wandering wandering star

…if your goal is to build a remarkable life, then busyness and exhaustion should be your enemy.

If you’re chronically stressed and up late working, you’re doing something wrong. You’ve built a life around hard to do work, not hard work.

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Hard work is deliberate practice. It’s not fun while you’re doing it, but you don’t have to do too much of it in any one day (the elite players spent, on average, 3.5 hours per day engaged in deliberate practice, broken into two sessions). It also provides you measurable progress in a skill, which generates a strong sense of contentment and motivation. Therefore, although hard work is hard, it’s not draining and it can fit nicely into a relaxed and enjoyable day.

Hard to do work, by contrast, is draining. It has you running around all day in a state of false busyness that leaves you, like the average players from the Berlin study, feeling tired and stressed. It also, as we just learned, has very little to do with real accomplishment.

What makes the kids market so lucrative is it’s not just a TV show. It’s not just a movie. It’s the whole ecosystem of entertainment. Kids want the action figure, the backpack, the Happy Meal, and the theme-park ride. There are dozens of little touch points, where parents pay for a brand experience and the brand experience is highly emotional. It gets back to kids’ hunger to interact with something they love. What Angry Birds and Cut the Rope are both trying to do is take control of and democratize that part of the equation too.

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This is where apps like Angry Birds or Cut the Rope have a stranglehold on anyone who markets to children: If brands are being created in the App Store, they have a direct line to kids. Do they really need Mattel, Hasbro, Disney, and Dreamworks? They don’t trust them. “Why enter into a marriage, if you know it’ll only end in divorce?” says Lyalin. (There were a lot more reasons for his mistrust, but that all falls into the off-the-record bucket unfortunately.)

These companies are creating original content. But make no mistake — if they succeed, they disrupt a lot more than just Hollywood.

It’s a dramatically new way of doing business that most toy makers don’t get.

“What’s the future of design?” he asked rhetorically. “There is no future. When the product becomes bionic, in the end there is no product.”

The digital age, Mr. Starck said, has created a process of “dematerialization,” in which products like the Zik headphones are simultaneously shrinking and becoming smarter. “It’s the elegance of the minimum,” he said.

The end result? Eventually, he announced, we’ll all be implanted with microchips, and we’ll be the product.

Of course, that could take a while…

”Follow Your Passion” is easily the worst advice you could ever give or get.

Why ? Because everyone is passionate about something. Usually more than 1 thing. We are born with it. There are always going to be things we love to do. That we dream about doing. That we really really want to do with our lives. Those passions aren’t worth a nickel.

Think about all the things you have been passionate about in your life. Think about all those passions that you considered making a career out of or building a company around. How many were/are there ? Why did you bounce from one to another ? Why were you not able to make a career or business out of any of those passions ? Or if you have been able to have some success, what was the key to the success.? Was it the passion or the effort you put in to your job or company ?

If you really want to know where you destiny lies, look at where you apply your time.

Time is the most valuable asset you don’t own. You may or may not realize it yet, but how you use or don’t use your time is going to be the best indication of where your future is going to take you .

Let me make this as clear as possible

1. When you work hard at something you become good at it.

2. When you become good at doing something, you will enjoy it more.

3. When you enjoy doing something, there is a very good chance you will become passionate or more passionate about it

4. When you are good at something, passionate and work even harder to excel and be the best at it, good things happen.

Don’t follow your passions, follow your effort. It will lead you to your passions and to success, however you define it.

“I read about how Zappos is focused on customer service. It isn’t.

It’s focused on company culture, which leads to customer service.

We don’t talk about customer service; we allow it to happen on its own by having the right people.”

There’s a feeling of thinness that I believe many of us grapple with working digitally.

It’s a product of the ethereality inherent to computer work. The more the entirety of the creation process lives in bits, the less solid the things we’re creating feel in our minds.

Put in more concrete terms: a folder with one item looks just like a folder with a billion items. Feels just like a folder with a billion items. And even then, when open, with most of our current interfaces, we see at best only a screenful of information, a handful of items at a time.

…most of our competitors are interesting in doing something different, or want to appear new - I think those are completely the wrong goals.

A product has to be genuinely better. This requires real discipline, and that’s what drives us - a sincere, genuine appetite to do something that is better.

Committees just don’t work, and it’s not about price, schedule or a bizarre marketing goal to appear different - they are corporate goals with scant regard for people who use the product.