The other day my wife complained, like many of us Twitter users have often done:
Why do people write these long tweetstorms, instead of writing a blogpost?
I blog. And I write tweetstorms. And the answer to that question, for me, is in three factors – reach, effort, and ephemerality. Continue reading Why tweetstorms, not blog posts
By integrating ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ in the same app, you’re forcing the bigger user group1 to also confront tools designed for the smaller user group.
On mobile – skewed by design more towards consumption, than creation – I assume the disparity in these two user groups is even bigger.
Having a standalone reader app, allows it to reach a much larger use case – ‘Help people follow, read, discover’.
Compare this to current use case – install it if you…
A really good standalone reader helps plug in a singular user need2 – reading. That need, in terms of following blogs and websites, only rarely overlaps with the other need that the app currently fulfils – writing.
Though it will place it in competition with feed readers like Feedly, it also has 2 unique benefits as well:
A good, successful reader mobile app with large user-base will, eventually, help close the RoI loop: suggest (through ‘discover’) other WordPress/Jetpack blogs, creating an incentive (or delivering reward) for creators using WordPress.
Great art makes you wonder,
great design makes things clear.
John Maeda, in ‘The laws of simplicity’
(When my mom – ex middle school science & economics teacher – asks about monetary and fiscal stimulus)
When does an economy grow?
At a simple level, when earning/spending increases.
People and companies spend more when they have more money.
They get more money from increased borrowing, or increased income.
The government, when confronting low inflation and low growth, wants to increase this spending.
It has two sets of tools – monetary and fiscal – to stimulate this growth.
Monetary tools target increased lending/borrowing, and fiscal tools intend to increase income directly.
Continue reading Mom asks: What’s monetary and fiscal stimulus?
Saw this chart – on prices in a car segment in the US – in this article in The Economist. I just couldn’t get over how grossly it misrepresented the data, so here’s the crib.
On a quick look, the chart above seems to indicate that the US government discounts electic car prices by anywhere from 37.5% (BMW i3) to 60% (Tesla Model 3) of the total price – the ratio of light blue bar segment to total.
The reason for this apparent fallacy is the cropped axis on which the values are plotted – instead of starting from zero, it starts from about $22,500 and goes up to $45,000. Adding to the crime of cropping is the location of the axis labels – in the already text heavy section on top.
Result: most viewers would casually interpret that tax credits form a huge rebate on electric cars.
The interpretation changes quickly when the axis is expanded to start from zero.
The tax credit is now clear as just a small share of the real price – a standard $7,500, whatever the car price – rather than a hefty 60% for a Tesla Model 3.
What’s more, it now highlights how competitively priced the Tesla Model 3 and Chevy Bolt are, even if the price subsidy is removed – only BMW 3 series beats them. And that’s before the running & servicing cost savings are accounted for.
Based on my experience of reading, and creating, countless charts – one of my key learnings is simply:
If the axis are cropped, the chart creator is trying to send a false reading – so dig in deeper.
In the case of this chart, the cropping is compounded by hiding the labels in the text heavy section of the graphic.
It’s either a super lazy job by the chart making (and the editor). Or a case of making the chart fit the story / bias.
Please, don’t do it.
I worked with one backend-as-a-service (BaaS) provider, Quickblox, where I saw closely users vetting the provider for stability and scalability (successfully). And I followed the rise, sale & fall of another, Parse, where we’re all seeing the impact of it’s folding on a wider community of users.
Combining experiences from both, there’s a business idea ringing in my head:
Just discovered this by trial (requires tabs to be consecutively located):
shift and mouse-down on last tab to moveVoila!
All the selected tabs in the range are moved into a new Window.
My latest piece of bling, a Garmin Fenix 3 watch, comes with an inbuilt activity tracker. One feature of this activity tracker is the so-called Move bar.
The basic idea is that if you are inactive for one hour, the bar turns red and shows an alert asking you to move around for 2-5 mins. The longer you’ve been inactive, the longer you have to walk to dismiss the bar.
On the non-fitness side of things, a.k.a. work, I use a pomodoro timer app to split my work into manageable bits. For the last year and a half that I’ve used it, I’ve stuck with the default 20 mins work, 5 mins break pattern 1. After every 4 sets, is a slightly longer 15 min break to stretch legs, and pamper Chewie.
Today was my first full day with the new watch, and I’ve already settled on a modified pattern – 25 on (working), 5 off (twitter). Every 2 sets, i.e. every one hour, take additional 10 mins off to walk around to clear the bar, chat with family, and then back again.
Worked well for the half day that I’ve worked today. If this works on Monday too, it’ll be a fun combination of work & walk :)
There are two ways people apply their significant intelligence and energy:
1. In figuring out excuses about why it can’t 1 be done
and
2. In figuring out solutions for how to do it
I call them the excuse generation and the solution exploration behaviours.
I explicitly say – two kinds of ways people think. Not, two kinds of people. Because, more often than not, we see both these behaviours in the same people.
Some of the most intelligent, determined, driven people I know are also the ones I often see working smart to come up with unquestionable excuses for why-not-to, instead of solutions for how-to.
A big task for a successful leader 2, then, is to give people a reason to switch from excuse generation to solution exploration. To motivate the best thinkers and doers with incentives 3 – emotional, financial, egotistical, or other – that helps them realign their thought process towards the target the leader wants achieved.
Most specifically (the usual):
Nurture a culture of solution exploration, with
- big, and highly visible, rewards for success
- little or no punishment for failure 4
Everything will always have a mistake so if you accept human fallibility you don’t try to optimize for never making mistakes, you try to optimize for correcting the mistakes as quickly as possible.
