Build It Better: Marketing With Email Courses (eCourses)
Filed Under Build It Better, In General | 37 Comments
Image credit: Mzelle Biscotte
When a really good idea is executed in a clearly not-good way, it pays to pause and ponder on what the executor could gain from doing it badly.
For example, I was chatting with Tonya from Fake It Until You Make It [an informative ezine I scavenge for free and affordable business tools to review] and she mentioned a free publicity ecourse that had really good content in a not-really-good delivery format.
Based on the ecourse description, I agreed with her assessment that it was overwhelming, but I signed up for it anyway. When the first lesson arrived, what I saw had me wondering if there was something sinister afoot. Read more
8 Random Business Bits About Me
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Image credit: losmininos
Sandie at GeekedOff has tagged me for 8 random facts. They’re (mostly) business relevant: Read more
Born To And Born For Our Crooked Paths
Filed Under In General | 32 Comments
Image credit: djrueb
I love mystery/thriller novels, and I’ve savored virtual stacks of audiobooks while cleaning, driving, and decompressing before bed. It’s fab to “read” one or two books a week while on the run (or inches from sleep), and following the story more closely is an unexpected bonus. My ears tune into small things that my eyes might have skimmed over.
One of these small things is from Tony Hillerman’s Jim Chee novels, where it sounds like the narrator emphasizes the Native American concept of being “born to” and “born for” their parents’ clans when discussing lineage.
My mind has a hard time with this elegant perspective…it’s entirely stuck on my own limited view. To me, born to and born for aren’t about who we’ve come from, they’re about where we’re going to. Read more
Waste No Part Of The Animal
Filed Under In General | 18 Comments
Image credit: equality
Many moons ago, when I thought horror novels were fun, a fiendish book left me with mental images I’d rather forget, and a line that I’d rather not: “We waste no part of the animal.”
Bringing that up in a business context may seem a little off, but “waste no part” is right in line with this week’s reflections about what I’ve brought forward from design school, and last week’s post on my leaving grad school to walk a different road. It may mean something to you, too. Read more
What Could You Create In A Weekend?
Filed Under In General | 13 Comments
Sprint qualifier—Image credit: Dave Haygarth
Yesterday’s zesty comments on brainstorming have encouraged me to continue reminiscing about my design school days. Anything I still remember after 15-20 years is worth massaging into something we can all use now.
What stands out for me today is the Virginia Society’s weekend charette. As I Remember It (AIRI), the annual event was always exciting, thrilling, exhausting, and disappointing. That last was my nature at the time (unfortunately), and the first three were the nature of the game.
The design guidelines and merciless countdown would have hundreds of students cranking out work all weekend—some without any sleep—and I’m still amazed at what we could produce in 63 hours. Looking back on it, what may be useful to us now is how I learned to manage the task, the ways we executed our solutions, and the competitive community spirit at its best. Read more
What’s 10% Of Nothing?
Filed Under In General | 45 Comments
252 of 2,601 squares—Image credit: striatic
The Backstory
Back in 1987—before CDs, iPods, the Internet, and eBay—I was a first year student in Virginia Tech’s architecture program. The program’s first phase was the Foundation, where they stret-t-t-t-t-tched our mind with design possibilities. And my first professor, Gene Egger, was max fabulous at making design possibilities happen.
The man wouldn’t let us use color for three months—he said we had earn it. No fasteners or glue for model building, either. From Labor Day to Thanksgiving, our world was pencil and black pens, white poster board, white paper, and clever assembly.
And so he kept us focused on the fundamentals of making things—not making things pretty—and we learned to handle materials the way they wanted to be handled. His offbeat rules had an amazing way of teaching us things we didn’t appreciate until much later.
Oddly enough, his lessons have helped me throughout my many detours, like developing websites and building databases. But the best of Egger’s lessons might be the most widely applicable: his 10% rule. Read more
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