YakShaving

Yak•Shaving (noun) Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem

Month: July, 2009

Feeling like you’re in control is so important

The other night, I was in the Bettr@ office in Beijing, which is not but a 10 minute walk from the hotel that I’m staying at (the Sariz international, which is pretty nice since it has a gym). It was kind of late, and I was the only one left in the office. I asked [...]

Foundations for a new science of [informal] learning

You know… I don’t think it’s heretical to think that we’re building an app that has some serious mass appeal, while we think that our initial/early adopters will be highschool through Gen Y. Last week, Vince sent us this great study that validates our research about interest nets. There are some great little nuggets in [...]

Subvocalization could be awesome

This is completely unrelated to bettr@, but I was looking through my notebook for stuff from the WFS conference and remember listening to a discussion about subvocalization and intercepting signals from the brain before they hit your vocal cords. This technology could be pretty awesome in due time. Some pretty amazing possibilities here, including never [...]

What ever happened to ebooks?

You have to love publishers who are trapped in old models of conducting business: connecting people who had unique and interesting ideas about the world, the lumberjacks to cut down trees to make paper, and the distribution channels like a bookstore, Amazon.com, or in some cases, oligopolistic grasp over school boards (in the case of [...]

The real reason to work on startups: fix the world (and hat tip to Disqus)

I just switched to Disqus commenting (I’m a huge fan of Disqus. Not that I get a ton of comments on here, but I haven’t been posting a ton in the past several months, which I fully intend on changing. For reals. In part I was reinvigorated to communicate the dire situation that our world [...]

Useful lifehack for buying stuff from Amazon.com for cheapos

I rarely buy things, being a recent graduate student saddled with loans and working on an exciting new lean startup, Bettr@. (When do you actually have the time anyway?) Here’s a useful lifehack I’ve found for saving money at Amazon.com that you may have tried. Instead of using a wishlist for yourself, just save stuff [...]

The Shift Index to motivated smartypants: “Get Better Faster,” people

The Shift Report from the Deloitte Innovation Center for the Edge just came out, and some of the findings were fascinating. The executive summary and the findings make well reasoned, intuitive sense. What’s great about it is that a lot of it fits directly in line with what we’re envisioning with Bettr@. I feel like [...]

who are these… “technopologists”?

A good friend and former coworker, Craig Sahrmann, sent me this article from the Wall Street Journal a while ago.. as in more than 4 months (Jeez, I gotta stop making draft blog posts, it’s a horrible practice) The article is titled “The Secrets of Marketing in a Web2.0 World“. This tiny piece of advice [...]

The best gifts – Get better at the things you love

Kevin and I were out on a little scavenger hunt today, looking in a magazine related to Running to see how much stuff in it was actually valuable and relevant content related to running vs how much was self serving, irrelevant advertising. The results were not too surprising: Most of the content was irrelevant advertising, [...]

Wooji Juice is sweet

This seems to be the year of weddings. My best bud from undergrad got married this past weekend, and I got to see some of my friends from school come to Chicago for the wedding. I even got to roast Nabeel with a Keynote slideshow, which was the most fun I’ve ever had giving a [...]