong and really thought Allan was lacking in something (I’ll save the “why were you working with someone like that” story for another time). This person was doing the html/css for a website and using some popular grid-css-template-thing (I believe that is the technical term for it). When Allan first looked at the code, he just started ripping parts out, not because it was bad in and of itself, but because it was clear that was way too complicated. Using this framework did not buy the simplicity and maintainability of what has come to be known as “The Allan Way™.” (It is amazing to watch Allan take a 7000 line css file and without changing the way the site looks, trim the file to 300 lines.) The other designer made a fuss until Allan was done. Once he saw the difference, he was converted to “The Allan Way™.”

It’s easy to say, “that is just a product of experience.” And although experience certainly plays a part, I think it goes way beyond that. I think this discernment might also be called wisdom. Wisdom basically boils down to how well can you predict the future. When one approaches the wise old sage, the sage immediately knows the outcome of all the paths presented.

So how does one get this discernment/wisdom? I am not sure. I do believe one can learn it, and I think one of the requirements is to know that that is what one is trying to learn. When you play chess, do you only think about your strategy, or do you constantly think “why did my opponent make that move?” Acquiring wisdom might require applying that mental discipline to every part of life: Why did my wife/boss/client/adversary say that? Was it planned or just careless? How does my action affect others? And not just in dealing with others: If I do this, what will I do next? And then what? What paths am I forcing myself into later, if I make this choice now? How deep is this rabbit hole?

Maybe this is the difference between success and mediocrity, between satisfaction and melancholy. Or maybe not.

During Sunday afternoons I spend time thinking about the past week and the week ahead. I ask myself, what can I do to improve? How can I help my business be successfull? Today as I think about this I find myself being washed over with a warm feeling of gratitude. A thankful spirit is such a great feeling. I'm grateful for many things, my family, for doing a job I love, working with such stellar people, having solid friends, great clients and all things life has dealt me.

We're all so lucky to be in this industry. Most of our mistakes can be fixed with a redeploy or hitting command+z. Most of us make decent money for a job we love and are passionate about. I believe taking a few minutes to appreciate your situation is important. Even if you have the client from hell, be thankful for that client. I'm sure somewhere there is someone else that would love to have that client even with their flaws. So take a moment before you get busy today and appreciate all life/business/love has given you.

Jason Fried of 37signals says meetings are unproductive and I can't agree more. I would even go as far as saying most conference calls are a waste of time. Here my reasoning, it never fails someone will talk and talk and have no idea what they are talking about. You'll listen to their 10-minute ego speech using vague buzz words and then you'll disprove their "theory" in half a sentence. So please, if you don't know what you are talking about don't pretend to know. You don't see me with a blog about dieting do you? If someone asks a question and you don't know, don't pretend you know the answer. Save us all the agony of listening to you ramble around the wrong answer.

I arrived back from SEED friday evening, Chicago was cold, thank god I have a thick layer of fat to keep me warm. Per SEED's website, SEED is "a One-Day Conference on Design, Entrepreneurship & Inspiration, by 37signals, Segura Inc. & Coudal Partners". When I signed up I didn't quite know what to expect, I knew Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, would talk about simplicity and keeping things easy. The other two speakers (Carlos Segura and Jim Coudal) I knew little about.

I knew no one attending, but I have been tracking the word SEED on twitter. Most tweets using the word SEED were useless but I found several people going to conference and made my introductions through twitter (my wife said I am a loser, I don't deny it). I found this to be a great way to initially get to know a few people. However everyone there was geeky/interesting and not just because the room was 90% iphones.

Carlos started the day off by showing how great his company's work is. They have huge clients with huge budgets that allow them to do really nice design work. I found this very irrelevant and pretty boring. How many people in the room have clients with those type budgets? He talked/bragged about how they use special inks and expensive papers. Great Carlos, good for you. I found his Q&A time to be much more interesting, he spoke about client relationships, elevating your client levels and mindset of a business owner. I'll go into his answers and such in a later post. He probably had the best Q&A out of the group.

Jason Fried was next. To me, and many others, his presentation was boring as well, just read "Getting Real". I did find him using the word "shit" quite funny (I am still 8 years old). It was pretty evident that everyone would have rather just asked Jason question instead of listening to his presentation. Because the questions were flying, after his time was up there were plenty of unanswered questions. Jason spoke about their apps, which was funny considering they were down most of the morning.

Lunch was next, followed by an extremely boring talk about architecture. Dear Lord this was boring. I will not put you thru the pain I endured.

Jim Coudal was next, he, out of the bunch seemed the most genuine and just really laid back and just fun to be around. I would drink a beer with this guy. Jim spoke about his many business ventures, ideas, starting businesses, how its okay to fail and pitfalls in startups. I really enjoyed him, his presentation was the only one that struck a cord with me. However his Q&A while funny wasn't really impressive.

The last portion of the conference was a panel Q&A, this was the best part about the conference. Most of the questions were aimed at Jason and Jim. I really don't know which speaker I liked the most they all had some really great quotes and interesting points.

Overall thoughts...
It was pretty evident some people attended because they were looking for work or needing people to help. I wish they would have been able to leverage the talent in the room. Maybe a bulletin board or something. I think the presentation were too long and the Q&A needed to be longer. I think the speakers said some great things, the people there were really cool and the weather sucked bad.

Recently while enjoying an overcooked under-seasoned steak at Outback, I noticed the drink coaster. When copywriting is so horrible/unfunny it makes you sad, thats just plain bad copywriting.

I also dually noted that Steve likes it, however Steve has bad taste.

Burger King has a tv commercial where they tell real Burger King customers the Whopper (a hamburger) is no longer available. The commercials show their customers getting mad, being totally distraught and flabbergasted. I've seen this tv commercial several times, they didn't strike me as outstanding. At the end of their tv spot they display an url, last night I went to it. There I found the full length video of the "setups" its so much better than the actual tv commercial.

So why is the commercial not-so-great and the full length video is funny?
Is it a case of bad editing?
Over-editing? I think the concept of the marketing is brilliant, but perhaps its a case of bad execution.



whopperfreakout.com

I also love Beer TV Commercials because they use humor, what's your favorite marketing campaign?