Category: Thought of the Day

Relevance not Determined by the Beholder?

“Relevance is determined by influence.” – Norman Mailer

That was Mailer’s response to: “Has your writing had an impact?”

While Mailer was referring to the larger influence of who controls the past determining what is relevant.

The same is true on a much smaller, person-to-person scale. Perhaps relevance is like identity – defined by everyone else. Individuals can only filter and prioritize.

Balance in the Air

A couple very recent quotes on balancing your life from two of my favorite bloggers:

“5. People have only so much toleration for novelty in them; no one embraces novelty consistently and in all fields of life. Spend your tolerance for novelty wisely.” – Tyler Cowen

23.”Running a startup is full of extreme ups and downs. Which is why so many successful and happy entrepreneurs I know lead such normal, stable, unglamorous, “boring”, family-centered lives. Somehow they need the latter in order to balance out the former.” – Hugh MacLeod

Take 40% Off the Top

“Trees must be cut down, hauled to factories in trucks, and pulped into rolls of paper, which themselves must be transported to other factories, where they are chopped up, covered in ink, folded, stacked, and loaded onto a third set of trucks. These trucks then fan out across the region, dropping bundles at distribution points, to be transported yet again to stores and homes. It’s an enormously expensive process, constituting as much as 40 percent of newspapers’ costs.” – Michael Kinsley

What would your business look like if you cut out 40% of the overhead – while improving your customer relationship?

LATER:
40% – that’s like an entire business itself. Reminds me of the old adage, goes something like: “I know 50% of my income is from my business, I just don’t know which 50%.”

Three Wise Men on Authenticity

It’s not the ancient gift of perfumes and spices, just some good thinking on being yourself:

“[Pro sports marketing] puts athletes on pedastals . Exactly where they shouldn’t be….The beauty of Happy Gilmore and big personalities is that you don’t have to create commercials to promote them.” – Mark Cuban

“By adopting a term that seems like a simple re-branding of ‘users’, but which is actually unconnected to head count or adoption, they’ve managed to report what the press wants to hear, while providing no actual information.” – Clay Shrirky

“You’re not a bad person, not really, but telling the truth at your current company tends to get people fired.” – Hugh MacLeod

Should I Be Relieved or Concerned?

While undigging from the vacation backlog, I peaked into a BaseCamp account I’m using for a handful of projects and received this message:

Uh. Um. Well. Guess I’ll just toss that To Do list into the trash and head for the beach.

On a related note – while going for my daily walk last Thursday (just happened to be around residential Brussels) I listened to Tim Coyne’s UNKEMPT #12 – Plans.

In it, he digs into a fear I’ve faced head-on more than a couple of times: being responsible for another person’s well-being. Doesn’t matter if this is a partner or a child. The stakes get higher when there’s someone else “riding on your scooter” as Tim puts it.

From my perspective – the good stuff happens on the other side of the fear. There’s something motivating about that obligation.

Hey Tim, metaphorically speaking – maybe it’s time to ditch the scooter. 😉

As always, Tim talks about this fear honestly and openly, if you haven’t given these a listen yet – you should.