Last night, Andy Murray won the US Open — his first grand slam victory — in an epic 5-set match (tied for the longest ever). I was on a train and missed the whole thing, unfortunately. But the story is great — Murray won the first two sets, then dropped the second two, only to rally in the fifth to win. And more importantly, he has been a perennial runner-up — always getting close, but never able to close (until now).

My favorite line from the HuffPo piece is this:

Just weeks after winning gold during the London Olympics, Murray has finally broken through in a Grand Slam. The perennial contender had consistently been held at bay by Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in the sport’s marquee events. After losing in the 2012 men’s final at Wimbledon to Federer, an emotional Murray told the partisan crowd that he was “getting closer.”

Getting closer.

I know that feeling — working so hard at something, but not being there quite yet. Being so close you can taste it. Working, little by little, day by day, to get there. Keeping your eye on the prize but not getting distracted from the task at hand. Working with determination and quiet confidence.

Yesterday I wrote about how the mental roller coaster rides of tennis and entrepreneurship are similar. This story is a great follow up to that, and is one that makes me really happy — that Andy was able to pull through, to conquer whatever demons were there from prior losses, and further, to come back from what must have felt like yet-another-disappointing-loss-in-the-making.

Pretty cool.

I’ve always thought of tennis as perhaps the most difficult of sports. It’s like hitting a baseball, but while you’re running, and with 90% of the addressable target area out of bounds (in the net, outside the lines, etc). To top that off, you’re a team of one, battling yourself, inside your head. So it’s really easy to get frustrated and implode when things start heading south.

I played a lot of tennis as a kid, but basically haven’t played at all for the past 15 years or so, until recently. Over the past few weeks, I’ve picked it back up and gotten really into it, and it’s been really fun and also a challenge. My playing style has always been aggressive and error-prone. I have (IM*H*O) beautiful strokes, but go for a lot of winners and tend to make a lot of unforced errors. Historically, I often lose to players who can simply get the ball back and put me in a position to beat myself. On serve: it’s aces or double faults. You get the idea.

Clearly, this is a frustrating way to play, and to be. And it puts me into a position to love and hate tennis at the same time, and to get really down on myself for not living up to what I see as my potential.

Recently though, I’ve been working on a way to address this. I’ve been going into playing tennis expecting it to be frustrating, and knowing that overcoming that frustration is part of the challenge, and part of the fun. Seems like a subtle difference, but it’s really been game-changing for me. If I go in expecting to have a mental challenge — and knowing that I’ll get through it — rather than being surprised when it happens, it’s somehow way easier to deal with. It becomes part of improving my game, just like working on my strokes, and it generally helps me relax and get loose, rather than get frustrated and tight.

This may seem like a stretch, but it reminds me of what a good friend once said about eating magic mushrooms: that it’s a challenge and an adventure; that he fully expected to get freaked out and scared, but working his way through that, and getting over it, is part of what he liked about it. Seems crazy in some ways, but I get it. So, I guess I’m saying playing tennis is kind of like tripping on mushrooms.

And of course, it’s the same with being an entrepreneur. Apparently Reid Hoffman characterized entrepreneurship as “throwing yourself off a cliff and building a plane on the way down”, which feels right. And my friend Nick has described the roller-coaster ride of entrepreneurship — one day you feel like you’re killing it and you’ve got the whole world figured out, and (literally) the next day, you can feel like you’re 100% wrong and totally screwed. That’s for real — in the past, I’ve felt it on something like 8-hour cycles — and it’s part of the reason why co-founder chemistry is so important; to help you weather that storm.

In all of these cases, I think the trick is not letting yourself feel like all is lost — expecting there to be (sizable) bumps, but understanding that of course there are, and that’s part of the challenge and part of the fun. Somehow, thinking about it that way really changes things for me.

Yesterday, I wrote a guest post on the Google Public Policy blog on “the clothesline paradox and the hidden economies of the web“, fleshing out an idea that was raised at the USV Hacking Society event back in April. I’ll include the video, below, of the conversation that kicked off this thinking:

The idea behind the clothesline paradox comes from the history of the environmental movement, and difficulty in quantifying certain kinds of shifts in economic activity — quoting from Tim O’Reilly on the video:

We take our clothes out hang them on the line. They don’t get moved to some kind of solar ledger. They just disappear. We don’t measure them at all. And it seems to me there’s a lot of economic value on the Internet that is like that clothesline paradox.

I’m interested in what we can do — with the web — to address this particular challenge. Specifically, I think there’s an important opportunity for a coordinated effort, across the web, to gather data and stories about the economic and societal impact of networks and the web. And I would like to see this happen in a web-native way.

Slash Awesome is a part of this — a distributed effort to collect stories of empowerment and opportunity. But ultimately, I hope we can build something that encompasses more real-time data about the wide-ranging economic impacts of networks and the web. An open data platform and API, across the web, for impact metrics.

One thing I didn’t have space to get into in the Google post is the role that they, and other major web platforms, might play in something like this. One of my favorite examples of the power of open data is the story of Google Transit and worldwide transit data. I’ve been meaning to write up something longer about this, and probably will soon — but in a nutshell, the combined power of a major consumer focal point (Google transit directions on google maps) paired with a lightweight data format (GTFS), lead to the creation of a powerful worldwide platform.

My hope is to work towards something similar here — a way for web platforms to publish impact metrics in a lightweight, machine-readable format, that can then be aggregated and made interesting and useful in some form. I don’t have a complete answer to the Clothesline Paradox, but I do think we can work on ways to build a clearer picture of what’s happening on the web.

Anyway, thanks Google for inviting me to guest blog — it was fun!

A few things happened recently, which are causing an unexpected and totally interesting change in my digital life.

1) On the last day of our vacation, Theo dropped our iPad on a brick patio, smashing it to bits.

2) I realized that I could save over $100/mo by consolidating my wireless accounts, and moving our phones from AT&T to Verizon.

So, I did two things, that are separate but related.

Instead of buying another $500 iPad, I got a $199 Nexus 7.

And, in the process of switching to Verizon, I traded in my iPhone 4 for an Android-powered Galaxy S III.

I’ve been an Apple user for a long long time — my first computer was an Apple IIe; Apple was standard fare throughout high school and college, (with the exception of a few years) my entire professional career has been Apple-based, and I’ve been an iPhone and iPad user. Despite all of this, I don’t consider myself an “apple fan boy”. I am absolutely devoted to Apple desktop and laptop products — my daily computer is an 11″ Macbook Air and I can’t imagine that changing anytime soon — the size, fit, finish, and smoothness of the OS are unmatched IMO. And Mac OS is still a reasonably open platform (compared to iOS).

But I’ve been itching to get off of iOS, and I’m super excited to have Android in my life now. While I appreciate that same fit & finish in iOS, I have been feeling suffocated by Apple’s ultra-tight control over the platform. Even just using both Android devices for half a day (I got them both yesterday), I feel liberated. Specifically:

I love the way each Android build can be customized. I know this creates some problems. But the fact that my Nexus 7 (meant for reading) and my Galaxy S III (a phone) present a different experience on top of the same OS is very cool. While there’s no question that the variety in core paradigms (where the buttons are, what they do, how you swipe to log in, etc.) is confusing as a whole (especially to newer or less savvy users), it just makes me happy to be part of a platform where it’s possible to experiment and try new things.

I like how configurable the Android desktop is. I’m a geek and like configuring things, so am in the minority globally, but already I feel like my phone fits my life much better than it did before (mainly due to the customizable widgets).

Sharing. Man. Sharing on iOS has been such a bummer — not being able to, say, share to Tumblr from a web page. I love the extensible, built-in sharing tools on Android.

Defaults. Similarly — now Chrome is my default browser. Android lets me choose. Maybe I’ll want to use a different browser at some point in the future; who knows; but I’ll get to decide.

Over all, I’d say Android feels more like a mobile version of MacOS, than a knock-off of iOS. And I like it that way.

Yesterday afternoon, I caught up for a coffee with Andrew Parker. After a wide-ranging and enjoyable discussion about app ecosystems and tech policy, we talked a bit about speed. This post (which I’ll keep short, in its own spirit) is about why speed is so important, awesome, and magical.

I wrote recently about reinventing the home row, and specifically about Brewster and Cue, two apps that I think have a lot of potential. As it happens, in both cases, my primary frustration is that they’re not fast enough. In both cases, what I want is “instant magic” — fire it up, get straight to what I want to do, and bam!

Speed is important everywhere, but it’s extra extra important in apps that I fire up often, and for short periods of time. In the case of Brewster, it’s to find someone — quickly — and contact them. In the case of Cue, it’s to find out what’s next in my day. In the case of Foursquare, it’s to quickly check in wherever I am. In all of these cases, I’m just hopping into the app for a second, to do one quick thing, and hopping out. Many times a day. When this happens quickly, my heart is warmed with web awesome. When I find myself waiting for these apps to launch or load data, my blood pressure rises and I curse technology’s crushing grip on my life.

In talking about this with Andrew, he pointed me to CloudMagic, an app that creates a search index across your cloud services, like Gmail, Google Docs, and Twitter. CloudMagic’s slogan is “Find stuff in a second” and the first testimonial, from TechCrunch, is “It’s really, really, really fast”. And boy, is it.

Within seconds of installing CloudMagic, I was flying through it — popping it open, searching for something, finding it, and hopping off to the thing I was looking for. Warm happiness filled my body instantly. After using the app for 1 minute, I moved it to the home screen on my phone. After installing the browser button, it’s first in my list.

Greplin, the precursor to Cue, provided the exact same functionality as CloudMagic (across many more services, in fact), but much less quickly. I would check it every once in a while, just to explore what it could find, but it didn’t jump into my life immediately the way CloudMagic did. The difference — the magic — is speed.

Thinking about other places where speed has made a difference for me, the one that stands out is Quicksilver for mac. It’s another “launcher” app – and I having used it for years now, I can’t bring myself to use a computer that doesn’t have it. I can’t imagine living without it.

Launcher apps, like Quicksilver, CloudMagic, and Brewster, have the potential to use speed to takes this workflow:

Thought -> Find the thing -> Do it

and (in the best case) remove the second step. They have the ability to bring me from Thought -> Do instantly, and that’s a great feeling.

Speed is the killer feature, the thing that makes it magic.