The above video is embedded in a fantastic post on work-life balance over on Deliberatism.

(via @Aarron)

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Taken from this Guardian Article, via Jay Parkinson.

Jay Parkinson and his team just launched Sherpaa, an around the clock email and phone access to friendly, NYC-based doctors (or Guides as they call them). Whenever you have a health question or concern, they’re here for you. And they play nicely with the insurance you’ve got.

For now, they’re focusing on working exclusively with tumblr employees but will soon be signing up other NYC-based companies. If you’re interested in joining Sherpaa, let them know. I am!

Jay gave an interesting CreativeMornings talk in 2010, in which he explains how he wants to change health care with help of technology and design. Worth watching.

I fully agree with Fred Wilson’s post from 2009 on email intro etiquette:

“When introducing two people who don’t know each other, ask each of them to opt-in to the introduction before making it.” – Fred Wilson

The Double Opt-In Introduction

(thanks Cameron)

Aboard the New York City Startup Bus.

Imagine this: You and a team of strangers, on a bus, traveling at 60 miles per hour, have 72 hours to conceive, build and launch a startup. That’s StartupBus in a nutshell.

StartupBus began life as a joke, a roadtrip starting in San Francisco with friends, but with the twist of launching a startup on arrival in Austin in time for the SxSW technology conference. Somehow though, people thought Elias Bizannes (the founder) was actually serious. A few unexpected blog articles and many emails later, he was stuck with having to now make good on his pub night promise.

StartupBus has since evolved into a competition and grew six-fold with buses departing from San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, and Miami. In 2011, an impressive 156 ‘buspreneurs’ participated who produced 38 different products.

Talk about turning an experiment into an international community! I can’t help but chuckle at the term Buspreneur. To become one, apply to the StartupBus.

StartupBus – what a refreshing and charming concept! Hat tip!

“For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”

Economist Glen Whitman on The Two Things. Make sure to check out this collection of various Two Things. I must now think about what they are for blogging…

(via bobulate)

Thanks to the above graphic and this post over on brain pickings I will never look at a simple fold the same way again. Same goes for an ant.

Try not.
Do.
Or do not.
There is no try.
- Yoda

(via bblinks)

(via Tim)

Wonderful AIGA talk by Valery Casey, founder of the Designers Accord, the global coalition of designers, educators, and business leaders working together to create positive sustainable impact.

Valery is an impressive force in the design industry: She was named a “Guru” of the year by Fortune magazine, a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine, a “Master of Design” by Fast Company and one of the “World’s Most Influential Designers” by BusinessWeek. The World Economic Forum has honored Casey as a “Young Global Leader.”

I’d love for us as an industry to be more tolerant, to encourage others and get rid of that underlying tone, that has crept in recently, of one-upmanship. I don’t expect everyone to get on, or even share the same opinion, but before making a snarky comment, ask yourself what real value it’s adding to the community? Personally, snarky comments on twitter remind me of one of a saying…

“Rudeness is the weak person’s imitation of strength”.

- Sarah Parmenter, from her blog post “Do Unto Others..”

Urban sprawl is bad. Intellectual sprawl is good. Giving up the previous leads to the latter. Putting people close together forces them to rub off on one another.

- Frank Chimero

From a post by Frank Chimero titled A Series of Ill-Informed Hunches and Observations

I will make sure my kids will watch this over and over as they grow up. Watch more wise clips by Steve Jobs over at brain pickings.

My studiomate Maria, force behind Brain Pickings just launched the Regifting API which aims to destigmatize regifting. Together with Josh Boston she designed a regifting icon, pattern, and stencil stamp. These are available as free, shareable downloads under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license, which basically means you’re welcome to use, remix, and share with attribution for non-commercial purposes. Two swissmiss thumbs up!

Link to resources.

“Don’t strive to make your presence noticed, make your absence felt.”

— Unknown.

(via Quote Vadis)

Is Mercury in Retrograde is a question I asked myself a lot last week. Now I know. Considering just how much went wrong during my trip to Switzerland, I am not surprised the answer is currently YES.

Don’t know what it means, when Mercury is in retrograde? Read up here.

(via Sharon Lee)

Moving and inspiring.

(via Tim)

SO&SO is a lovely new short-form journal for the wandering interneteer. The current, second edition tries to resolve the Atheist / Agnostic distinction. Interesting.

(Hat tip to the creator Alasdair Monk.)

Rob Walker’s The Unconsumption project which focuses on mindful consumption and creative reuse — has embarked on a really cool side project that they’re calling The Uncollection.

Clifton Burt designed the Unconsumption logo, and they put it under a Creative Commons license that allows others to use it. The Uncollection so far is here.

Read more about the thinking behind the Uncollection in this interview with Craft, and this item on FastCompany.com, and of course the links at the top of this page.

Submit pix of your own creations to their Facebook page.

(I think this would make for an excellent Tattly…)

This Class Guidelines at my daughter’s kindergarten class made me smile. It not only applies to 5 year olds. (And no, I don’t know what “Magic Six” is, will have to ask my daughter tonight)

I agree with my studiomate Raul, I like this proclamation by children’s book author Mac Barnett and signed by many other authors.

All I want to be
is a person who makes things
and thinks about them.
– John Maeda

(From this wonderful post by Frank Chimero)

(via @keeftv)

“In Holland, we have two words for design. One is vormgeving; in German formgeben. And the other word is ontwerpen; in German entwurf. In the Anglo-Saxon language there’s only one word for design, which is design. That is something you should work out. Vormgeving is more to make things look nice. So for instance, packaging for a perfume or for chocolate in order to make things fashionable, obsolete and therefore bad for society because we don’t really need it. While ontwerpe means, and the Anglo-saxon word, but its stronger, means engineering. That means you as a person try to invent a new thing—which is intelligent, which is clever, and which will have a long-life. And that’s called stylistic durability. It means you can use it for a long time.”

—  Gert Dumbar

(via frankchimero)

Creating the Future of Education and Work wants to help educators foster creativity and conceptual thinking in schools. The founders, Rita J. King and Joshua Fouts, created creatingthefuturetoday.com as a resource for teachers and parents with ideas that help foster imagination and teach kids to collaborate while problem solving.

(via GOOD / @archiculture)

Leaders are not what many people think–people with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see whether anyone is following them. “Leadership qualities” are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, determination, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head even when things are going badly. This is the opposite of the “charisma” that we hear so much about. – John Holt

Found this quote in a post by Caterina Fake titled Make Things

John Maeda recorded three minutes with David Kelley (IDEO) on what young artists and designers should know. I just kept nodding in agreement while listening.

I know, I am late with posting this one, but I am absolutely loving this stunning stop-motion advertising directed by Johnny Kelly for Chipotle. Check out the making of photos.

A little over a year ago three German students tested the design viability of a shiny black cube. They asked established designers and design critics to assess the cube. Above is the video with design legend Dieter Rams.

I agree with Steve Heller, you’ll never look at a cube the same way again (or will you?).

Read more: Daily Heller: In CUBE We Trust

UPDATE: They just launched their site: the-black-cube.com

This blog post is a few years old but still timely: Liz Danzico makes us think about our Email Closing Lines.

If a closing line can be so meaningful, so important, why are emailers squandering the opportunity, putting no thought in the closing? Time, perhaps, iPhone-finger exhaustion, multi-tasking—they’re all possible excuses. And many times, acceptable ones. We can’t be expected to neatly tie up every email every time. But once in a while, it would be delightful if people applied the same sincerity to the last impressions that we do to first ones.

My personal closing line “Waving from Brooklyn” is not on her list. What’s yours?

(via @brainpicker)

Here’s an interesting round-up of Quora Entries Every Startup CEO Should Read.

(via Chris Glass)

Mike Dempsey’s Design Business Tips.

(via superbunneh)

Plan B, it turns out, is a lot harder than it seems. But that hasn’t stopped cubicle captives from fantasizing. In recent years, a wave of white-collar professionals has seized on a moribund job market, a swelling enthusiasm for all things artisanal and the growing sense that work should have meaning to cut ties with the corporate grind and chase second careers as chocolatiers, bed-and-breakfast proprietors and organic farmers.

An honest look at what it means to run a small business: Maybe It’s Time for Plan C, by Alex Williams

1. Avoid rules. Avoid order. Don’t just embrace chaos, but create a little bit of it. Constant change, from the top-down, keeps people nimble and flexible (and shows that you want constant change).

2. Give yourself and your team permission to be creative. Permission to try something new, permission to fail, permission to embarrass yourself, permission to have crazy ideas.

3. Hire weird people. Not just the tattoo’d and pierced-in-strange-places kind, but people from outside your industry who would approach problems in different ways than you and your normal competitors.

4. Meetings are a necessary evil, but you can avoid the conference room and meet people in the halls, the water cooler, or their desks. Make meetings less about delegation and task management and more about cross-pollination of ideas (especially the weird ideas). This is a lot harder than centralized, top-down meetings. But this is your job — deal with it.

5. Structure your company to be flexible. Creativity is often spontaneous, so the whole company needs to be able to pivot quickly and execute on them (see #1)

(via FastCompany)

Last friday I had the pleasure to meet the folks behind Bolder, a site that helps people to trigger and discover experiences that make the world a little better, one action at a time. You can start a challenge yourself or browse through the challenge catalogue and do positive actions to earn rewards. Anyone can respond to a challenge and earn a reward.

Every challenge is a unique creation started by businesses or people. Challenges pose a request for users to take action, have a little fun, and be part of something that drives positive change.

Here are some of the challenges that caught my eye:

Go completely waste-free for a day
Say no to disposable bag at check-out
Make a regular work meeting a walk meeting

While talking to one of the Bolder founders he told me he used it to challenge his roomates to keep the apartment clean. Whenever they would clean something, they would ‘check in’ and mention what they did. That way they’d get recognized for their actions and earn points. Made me chuckle. I might do the same for Studiomates. But the cool thing is that if enough people meet the challenge, the person posing it has to do something in return. For example: Eric A claims that if 25 people go waste-free for a day he’ll go waste-free for a week!

But the site goes beyond the personal challenges, it invites companies to pose challenges. I like the notion of companies wanting to trigger good actions. And I am not surprised by some of the companies I see up there: Seventh Generation, Rickshaw Bagworks, Nature’s Gate…

Why don’t you go ahead and start a challenge?

Khan Academy is an educational website that, as its tagline puts it, aims to let anyone “learn almost anything—for free.” There’s currently a fantastic write-up about it over at Wired.

(via Amrit)

I am delighted about Chris Anderson’s launch of the Email Charter. We’re drowning in email. And the many hours we spend on it are generating ever more work for our friends and colleagues. We can reverse this spiral only by mutual agreement. Hence the charter:

10 Rules to Reverse the Email Spiral

1. Respect Recipients’ Time
This is the fundamental rule. As the message sender, the onus is on YOU to minimize the time your email will take to process. Even if it means taking more time at your end before sending.

2. Short or Slow is not Rude
Let’s mutually agree to cut each other some slack. Given the email load we’re all facing, it’s OK if replies take a while coming and if they don’t give detailed responses to all your questions. No one wants to come over as brusque, so please don’t take it personally. We just want our lives back!

3. Celebrate Clarity
Start with a subject line that clearly labels the topic, and maybe includes a status category [Info], [Action], [Time Sens] [Low Priority]. Use crisp, muddle-free sentences. If the email has to be longer than five sentences, make sure the first provides the basic reason for writing. Avoid strange fonts and colors.

4. Quash Open-Ended Questions
It is asking a lot to send someone an email with four long paragraphs of turgid text followed by “Thoughts?”. Even well-intended-but-open questions like “How can I help?” may not be that helpful. Email generosity requires simplifying, easy-to-answer questions. “Can I help best by a) calling b) visiting or c) staying right out of it?!”

5. Slash Surplus cc’s
cc’s are like mating bunnies. For every recipient you add, you are dramatically multiplying total response time. Not to be done lightly! When there are multiple recipients, please don’t default to ‘Reply All’. Maybe you only need to cc a couple of people on the original thread. Or none.
6. Tighten the Thread
Some emails depend for their meaning on context. Which means it’s usually right to include the thread being responded to. But it’s rare that a thread should extend to more than 3 emails. Before sending, cut what’s not relevant. Or consider making a phone call instead.

7. Attack Attachments
Don’t use graphics files as logos or signatures that appear as attachments. Time is wasted trying to see if there’s something to open. Even worse is sending text as an attachment when it could have been included in the body of the email.

8. Give these Gifts: EOM NNTR
If your email message can be expressed in half a dozen words, just put it in the subject line, followed by EOM (= End of Message). This saves the recipient having to actually open the message. Ending a note with “No need to respond” or NNTR, is a wonderful act of generosity. Many acronyms confuse as much as help, but these two are golden and deserve wide adoption.

9. Cut Contentless Responses
You don’t need to reply to every email, especially not those that are themselves clear responses. An email saying “Thanks for your note. I’m in.” does not need you to reply “Great.” That just cost someone another 30 seconds.

10. Disconnect!
If we all agreed to spend less time doing email, we’d all get less email! Consider calendaring half-days at work where you can’t go online. Or a commitment to email-free weekends. Or an ‘auto-response’ that references this charter. And don’t forget to smell the roses.

visit emailcharter.org