January 13, 2005
Sloooooooowwwwww.....
Today I went to Starbuck's and hung out with a bagel from Noah's next door and a mocha. Although I was experiencing anxiety about being away from my PC - I did have my Treo however - I resisted the temptation to wolf down my bagel and rush back home to finish all the stuff I had to do.
Instead, I savored the calm moment of being there at Starbuck's, reading some of my recent magazines that I got this last week, ripping pictures out of them for my coaching process (see my coaching blog), and sipping my mocha while listening to my iPod.
Steadily, I enter the realm of "slowness". I just bought the book "In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed" by Carl Honore. I am eager to dig into this book as my life is just so ridiculously full right now and I need to make sure I do not overload myself inadvertently. I have lots of interests and really need to evaluate what's most important, what I'm really committed to, and what can be done later.
So many of us veterans of the dot-com years can't help but live in the hyper-fast world of information overload and shrinking deadlines and getting it done yesterday. But yet, we never stop to listen to a friend or my child, really absorb the richness of the world through our senses, or just sit and think deeply about a topic or our lives.
Even now, my favorite moments with friends are just sitting down and having a focused one-on-one conversation with them. I abhor conversations in group settings; they inevitably boil down to quick snippets of "how are you?" and "what's up" and then that's it before you move to the next person.
Back to Starbucks: So I still hit the Send/Receive button on SnapperMail on my Treo every now and then. Can't break the habit that quickly...! But I do know that I am enjoying the relaxed nature of slowing down and plan to do this much more.
Posted by dshen at 11:21 PM
Unfetter my mind!
Today I learned something incredibly important.
So I met up with James who runs hotornot.com. Wow - what unbridled creativity I saw! It was an awesome conversation he and I had. Not just for the content, but what it made me realize.
As we grow older, our brains get more and more shackled and we start thinking about what won't work and what we can't do. But the internet is not like that. I have seen so many things that I thought would never work suddenly spring into success!
And James just made me realized how shackled my brain was. I need to re-open my brain, my creativity, and my willingness to try lots of new things on my internet startup. It's the only way to do something that others won't have thought of and keep ahead of the innovation curve.
He also hired a bunch of Berkeley CS students. Not just for their energy and willingness to code all nite, but for their lack of brain constraints because they were young and untainted by the corporate world, and their youthful creative thinking on what could be cool and what could work. It was a way for him to not be limited and to generate new and interesting ideas, or ways of doing things.
No MRDs, no justifications to upper management. Just create and do.
It is a shame that larger corporations and our experiences (as we age) stifle this type of thinking and innovation. How do we all re-capture the child in ourselves and remove the shackles we have placed on our minds?
James, you just joined my list of HEROES. Dude, I wanna be like you.
Posted by dshen at 04:32 AM
January 12, 2005
CSS - so many details
Whew fixed. So I'm old school and trying to figure out this new CSS formating stuff. I left out a clear : both in the style for the div's. At least now my site looks right. Many thanks to Dan Cederholm's Book Web Standards Solutions, a bible for us HTML dinosaurs.
Posted by dshen at 02:32 AM
January 08, 2005
Movable Type Rocks!
I am happy to say that my programming skills have not atrophied - although I can't say the same for my CSS/HTML skills as this site looks really jacked in Mozilla. Oh well - one out of 2 ain't bad. Next few days gotta fix the CSS on my little site to work in Mozilla.
Movable Type is great!
Posted by dshen at 06:02 AM
