James Altucher on Delivering Unprecedented Value
“Only free time, imagination, creativity, and an ability to disappear will help you deliver value that nobody ever delivered before in the history of mankind.”
You can’t make money without
You can’t make money without selling something real. You can’t make something real without […] imagination […]. You can’t have imagination without surrendering yourself to an idea that you want to create something of value to other human beings.”
In the blog world (where many of my clients and friends live) it’s easy to setup a site and dole out advice on things like life, success, happiness, etc. There’s no required certification. For better or worse.
The blog world is inundated with these kinds of properties. It can be greasy, but my experiences with these kinds of bloggers has typically been positive.
My other world, the tech & startup world, is much different. It’s not a simple thing to get into (or at least it feels that way). When there’s real money, real stakes, there needs to be real value, real worth.
Recently I’m seeing these two worlds combine. Bloggers thinking more about real value, startuppers thinking more about lifestyle and happiness.
These two worlds are much more alike than I used to think. Though blogging is easy to start, creating true value (a question the typical blogger starts thinking about a year or more after starting) is hard. And that’s hard everywhere — be it a blog, an app, an HVAC company, or anything else.
And maybe I should rephrase that. It’s not that it’s hard to create real value, it’s that creating real value is the real work.
My two worlds are discovering they share the same ecosystem: creating value, making things someone wants.
Hemingway on Being Alive
“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”
The Focus Factor™
I recently finished a project. I worked hard on it. I’m proud of myself and my team. But the most important thing about it was surprising. Watch the video and let me explain.
Dan Harmon on The Creative Process
“If you’re present at the time when things are being created, then what you’re seeing is always going to look like a mistake.”
Seth on Art and Success
“…trying to be big is different from trying to make art. Big isn’t a useful goal. Making a living at it might not even be a useful goal. Engaging in the art, making change, embracing it… that’s a useful goal.”
Seth Godin on Why He Blogs
“I do this because it is a privilege.”
Hillman Curtis on Reinvention
I’m spending less of my time thinking about how’s and why’s these days. My mind is stuck on the what’s. I clamber and climb over all sorts of ideas. I can pick up any single one of them and do some how/why work on it for a time. But it’s clear to me: none of the how’s or why’s will be very deep so long as there’s so many of them.
Should Bloggers Learn to Code?
@chase_reeves Do you think bloggers should learn to code design changes to their own sites? Or is hiring a designer for everything ok?
— Ross Lukeman (@rosslukeman) January 11, 2013
Great question. Here’s my take:
The best thing a blogger can focus on is providing value to their audience. That can mean any number of things, but it most likely has to do with creating content, preferably good content.
That’s what you do. That’s priority number 1. That’s your job.
Getting into the code and geeking out about the tech can distract you from that. It’s very common.
However, it’s also empowering to be personally capable of bringing your design idea to life.
I’m one of those guys who can do both: I can write the stuff and I can fiddle the bits that present the stuff. But here’s the thing: most of the successful people I know and/or look up to don’t do both, they do their job really, really well and are pro enough to let others fiddle the bits. And even though I can do both really well, I believe I can be excellent at only one.
So my advice is this: be really good at your job. Then, make changes to design and code as infrequently as possible and have someone who’s a pro at that stuff do it.
New social media buttons, hip sliders, something something manifestos, buttons and hovers and shadows and corners and responsiveness and yadda yadda yadda. Don’t fiddle with this stuff. Don’t get distracted by the shiny dumb things.
I can put you in the best recording studio in the world and your song will still sound shitty. Make a good song.
Hungry, Open, Grateful
It creeps in very subtle, and before I know it my thoughts are colored. They look entitled, they look lazy and cocky, wriggling out of the hard work.
It’s not hard to get to a place where people look up to you, and it’s real easy to let that color your thoughts.
Somehow I need to get it again, every morning: be hungry, be open, be grateful.
- Be hungry: you’re a caveman and this is about survival. Whichever tiger you choose to fight, it’s you or him – one’s not walking away.
- Be open: you don’t know it all, know it all. Have a kid, learn a language, roll with the punches. When you think you know it all you get brittle and needy, controlly.
- Be grateful: there’s breath in your lungs (take a breath), a woman by your side (don’t fuck it up), a son trying new stuff every day, parents and a brother who are way better than shitty, people you care about and who care about you. Don’t let the tiger or the getting of the tiger get you in a way that you miss this stuff.