Trapper Markelz

Steve Jobs did what a CEO is suppose to do.

Best statement I have read about Steve Jobs.

He did what a CEO should: Hired and inspired great people; managed for the long term, not the quarter or the short-term stock price; made big bets and took big risks. He insisted on the highest product quality and on building things to delight and empower actual users, not intermediaries like corporate IT directors or wireless carriers. And he could sell. Man, he could sell.

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Reading Anything You Want by Derek Sivers

I grabbed Anything you want on Kindle because it was short. I was in the mood for a quick read. Sometimes you get like that right? Every where I looked (on Twitter) were people quoting parts of it, so I figured that was enough social proof to check out just who this Derek Sivers person was!

I was not familiar with the website CD Baby. I am not super into the indi music scene, so no surprise there. It sounds like it was a brilliant, disruptive idea that was almost ahead of its time. Through sheer blood, sweat and tears, Derek walked his own path, and managed to find some amount of success.

I can't say I can identiy much with Derek. As a product manager, some of his decisions seem pretty foreign to me. He sounded like a control freak in some cases (around the web code) and in other cases didn't want to be bothered to a point of general neglect for his company. If there is one lesson I learned, it is that a good idea with amazingly strong product/market fit will succeed, even when you do everything possible to keep it small. 

Given that I was reading this on Kindle, I did highlight a few quotes. Kindle is nice enough to save these on the web where I can easily find them, so here you go... some interesting stuff/advice from Derek Sivers:

Every event you get invited to. Every request to start a new project. If you're not saying “HELL YEAH!” about it, say “no.”

No plan survives first contact with customers.

None of your customers will ask you to turn your attention to expanding.

When you build your business on serving thousands of customers, not dozens, you don't have to worry about any one customer leaving or making special demands. If most of your customers love what you do, but one doesn't, you can just say goodbye

You need to confidently exclude people, and proudly say what you're not. By doing so, you will win the hearts of the people you want.

Have the confidence to know that when your target 1 percent hears you excluding the other 99 percent, the people in that 1 percent will come to you because you've shown how much you value them.

You can probably read this book in a single sitting. I blasted through it on the train during my morning commute in two days. I can recommend Anything You Want as a unique perspective on brute forcing a company your own way no matter what anyone tells you. There are lessons here for sure on being true to yourself, but I can't help but ignore that Derek really didn't want to start a company. He wanted to be a musician. He loves music. The company just sort of happened because he was there with the right idea and the right execution at the right moment. Timing as it turns out, continues to be everything.

2030 by Albert Brooks

I watch a lot of Daily Show, so it is no surprise that many of my book suggestions come from that. It is too easy to just grab the free version off Kindle for any recommendation and dive right in. Check out the Albert Brooks Daily Show episode for a good book recap.

2030 is about the near future. All the problems we have now (debt, health care, economic troubles, etc) have not been solved and have become worse to a debilitating degree. The scary part about this book is that it all seems so... possible.

It isn't all bad... by 2030 cancer (and many other diseases) have been cured. But in these awesome scientific advances there are all sorts of negative outcomes related to health care now supporting even more elderly people who are living longer and taking increased advantage of medicare, medicaid, and social security. This in turn creates resentment in the younger generations who see a nation destroyed by debt, and their increasing taxes put towards keeping the old alive at the expense of opportunities for the young.

As you can imagine, it is a complex set of culture issues that create all sorts of interesting directions to explore. Unfortunately large parts of the book are spent on the romantic relationships between the main characters which does little to propel the narrative forward in my opinion. But regardless, I deem the entire book an interesting thought experiment that culminates in a challenging idea about true globalism and the role of countries in the future beyond 2030. 

The book reads quick, so if anything I mention above seems interesting, give it a go.

Character and Motivation of an Entrepreneur

I was reading through the Kindle sample for Don't Count on It!: Reflections on Investment Illusions, Capitalism, "Mutual" Funds, Indexing, Entrepreneurship, Idealism, and Heroes and came across a nice quote that John C. Bogle dropped from economist Joseph Schumpeter about the character and motivation of an entrepreneur:

"First, the dream and the will to found a kingdom. Second, the will to conquer, the impulse to fight, to succeed for the sake of success; not of the fruits of success, but of success itself. Third, the joy of creating, getting things done, of simply exercising one's energy and ingenuity."

Sounds like fun to me!

I haven't dug into Derek Sivers new book Anything You Want yet... but a few of his principals align with this:

1. Business is not about money. It’s about making dreams come true for others and for yourself.
2. When you make a company, you make a utopia. It’s where you design your perfect world.

...etc.

In short, do things that you think are awesome because you want to.

Book Review: Game On by Jon Radoff

In the interest of full disclosure, Jon Radoff and I have a bit of history! He bought a company from me. Hired me at gamerDNA to run product development. And now him and I are working together on a small project at MeYou Health. When I heard Jon was writing a book about social media games, I told him I would be happy to read and review it. So here we go!

As the title states, Game On is about nothing less than transforming how you think about your business through the application of ideas and patterns born out of social media gaming. The hot term for this is "gamification". And while that term is helpful, gamification is a technique, but it isn't a process. What Jon gives you is a way of thinking about how you apply this nebulous term to your business right now.

Ultimately, that is why I like this book. It doesn't spend a ton of time trying to convince you that gaming is a trend you should pay attention to. Zynga (one of the hottest social game companies on the planet) has a multi-billion dollar market cap. We shouldn't need much convincing. 

But what I think we do need is a clear understanding on how any of this social game craziness matters to us. Jon attacks this head on in Chapter 2 - "Games have changed the business playfield" - by laying out very clearly how the media and online landscape has changed and how these changes have altered how we interact, and how social games have capitalized on these changes to become so popular. It turns out that social media games focus on doing many of the things your business should be doing!

• Facilitating human contact
• Creating enjoyable experiences
• Recruiting the learning machinery of the brain
• Engaging your creativity
• Allowing you to Interact anywhere through digital technology
• Building around asyncronous consumption

All of our businesses should strive for these things in this connected, digital, participatory, entertainment-driven era. If you aren't striving now, maybe after reading Game On, you will be!

For me, since I am not specifically building a social game, the meat of the book was Chapters 4 - 6 where you learn to think of your customers as "players", the process around "Fungineering" and some case studies of turning work into fun (which features MeYou Health on pages 150,151).

With my work on behavior change in the health space, I continue to rely on the fulfillment mechanics that games are so good at leveraging. For the longest time I have used Dr. Richard Bartle's model as a way of describing motivation, but going forward I plan to reference Jon's refactoring of that model into a slightly richer version that accounts for a few different nuances that I find valuable. See below: 

In summary, I think Game On is a book written at the right moment. It takes a term like "gamification" that people can't decide if they like or not, and cuts straight through to what really matters: the patterns that drive greater loylaty, engagement, and passion for your product and business. I plan to recommend it to anyone I know looking for a good primer on this latest trend.

Will you someday change your name to hide from social media?

Sketch 49 (mistakes) by Greg Biche

I cam across an article on TechCrunch that discusses if, sometime in the future, we might get a free name change as we enter adulthood to hide from all the crazy things we posted online or were captured about us in our youthful experimentations. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google was the one who raised this:

“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he [Eric Schmidt] says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

Techcrunch author Jason Kincaid goes on to critique this statement from a few angles.

"if this name-changing practice became commonplace, how long would it take for an entire industry to emerge built around helping businesses who wanted to go the extra mile and link people with their “former” identities? You can bet they’d pay for that privilege."

"...in an age where search will be much more powerful than it is now, a simple name change probably won’t present much of a hurdle to anyone actively looking to dive into your online past."

Read the full article

I think Jason is missing the point. There will always be ways for people to dig deep into your electronic past and find out who you really are and what you did. Just because I don't have the same email address today as I did a while back, doesn't mean people can't search for that and find some volatile material if they really wanted to.

But I do think that a name change (just like an email change or an internet nickname/handle/username change) obscures you quite well from anyone who is looking around. I have hired lots of people and I rarely do a background check on them... but I always do a google/facebook/flickr/youtube search on them. So while it won't fool a background check, or some shadow industry that will arise to find all the videos of you stealing pumpkins and egging cars when you were 16 years old... a name change could be just another step in the future that feels as normal as changing a mobile number or an email address.

The reality is that most people just aren't going to look that hard... and it will be quite easy to hide from what they could easily find with a new name.

Dauntless (The Lost Fleet Series, Book 1) By Jack Campbell

Sometimes a book just jumps out and grabs you. Dauntless kept coming up as a recommended book for me in various places. I don't know why I kept ignoring it. The other day I was in a book store with some time to kill, so I sat down to try out the first few pages. That is all it took. The next day, I knew I had to complete the story so I picked it up on Kindle for the daily commute.

Dauntless is your standard fish out of water tale of a man who wakes up after a 100-year sleep in a survival pod to discover that he is a mythic hero of the ages. His last stand in a space battle a century ago has made him legend, and his discovery serves to fulfill a prophecy that he would return to lead the Alliance to victory.

Now mind you, when this book starts out, there is no sign of victory. This book jumps you right into the groggy mind of Captain Jack "Black" Geary. In his mind, he had only been asleep for two weeks... but now he has woken up... in a stateroom... on a battle cruiser that is facing hopeless odds. He suddenly finds himself in command (not by choice) and has to come to grips with the weight of expectations places on him. Not to mention when he died he was a commander... never captained a ship much less a fleet...

And that is all in the first few pages. I ripped through this book in two days. And the best part is that there are five books left.

I do have to say that the way Jack Campbell describes space battles in this is excellent. Everything is extremely precise about how moving around at 0.1 - 0.2 the speed of light plays all kinds of tricks with relativistic effects. And also how if you have a fleet spread out around space, it takes light 30-90 seconds sometimes for your instructions to flow around. Also when ships enter a system there are light-hours between them so knowing what is going on at all times is an amazing challenge. The author does a great job making this all work and feel extremely genuine. The space battles are the best part.

If you like Old Man's War and Forever War, I think you will like this.

A Tear at the Edge of Creation by Marcelo Gleiser

I came across A Tear at the Edge of Creation when it was reviewed in Wired magazine. These are the kinds of books you file away in your mind because if you decide to read them, they are a commitment. 

This thing is dense. Packed with a review of every aspect of physics from general relatively down to quantum mechanical musings on string theory and M-Theory... and everything in between. It all tried to pick apart the assumption by physicists that we must pursue a unifying theory. 

The biggest challenge with physics is that there are all these forces... and all these particles... and some of them operate on very large scales (like gravity) and some of them on very small scales (like the strong nuclear force)... and then there are all these particles... some with mass (protons) and some with little mass (neutrinos) and some with no mass (photons)... All of this is explained in the Standard Model which is probably one of the most amazing things the human mind has ever collectively created.

The problem is, as you go back in time... further and further to the exact moment of the Big Bang... everything starts to break down. 

One of the leading motivations to pursue a better "Theory of Everything" is that the standard model is an inelegant mishmash of particles, constants, forces etc. Marcelo jumps on this and asked the question: Why must we think everything be symmetrical and elegant? He then spends most of the book showing example after example how most of the universe and its evolution comes largely from asymmetric and at times random scenarios. 

The last part of the book takes a bit of a different turn as he jumps from cosmology to evolutionary biology and makes a case for the rarity of life in the universe, and the ramifications that would have on science if we are in fact a rare accident, humanity as an error, worth protecting and propagating. This theory and philosophical exercise was in stark contrast to Biocosm which tries to argue that life possibly exists in any energy gradient in the universe... although as Marcelo points out... there are plenty of energy gradients in our own solar system and nothing to show for it.

In summary, A Tear at the Edge of Creation is a mix of cosmology, biology, and scientific philosophy all rolled into one. If you are into any of this... this book is great. Give it a read. 

There are no special books

A Rainbow Of Books

"What book could you read over and over?"

I was asked this question on Formspring.me and my answer is: There are too many books to read them over.

I have read a ton of good books in my life... and maybe someday I will re-read them... but not any time soon. Walk into a bookstore or (more recently) pull up the virtual store on your Kindle or iBooks and gaze at the amazing diversity of literary awesome that stands before you. No my friends... not any time soon.

Even within the tiny niche of my science fiction addiction, I have now come across enough authors that I enjoy that I am starting to fall behind on all the sequels and add-ons to universes already explored. Just tackling this expanding reading list alone will take me a good while.

When it comes to games, movies or books, there are just far to many left to experience (and being produced every week) to turn back to a favorite. What about all the potential NEW favorites?!?

I honestly can't think of a single time I have re-read any full-length book and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Switch by Chip & Dan Heath

Every one in awhile you hear about a business/idea book that happens to discuss something you are working on at that very moment. When I started at MeYou Health and it became apparent in the first month that we were building a new "behavior change platform", I had to pick this up.

In short, Switch is great. You could get a lot out of it if you are in any situation where you are trying to make change happen. You might be in a big company trying to change the entrenched ways that people work, or you might be in a small start up trying to introduce a new behavior to an old industry. There are many scenarios where getting a framework for how and why people change could help you accomplish your goals.

In short, this book claims that in order to achieve change you must control three factors:

• The Rider - This is our rational and logical side, often paralyzed by choices.
• The Elephant - This is our emotional side, guided by impulse, pleasure, fear.
• The Path - This is the direction you want the rider and the elephant to move along.

The analogy is such that the Rider directs the Elephant most of the time, but the Elephant is so big that if it wants to do something, it can... and the Rider is powerless. So it is important to shape the Path so that the Rider and the Elephant know where to go. The book is therefore broken up into three main pieces: Direct the Rider, Motivate the Elephant and Shape the Path.

While the concepts of Chip and Dan Heath aren't originally created (and come from long standing psychology), the narrative in which they package and explain it, and the examples they give, really bring the material to life and cement it in your mind. I have found myself talking in their language frequently, especially when it comes to thinking about how we shape the path for users as they engage with a product.

All in all, a great book. I highly recommend it for anyone trying to change the world.