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.
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.
The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman
Investing @ USV. Student of cities and the internet.
The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman
Investing @ USV. Student of cities and the internet.
I have been intrigued recently by apps that give a new spin on what have previously been stock features of the phone. Apps that a) improve upon in minor ways or b) really try and re-invent some of the basic things we do every day. Above is a snapshot of my new "home row". Sort of -- I say sort of because this isn't actually working for me, yet, and I'll explain why in a sec. Brewster is an app that I think of as a "launcher for people" -- their goal is to be the fastest, most intuitive, way to initiate contact with anyone, regardless of mode. It takes your contacts, twitter followers, facebook friends, etc, and makes it easy to find who you want to find and then contact them how you want to contact them (via SMS, phone, twitter, etc). I really like the idea of flipping the paradigm to "people first, mode second", vs how it is now: mode first (twitter, sms, etc), then person. I love the potential of Brewster, but it hasn't made it into my routine yet, for a few reasons: 1) speed. It simply takes too long to fire up -- the whole appeal of this app, to me, is that it's the fastest, easiest way to find someone. For that to work, it actually needs to be the fastest and easiest. I would love it if they optimized the app startup process so that I see faces (ideally the best faces) super quickly. 2) intelligence. Part of the promise of Brewster is to cut through the hundreds of people I'm connected to and surface the ones I'm most likely to want to contact. Since I've authed them into my gmail, twitter and facebook, and they can see what's in my phone, I would expect them to do a better job of this, but it's not quite there yet. 3) A few bits of clunky UI -- the Brewster UI is all hand-rolled, so it doesn't feel native to iOS, and there have been a few times where that's lead me to make some mistakes (for instance, canceling edits on a contact when I thought I was saving them). I assume this is to make cross-platform development easier, and I expect it to improve over time. But as it is now, it's not quite as easy to use as I would like or expect. Sparrow is a really nice email client for mac and iOS. The've made a lot of subtle improvements over iOS Mail, which I won't go into detail on since it's been widely blogged about. The feature that made me switch was search -- Sparrow's search is so much better than iOS Mail search, and searching email is something I do a lot. Sparrow has been my daily mail client for a while now. They were just acquired by Google
Amazing things happen when people are stuck on a bus together. More on that in a bit. I spent yesterday afternoon with Chiefs of Staff and Chief Information Officers from about 10 US cities, at an event convened by the Harvard Kennedy School and Living Cities (a collaborative of large funders who focus on issues affecting low-income city residents). The focus of yesterday's event was on "civic technology", and specifically, how Living Cities, as a network of major funders, and the Urban Policy Advisory Group (Harvard's network of city leaders) can best take advantage of their scale to do something powerful with it. There was a lot of energy in the room, and I think there's potential for good things to develop around this group. I'll note a few of the ideas that stood out to me: We talk a lot about "civic tech" (this was the title of the event), and a lot of effort goes into developing the right technical strategy. This is, of course, very important, as lots of money is spent, often poorly, on big tech projects, and cities are almost universally mired down with legacy systems that limit their flexibility. But in the closing of the event, I made the point that the really big idea isn't about civic technology, per se, as it is about being networked, and what that means for cities, civic engagement, and how governments work. This is the fundamental shift -- and it affects everything: how city governments work internally, how they relate to their technology vendors, how they treat the relationships between themselves and their constituents. This has been alternately described as "moving from being a problem solver to being a matchmaker", "stepping back and let other people lead", "moving from being a bureaucrat to being a concierge", moving from talker to listener (this applies to things like online conversations as well as data analytics), and moving from a paradigm of control to a paradigm of empowerment. I agree with all of that. I also made the point (and this relates to the first) that "using civic technology well" doesn't necessarily mean building anything new from scratch. Often, it means identifying where activity is already happening in the real world, and applying tech-enabled effort to amplify that activity. Good examples from our past work are the
...and told a story about a group of people who ended up stuck on a bus, in some city, in the middle of the night in a blizzard. Stranded, and far enough away from anything that they couldn't leave, the group got to talking. And apparently, the connections stuck and people remained friends afterwards (they may have done something awesome together too, but I don't remember, and it doesn't really matter). I think it's cool that a simple disruption like that can really change the way people connect with one another. I know from living in NYC that the best times were when something bizarre or messed up happens on the subway. It transforms a group of strangers into a group of kindred spirits; sharing a laugh, wink or smile (or perhaps something more severe like protecting someone -- though I've never been in a position like that -- with a group of strangers is really amazingly cool. And it happens in places like the NYC -- and particularly the subway -- all the time (which I've written about before). Anyway, so the link here is: I wonder what we can do to create more "virtual blizzards" -- little disruptions that create moments where we feel comfortable connecting with our neighbors and city-mates in unexpected, cool, and potentially powerful ways (ideally without threat of an exploding bus). // photo: jokeroo.com
I have been intrigued recently by apps that give a new spin on what have previously been stock features of the phone. Apps that a) improve upon in minor ways or b) really try and re-invent some of the basic things we do every day. Above is a snapshot of my new "home row". Sort of -- I say sort of because this isn't actually working for me, yet, and I'll explain why in a sec. Brewster is an app that I think of as a "launcher for people" -- their goal is to be the fastest, most intuitive, way to initiate contact with anyone, regardless of mode. It takes your contacts, twitter followers, facebook friends, etc, and makes it easy to find who you want to find and then contact them how you want to contact them (via SMS, phone, twitter, etc). I really like the idea of flipping the paradigm to "people first, mode second", vs how it is now: mode first (twitter, sms, etc), then person. I love the potential of Brewster, but it hasn't made it into my routine yet, for a few reasons: 1) speed. It simply takes too long to fire up -- the whole appeal of this app, to me, is that it's the fastest, easiest way to find someone. For that to work, it actually needs to be the fastest and easiest. I would love it if they optimized the app startup process so that I see faces (ideally the best faces) super quickly. 2) intelligence. Part of the promise of Brewster is to cut through the hundreds of people I'm connected to and surface the ones I'm most likely to want to contact. Since I've authed them into my gmail, twitter and facebook, and they can see what's in my phone, I would expect them to do a better job of this, but it's not quite there yet. 3) A few bits of clunky UI -- the Brewster UI is all hand-rolled, so it doesn't feel native to iOS, and there have been a few times where that's lead me to make some mistakes (for instance, canceling edits on a contact when I thought I was saving them). I assume this is to make cross-platform development easier, and I expect it to improve over time. But as it is now, it's not quite as easy to use as I would like or expect. Sparrow is a really nice email client for mac and iOS. The've made a lot of subtle improvements over iOS Mail, which I won't go into detail on since it's been widely blogged about. The feature that made me switch was search -- Sparrow's search is so much better than iOS Mail search, and searching email is something I do a lot. Sparrow has been my daily mail client for a while now. They were just acquired by Google
Amazing things happen when people are stuck on a bus together. More on that in a bit. I spent yesterday afternoon with Chiefs of Staff and Chief Information Officers from about 10 US cities, at an event convened by the Harvard Kennedy School and Living Cities (a collaborative of large funders who focus on issues affecting low-income city residents). The focus of yesterday's event was on "civic technology", and specifically, how Living Cities, as a network of major funders, and the Urban Policy Advisory Group (Harvard's network of city leaders) can best take advantage of their scale to do something powerful with it. There was a lot of energy in the room, and I think there's potential for good things to develop around this group. I'll note a few of the ideas that stood out to me: We talk a lot about "civic tech" (this was the title of the event), and a lot of effort goes into developing the right technical strategy. This is, of course, very important, as lots of money is spent, often poorly, on big tech projects, and cities are almost universally mired down with legacy systems that limit their flexibility. But in the closing of the event, I made the point that the really big idea isn't about civic technology, per se, as it is about being networked, and what that means for cities, civic engagement, and how governments work. This is the fundamental shift -- and it affects everything: how city governments work internally, how they relate to their technology vendors, how they treat the relationships between themselves and their constituents. This has been alternately described as "moving from being a problem solver to being a matchmaker", "stepping back and let other people lead", "moving from being a bureaucrat to being a concierge", moving from talker to listener (this applies to things like online conversations as well as data analytics), and moving from a paradigm of control to a paradigm of empowerment. I agree with all of that. I also made the point (and this relates to the first) that "using civic technology well" doesn't necessarily mean building anything new from scratch. Often, it means identifying where activity is already happening in the real world, and applying tech-enabled effort to amplify that activity. Good examples from our past work are the
...and told a story about a group of people who ended up stuck on a bus, in some city, in the middle of the night in a blizzard. Stranded, and far enough away from anything that they couldn't leave, the group got to talking. And apparently, the connections stuck and people remained friends afterwards (they may have done something awesome together too, but I don't remember, and it doesn't really matter). I think it's cool that a simple disruption like that can really change the way people connect with one another. I know from living in NYC that the best times were when something bizarre or messed up happens on the subway. It transforms a group of strangers into a group of kindred spirits; sharing a laugh, wink or smile (or perhaps something more severe like protecting someone -- though I've never been in a position like that -- with a group of strangers is really amazingly cool. And it happens in places like the NYC -- and particularly the subway -- all the time (which I've written about before). Anyway, so the link here is: I wonder what we can do to create more "virtual blizzards" -- little disruptions that create moments where we feel comfortable connecting with our neighbors and city-mates in unexpected, cool, and potentially powerful ways (ideally without threat of an exploding bus). // photo: jokeroo.com
, so there's some concern in the user community about what will happen to the app. For my part I'm not worried; it's great how it is now.
, a search appliance across all of your web accounts. They've pivoted and the idea now is to "cue up your day" with a super-charged daily agenda that draws from your calendar(s), mail, twitter, facebook, etc. This is a radical, socially-powered, reinvention of the calendar, and I really really like the idea. And the job they've done executing so far is really nice. There is so much potential here, really (think: surfacing important to-dos, linking to bios of people I am meeting with today, giving me travel information a la
, etc.). However, there is one simple problem which is stopping me from using the app completely: by default (and this is unchangeable), it draws appointments from every google calendar that has been shared with you. For me, that's about 50 calendars. So my cue is full of seemingly random events from calendars that aren't part of my real day. I tweeted this feedback their way and
. I'm a big fan of Chrome for mac, and my Chrome is totally tricked out with extensions and customizations that make it really work for me. In starting to use Chrome for iOS, the one feature that's come in most handy is google login and shared history -- makes it really easy for me to access sites from my computer's browsing history when I'm on my phone. This is a super nice feature, especially on mobile where typing is annoying. Of course, the big problem here is that you can't make Chrome your default iOS browser, so whenever you launch a link from another app, or from a home screen shortcut (I use several), you end up back in Safari. Boo, Apple, for not making this configurable. The solution here is to jailbreak my phone, which I just haven't gotten around to doing yet. So, that's about it -- lots of potential here, but some hurdles as well. The screenshot above is what I want my home screen to look like. Here's what it actually looks like now:
who were already deeply engaged in this issue. When Uncivil went live, there were individuals in neighborhoods across NYC who were chomping at the bit to upload photos & issues to it, and it immediately took off (and ultimately led to
, once the agency finally came around to the idea. In both cases, there was a lot of existing demand, which helped make relatively simple tech interventions successful. Lastly, I'll include an idea presented by
, a search appliance across all of your web accounts. They've pivoted and the idea now is to "cue up your day" with a super-charged daily agenda that draws from your calendar(s), mail, twitter, facebook, etc. This is a radical, socially-powered, reinvention of the calendar, and I really really like the idea. And the job they've done executing so far is really nice. There is so much potential here, really (think: surfacing important to-dos, linking to bios of people I am meeting with today, giving me travel information a la
, etc.). However, there is one simple problem which is stopping me from using the app completely: by default (and this is unchangeable), it draws appointments from every google calendar that has been shared with you. For me, that's about 50 calendars. So my cue is full of seemingly random events from calendars that aren't part of my real day. I tweeted this feedback their way and
. I'm a big fan of Chrome for mac, and my Chrome is totally tricked out with extensions and customizations that make it really work for me. In starting to use Chrome for iOS, the one feature that's come in most handy is google login and shared history -- makes it really easy for me to access sites from my computer's browsing history when I'm on my phone. This is a super nice feature, especially on mobile where typing is annoying. Of course, the big problem here is that you can't make Chrome your default iOS browser, so whenever you launch a link from another app, or from a home screen shortcut (I use several), you end up back in Safari. Boo, Apple, for not making this configurable. The solution here is to jailbreak my phone, which I just haven't gotten around to doing yet. So, that's about it -- lots of potential here, but some hurdles as well. The screenshot above is what I want my home screen to look like. Here's what it actually looks like now:
who were already deeply engaged in this issue. When Uncivil went live, there were individuals in neighborhoods across NYC who were chomping at the bit to upload photos & issues to it, and it immediately took off (and ultimately led to
, once the agency finally came around to the idea. In both cases, there was a lot of existing demand, which helped make relatively simple tech interventions successful. Lastly, I'll include an idea presented by
