Couldn’t help but notice this today on Google’s Home page.

Is March Madness that big of a deal? Or is this an excuse to get Google+ home page real estate?

You need to stop reading this and read this

What an inspirational, sensational post.

Ignore the noise. Focus on you.

Too often we compare our inside with someone else’s outside and that is destined for failure.

Know thy self.

You are where you are and that is where you should be. Learn from each moment and then let it go. You don’t need the past.

Be here now.

Be remarkable. Or don’t be.

You spend 2-3 hours cleaning your house from top to bottom, yet naturally after a week it gets messy again.

You add a drop of cream into a black abyss of coffee, and like magic it infuses the entire glass with a milky glow.

Entropy kinda sucks doesn’t it

So what can you do about it?

Simple. Do a little bit everyday.

Don’t spend 2-3 hours cleaning every week. Spend 10-15 minutes everyday.

Don’t build an app or a business in 2-3 months and hope for magical funding. Build it up, bit by bit.

Entropy is one of the most pervasive and powerful forces in the universe. Time itself, can be seen as an expression of Entropy. With each tick of the clock, we decay, we get further away from where we started.

Everything falls apart in the end, so make the most of your time and do the work each day to keep you, your projects, and your life on track.

Little by little is the best way to create order.

When you are starting a business it’s vital to ask as many questions as possible.

Don’t feel dumb or embarrassed about this, in fact, I would say that you should feel dumb and embarrassed if you aren’t asking a lot of questions.

Life is about learning from your mistakes and from those of others. The more people you speak with, the more questions you ask, the more knowledge you gain and the better you will be for it.

So ask me questions. Ask them questions.

Ask and you shall receive.

Spoke with a very bright designer / developer today and he said something that made me raise an eyebrow.

He told me that he Regularly does Spec Work for clients.

This is wrong on so many levels. No one should ever work for free. It cheapens you and the other person.

There is nothing wrong with donating your time, but people should still understand that this time costs something. This isn’t about being mean, a dick or anything like that. It’s about being fair to yourself and to the world at large.

Payment doesn’t have to mean a cheque every two weeks. There are lots of ways to do it. Come up with a way that works for you, but for God sake’s do not do it for free. You will start to be grudge the work, and you won’t have all of your creative juices following when you work on said project.

Here is a funny and direct take on what I just said.

2011/03 Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me. from San Francisco Creative Mornings on Vimeo.

Starting is easy… finishing is hard.

I started and stopped this blog post twice before finishing it. Really I did.

Why do you think that is? Why are we so afraid to finish things that we start?

I think we are afraid of what it will mean to be finished. If we are done, then we have to start something else. If we are done then it better be pretty good. If we are done, then we are accountable.

If we never finish things we really aren’t accountable. There is no risk. Sure we might waste some time, but we never put our name on it. We never publish it. We never finish it.

So we have directories full of half finished side projects. Half baked mockups for half baked ideas.

The next time I start something I am going to finish it.

Do we really need to kill Hollywood?

Of course not!

And I understand we are just being dramatic for effect, but common people. Attitudes and movements that are born with malice and bad intentions are doomed to fail. It becomes a war and wars can’t be won. Both sides end up loosing.

Gandhi didn’t declare war on Britain and if he had he likely would have failed. We should not be declaring war on Hollywood, or War on Music. We should be doing what we do best. Finding creative ways to solve hard problems.

We don’t need to start a war. We need to change hearts and minds.

So please, let’s stop talking about War and start making meaningful changes to the companies we run, the companies we fund and the places we spend our money.

Thanks for reading,

Kent

Well the flap is starting to buckle, the book is nearing the end. We don’t even know he has cancer yet, but I know it’s close. I wanted to write this post because there was a lot of black lash from respected Apple Fans about the book when it came out. They thought that Walter Isaacson did a poor job.

I really disagree. I think the book is very well written, has great pacing and does justice to one of the most loved and hated CEOs of history.

John Siracusa’s major complaint was that there was a lack of technical knowledge or appreciation on Isaacson’s part. He believed that Isaacson should have spent more time learning about the impact of the technologies that Jobs help create and explained these meaningful technologies to the reader.

This book wasn’t written for me, or John Siracusa. It was written as an introduction and as farewell to Steve Jobs. There will be other books to tout the tech stuff. This was about the intangibles of Steve Jobs, and Isaacson nailed it.

So far I have loved it, and can’t wait to see how it ends.

As a Canadian and avid Hacker News follower, I have been watching the SOPA, PIPA debate and protest from the sidelines.

Like most software developers, I am against SOPA for all these reasons however most of the petitions and protests are American based so I have felt helpless to make a difference all the way up in Mississauga, Ontario.

On Friday, I called my Representative, Stella Ambler in Ottawa and also called a whole bunch of US Representatives. I didn’t get much traction at all, but I think every able Canadian should do the same thing. There is nothing wrong with more people getting informed.

Big thanks to Alexis Ohanian who is doing a great job as the “face” of the resistance.

Let’s hope we can use our amazing tools that SOPA aims to control, to defat the bill from being passed.

Click here for the audio version of this post (Evernote link)

why don’t we wait?

There are so many times during a day when we should just wait for something but we don’t. We don’t have the patience to wait five or ten seconds for something and we quickly get distracted and move into something else. I’m a software developer, sometimes my server has to restart. Sometimes my changes need to be downloaded. Sometimes my code needs to be compiled. All of these take about ten to thirty seconds. Yet, for some reason I can’t wait for them to finish.

I’ll run them, quickly open up the browser, pull up hacker news and read about what’s new and shiny in the world of start-ups. Imagine if we took the time and waited for these little things. What if the next time you run a script server or rails server or build and analyze or take your small task that really doesn’t take a long time; maybe even just a webpage to load, maybe it’s just software to download.

Imagine if we just waited?

Imagine if we just took a deep breath while we waited? Use that time to reconnect with our body. Take three deep breathes. Melt into our chairs or melt into our heels if we’re standing up.

Try this for a week. It’s not easy. But wait, wait and breathe.

We breathe all the time but we never really take a good breath. Most of us, never really breathe. So the next time you’re waiting for your code to compile, the next time you’re waiting for your server to start watch it, take some breathes. See how you’re feeling. Don’t rush, go slow, wait.

Thanks for reading.

Kent

for more on waiting

If you haven’t seen this yet, it’s a collabortation between Google and Arcade Fire, to the music of We Used to Wait.

Very 2010 http://thewildernessdowntown.com/