After I released Live Editor File Manager into private beta, my relationship with the product changed quite a bit. I can attest that putting your product live and letting users in is one of the most powerful and vulnerable things you can do.
Of course, much of what I am able to describe will have more impact when you experience it for yourself. I hope that sharing some lessons from my own experience will inspire you to make the leap and put your idea out there. Don’t spend all your time setting up your GI Joes. Ship it.
In Seth Godin’s Linchpin, he describes our own “lizard brain.” I battle mine on a daily basis. This video reminds me of this struggle and describes the concept well.
A few months ago, I read Seth Godin’s Linchpin, and it was just what I needed. This book truly is a gift and is one of Godin’s best to date. If you’re doing important work (or want to), pick it up and dedicate some time over the next week to read it. I promise that you won’t be disappointed.
The beautifully-designed source code control site GitHub has the best explanation of Gravatar yet:
You’ll notice that they don’t really explain it. They show the info that you need to know and help you get to the next step, which is gravatar.com. And gravatar.com does a really good job of explaining how it works.
Sometimes the best way to explain something is to not explain at all.
They give us a sentence, 6 bullet points, and a dead-simple diagram showing what it does. They even show us a video demo that was created using the product itself. Brilliant.
A piece of advice I gleaned from my Creativing Writing professor in college: be a big spender. When he was teaching us how to write creative works, he encouraged us to work hard on every piece that we wrote.
If you have a big idea, do it now. Don’t feel like you have to save your best stuff for later. And don’t put it off. If you get in the practice of coming up with great ideas, then you will find ways to outdo yourself later.
It’s funny how some lessons can stick with you years later.
If you’re into marketing at all (which I’m trying to teach you about), you need to be producing all kinds of social artifacts. There are a lot of tools out there that you need to be learning. A lot of them are online.
I will be sharing ideas about the more common social artifacts: video, audio, articles, presentations, blogging, and document sharing.
I know that many of you already read Seth Godin’s blog, and you probably already saw his post about making a living online.
If you haven’t taken the time to download and read 279 Days to Overnight Success yet, I am another person telling you to do it. If you’re doing any kind of social media (blog, Facebook, Twitter, flickr, etc.), then you’ll want to read it.
When your vision of what you want to do is what you can do single-handedly, then you should pursue it. The day your vision, what you think needs to be done, is bigger than what you can do single-handedly, then you have to move toward management. And the bigger the vision is, the farther in management you have to go.
The bigger your vision is, the bigger the ship that you need to steer to get to that vision. Just this idea alone can tell you where you need to go in your career and whether you’re on that ultimate goal.
It can also be a criticism of leaders that have no vision. Why are managers in their current positions if they have no vision of where to go?
