I’ve been reading Richard Feynman lately. Although my brain feels battered by his brilliance, and his grasp of far reaching ideas, I keep bumping against something else about him that I find fascinating.

Feynman accepts facts. Light moves as particles and waves? Maybe this is true, or maybe there is a more elegant answer. Why does it seem this way? What machine drives it? Feynman seemingly doesn’t care.

The fact that it can be described this way is what matters. If the description he has of something is sufficiently accurate enough to get him to the next step, he has no reason to challenge it till it brings about a fallacy.

I think I have a lot to learn from this attitude. Getting on with it, moving to the next thing and course correcting only where necessary.

A good example is our programming language of choice, PHP. It’s a mess of a language. It’s strength lies in it’s breadth, but it’s width is a spiraling spaghetti mess.

I’m a “why” learner. When I understand the reason why something exists, and how it is supposed to work, I feel that I can begin to “think” within the system. I can anticipate the way that something should work. I can reason without knowing.

PHP offers very few opportunities for this. Very often it asks you to have faith in libraries without knowing why they work. Very often it asks you to grant it exceptions to syntax, just because. Almost always it tells you that there are several ways to achieve the same goals. It is in effect the result of many brains thinking many different ways.

I struggle with this continually. I’m someone who can explain to you how historical events relate to each other, but I often cannot give you specific dates or facts. I’m a reasoner, not a memorizer.

It’s time for a confession. My first professional programing languages were ActionScript and Coldfusion. Outrageously bad picks for having your past efforts translate into future success. Both are becoming increasingly obsolete in cool web dev circles. (not sure Coldfusion was ever cool)

I can say this for these languages though. They were constructed on purpose,, and with a methodical effort. You could think in them. Even if you had no experience with a thing, you could often trial it out without cracking a book.

While that feels good, I think there is something greater to be yielded from a larger, more open system. Trusting that things work, because they do. The idea that I don’t have to dig down to bedrock to do something great is liberating.

So besides the fact that orbiting objects are essentially falling perpetually at a fixed rate and speed towards a round object, I’ll take away something else from Feynman. Maybe it makes no sense why a function, or pattern works the way it does. Maybe I disagree with why something is built the way it is. But if my wishes are not what is true for the rest of the world, I need to get on with it and try to do something great with what does work.

In 1899 Charles H. Duell, was quoted as saying, “everything that can be invented has been invented.” To our ears, he sounds like an ignorant old hayseed. You could fill oceanliners with the gobs of stuff that has been invented since then.

But I have to admit I can relate to the statement. Everywhere I look on the internet I see the same old crap. Recombinations of old ideas. Mostly minor improvements on “old” ideas that were created only just months ago. I suppose as an industry we’re just iterating on our own ideas. I suppose it’s healthy.

But I can’t help thinking it’s getting a little old. I’m not pretending we’re above this criticism. Some people have said that Staction was just Twitter+Basecamp. Jumpchart was called “a specialized wiki.” Paprika is probably an even smaller evolutionary leap.

We’ve been working for seemingly endless months on tweaks to our current apps. In the background we’ve been dreaming of new apps. I have lists of ideas. Many lists, -big lists. I can pretty much summarize them for you, -they’re all essentially just a different way to collect data from form fields and process it. That’s what all productivity apps do.

So what can you do to invent? Someone types text on a keyboard, and you store it. Or use rudimentary processing to try and understand it. Or attach meta information to it to try and make it more useful. Ad infinitum.

So have we as an industry maxed out the number of ways we can creatively combine todos, milestones, text, and files? What’s the next thing in productivity apps?

A lot of people think the moment of discovery is a loud, bright, crash-bang thing that happens all in one instant.

I think that’s wishful thinking.

As humans, we can be guilty of sitting around, waiting for the next big idea to hit us. We reactively reflect, think about things, expose ourselves to relevant material and hope to have some sort of epiphany that will make us the next Alexander Graham Bell. But it’s just another excuse for not producing. Is waiting for something to be revealed to us just divine laziness?

Think about some of the biggest inventions in history. The telephone. The lightbulb. The computer. The inventors of all these things worked their butts off over a period of time to get the results they ended up with. They pitched their ideas. They got rejected time after time. But they made progress, then made improvements on their progress. They got to their finished product in increments- not all in one day.

So, instead of waiting for greatness to strike and our names to go down in the history books in the blink of an eye, we should spend our time improving on the baby steps we’ve already taken…. The path less traveled.

Interesting related reading: Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun

“If you have your own business, you are in the business of marketing.”

- Quicksprout

Neil Patel (Quicksprout) tells the sad story of Roger. Roger had great aspirations for his design career straight out of college, but failed when he started his own business because he forgot about the whole marketing thing.

I don’t think a lot of people realize how time consuming marketing is when they decide to go it alone. You think to yourself- hey, I can handle this. After all, it’s my skills that are going to make me money. And that might be true… eventually. But your audience has to know you exist, and what’s more- they have to like you.

That’s why I think marketing works best on a personal level. Don’t have a lot of money to spend on print ads, web ads and other promotions? There’s an easier way. Start conversations with people. Networking is the best thing you can do that doesn’t cost any money- and I think it’s the most profitable over time. You never know who can point you in the right direction. We do it ourselves- when we come across a project that isn’t a good fit for us, we’ll recommend someone we think is. Those kinds of personal relationships have, in turn, brought us some really cool projects- and recurring business.

We’re not experts on social networking, but in the age of Twitter, you have no excuse not to reach out. Start talking. Even if your forte is programming or design (read: not marketing!), you can still let your voice be heard. What’s even better is that people will see you for who you are. Personal touches don’t get more genuine than that.

The race is never over. Your app is never done.

I haven’t been in this business for long, but if there’s one thing I’ve seen proven to be true, it’s that the launch of an app is only step one. Yeah, it’s a big step, and something you should be really proud of, but it only signifies the beginning of a long stretch of finish lines to be crossed.

It’s an endurance race. There are always hurdles to clear, coaches yelling at you to do better, and teammates who are counting on you. Each update or feature addition takes preparation and time; each user comment takes careful consideration.

But every time you cross one of the little finish lines, you remember why you love what you do. That satisfaction is what motivates you to train for the next ribbon you snap. And each time you stretch your arms toward the sky in victory, you’ve made progress toward a better app.

“Dave Navarro wrote recently that worrying about what you’re doing (or not doing) is the surest way to keep you poor and unsuccessful.

It’s a cracking article with a heap of good points, one of them being that the key difference in the way successful people operate is that they see failure as an integral part of the process of achieving success.

That’s true. Unless you plan on spending all your time underneath your duvet, failure is in your destiny. Trying to minimize or avoid failure will not help you be successful.” – Steve Errey, Copyblogger

Of course failing isn’t your goal. But taking it with a grain of salt, and figuring out what you did wrong is, in my opinion, a fantastic way to learn. And look at it this way: unless you fail day after day, without seeing any successes whatsoever, you’re probably not going to lose your job or repel a client. (And at that point maybe you should re-evaluate the line of work you’re in…) We’re human, and humans understand humans.

You have high standards for yourself and that’s great. But the occasional mistake should be included in those standards.

You work, and you play. Why do they have to be separate things?

You love what you do, right? Otherwise, you wouldn’t choose to be doing it. So you do your work during the day, and then you go home and recharge by doing things like writing, reading, drawing, cooking, or whatever. You make it a point to keep these things separate, because you think they have to be.

It’s time to combine everything.

By bringing your hobbies to work, you’re making your work richer. Like Wes Anderson. Each piece of work he contributes to has a little piece of something extracurricular in it- and brings a whole new dynamic to the project.

Do what you do to recharge- don’t quit. Just do them at work. Channel that creative energy you use at home, and add a new perspective to that new modal editing menu you’re creating. You’ll be making your day more fun, while at the same time getting better at drawing… and design.

“2,500 years ago, a Greek writer told us something about creating software: Thucydides wrote, ‘The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.’ The optimal society is one that mixes scholar-warriors and warrior-scholars. The same is true for companies that schism their designers and engineers. The most important trait a team can have is empathy. Without it, the implementers will not care, and the designers will not be realistic. When companies complain of specs and code being “tossed over the fence”, a lack of empathy is to blame.”
An excellent article by Aza Raskin. I bet family get-togethers at his house are a real trip.

It only takes a few tools to make homemade candy. A good sturdy bottomed pot, a measuring cup, something to stir with, and a thermometer. If you’re really good, you can even do without a couple of these…

Heated sugar goes through lots of stages. An astute eye can see them, but most of us need to use various methods to discover what stage it’s at. At roughly 230ºF sugar forms thin gossamer stings like a spider web when you drip it into cool water. At just 5º more it will form tight little balls. From here, the balls of sugar when dropped into water will just get harder in increments as you approach 265ºF. At around 270ºF something cool happens. The sugary strands and balls you drip into water will remain plyable, and soft when removed. By the time you hit 300º the sugar when retrieved will be hard like a jawbreaker.

At 320ºF something really magic begins to happen; the sugar begins to caramelize. “Caramelize” being just a pretty word for burn. But like a steak on the grill it’s the little black bits that make the flavor. If you heat the sugar to 338ºF give or take a couple, it breaks down to form complex compounds that create an unbelievably rich mixture of flavors. Above 350º and the sugar isn’t caramel anymore, it’s bitter, black, and disgusting.

Just 12º exist between perfect caramel and sticky ashes. If you’ve ever made anything on a stovetop you know it can be tough to control heat in 50º increments, more/less 12º. You might also know that acceleration of heat matters, -things keep cooking when you are done. It’s a challenge of talent, patience, reaction, and intuition to get it right.

I’m not a candymaker, but this whole thing sounds familiar to me. As a graphic designer I work on projects that go through stages. I struggle to add enough heat in the beginning to get to the next stage. I work sometimes days on end to keep evolving the design through stages of hopefully increasing quality. Midway through, it seems that the changes I make start to affect the overall design more dramatically. Really late in the game, it’s all about knowing when to quit.

Design, like sugar, requires talent, patience, reaction, and intuition. I’ll be honest-I’ve been burning lots of designs I work on lately. I take some consolation in hoping that it might be as easy as backing off the heat just a tiny bit to get it to turn from black to golden yummy brown.

“The percentage of our time we spend on DVD by mail [still Netflix’s biggest revenue source by far] is tiny. We’re entirely focused on streaming.” Most newspaper companies’ organization and usage of staff time is focused on print. That means it is facing today, if not yesterday. Expend as few resources on the current operating model as possible, says Hastings, and run to the future. Put your best minds there — and most of your company. ‘We knew that the DVD business was temporary when we founded the company. That’s why we named it Netflix and not DVD by mail. We wanted to become Netflix.’ Whatever the brand name, aspire to what and who you want to become.”

- Reed Hastings Founder of Netflix