Version 3.8 of WordPress, named “Parker” has been released and it is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard! Finally, this release has been focused on long awaited, WordPress UI / Admin Panel improvements. Quick review of the new WordPress 3.8 features: 1. New flat, minimalistic & responsive admin design Finally WP admin interface received a fresh & modern look, which will is based on: MP6 plugin. 2. Dashboard homepage has been simplified & redesigned New dashboard is now having only few but more useful & relevant widgets. 3. Better live preview of themes Process of choosing themes has been also improved and new, faster interface has been added for the theme previews. 4. Redesigned & improved widgets page Finally we are now able to add widget sidebar destination without dragging it across the screen. 5. New Twenty Fourteen Theme If like me, you were never a fan of Twenty Thirteen, good news is that the new default theme coming in WP 3.8 is looking much better, you can check the Twenty Fourteen live demo.

Hello I am looking for a developer(s) to finish my iOS app. I have a full working website but it needs to completely migrate over to full iOS functionality. The website will only serve as a splash from now on. I got started with some basic functio [...]

I’ve talked openly about the five month long depressive episode I went through earlier this year.  If you missed it, I encourage you to read my article last month in Inc. Magazine titled Entrepreneurial Life Shouldn’t Be This Way–Should It? Depression is a fact of life for some entrepreneurs.

My depression lifted near the end of May and I’ve been feeling normal for the past few months. On July 1st I wrote a post titled Regroup Successful. I changed a lot of tactical things in my life in Q2 – some of them likely helped me get to a place where my depression lifted. And, once I was confident that the depression had lifted (about 45 days ago), I started trying to figure out some of the root causes of my depression.

I’ve told the story of how I ended up depressed a number of times. In the telling of it, I searched for triggers – and found many. My 50 mile run in April 2012 that left me emotional unbalanced for six weeks. A bike accident in early September that really beat me up, and was inches from being much more serious. Six weeks of intense work and travel on the heals of the bike accident that left me physically and emotionally depleted, when what I should have done was cancelled everything and retreated to Boulder to recover. A marathon in mid-October that I had no business running, followed by two more weeks of intense work and travel. The sudden death of our dog Kenai at age 12. A kidney stone that resulted in surgery, followed by a two week vacation mostly in a total post-surgical haze. Complete exhaustion at the end of the year – a physical level of fatigue that I hadn’t yet felt in my life. There are more, but by January I was depressed, even though I didn’t really acknowledge it fully until the end of February.

The triggers, and the tactical changes I made, all impacted me at one level. But once the depression had lifted, I felt like I could dig another level and try to understand the root cause. With the help of Amy and a few friends, I’ve made progress on this and figured out two of the root causes of a depressive episode that snuck up on me after a decade of not struggling with depression.

The first is the 80/20 rule. When running Feld Technologies in my 20s, I remember reading a book about consulting that said a great consultant spent 20% of their time on “overhead” and 80% of their time on substantive work for their clients. I always tried to keep the 80/20 rule in mind – as long as I was only spending 20% of my time on bullshit, nonsense, things I wasn’t interested in, and repetitive stuff that I didn’t really have to do, I was fine. However, this time around, I’d somehow gotten the ratios flipped – I was spending only 20% of my time on the stimulating stuff and 80% of my time on stuff I viewed as unimportant. Much of it fell into the repetitive category, rather than the bullshit category, but nonetheless I was only stimulated by about 20% of the stuff I was doing. This led to a deep boredom that I didn’t realize, because I was so incredibly busy, and tired, from the scope and amount of stuff I was doing. While the 20/80 problem was the start, the real root cause was the boredom, which I simply didn’t realize and wasn’t acknowledging.

The other was a fundamental disconnect between how I was thinking about learning and teaching. I’ve discussed my deep intrinsic motivation which comes from learning. At age 47, I continue to learn a lot, but I also spend a lot of my time teaching. The ratio between the two shifted aggressively at the end of 2012 with the release of my book Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City. I spent a lot of time teaching my theory of startup communities to many people I didn’t previously know in lots of different places. I expected that I’d continue learning a lot about Startup Communities during this period, but I found that I had no time to reflect on anything, as all of my available time was consumed doing my regular work. So – between teaching and working, I had almost no time for learning.

I had an intense insight a few weeks ago when a friend told me that as one gets older, the line between learning and teaching blurs. This is consistent with how I think about mentoring, where the greatest mentor – mentee relationship is a peer relationship, where both the mentor and mentee learn from and teach each other. With this insight, I realized I needed to stop separating learning from teaching in my motivational construct – that they were inextricably linked.

Each of these – the flip in the 80/20 rule that led to a deep boredom combined with the separation of learning and teaching – were both root causes of my recent depression. As I reflect on where I’m at in mid-August, I’m neither bored nor struggling with the learning/teaching dichotomy. Once again, I’m incredibly stimulated by what I’m spending my time on. And I’m both learning and teaching, and not spending any energy separating the two.

While I expect I’ll discover more root causes as I keep chewing on what I just went through in the first half of the year, I’m hopeful that explanation of how I’ve unpacked all of this helps anyone out there struggling with depression, or that is close to someone who is struggling with depression. It’s incredibly hard to get to the root causes when you are depressed, but moments of clarity arise at unexpected times.

The post Two Root Causes of My Recent Depression appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Appalling, yet not surprising (which, itself, is appalling).

Spokespeople from some of the tech companies are denying involvement, but I don’t trust those denials at all: not only have they left a lot of potential loopholes in the wording, but the post-9/11 U.S. federal government, especially via the executive branch under Presidents Bush and Obama, has instituted conditions under which they can order online businesses to disclose user information and prevent them from ever disclosing the order’s existence or the actions taken.

PRISM claims to only be intended for monitoring “foreign” communications, but that’s just lip service: they have access to everything, they try to establish that a target may be foreign, and then they collect two degrees of Kevin Bacon out from them even if it includes Americans.

Let’s see if Obama has anything to say about this. And, more importantly, let’s see if he takes any action to restore reasonable rights to our citizens and businesses. My guess: he might say something promising, but probably not; either way, he won’t actually do anything about it. (Not that any other viable candidates would have.)

Times like this show the great value, to society as a whole, of widely available cryptography and open-source software. Even people with nothing to hide shouldn’t tolerate or permit overreaching government spying.

∞ Permalink

This is a really touching 20 minute video about how Zach Sobiech, a 17 year old diagnosed with bone cancer, chose to spend his final months. Inspirational.

It reminded me of the Enjoy Every Sandwich book trailer.

By Andrea Plaid

Now, I can understand critiquing this Cheerios commercial for being, say, heterosexist–and even at that, that’s not a critique that unto itself would shut down a YouTube comment section.

Nope. The decision-makers at Cheerios had to shut the comments because the racists somehow thought it was a dog-whistle for them to get their hatred on. From Huffington Post:

The ad had received more than 1,600 likes and more than 500 dislikes as of Thursday evening.

Prior to the closure, the comment section had been filled “with references to Nazis, ‘troglodytes’ and ‘racial genocide,’” according to Adweek.

Commenters on the cereal’s Facebook page also said they found the commercial “disgusting” and that it made them “want to vomit.” Other hateful commenters expressed shock that a black father would stay with his family.

Though the racists shut down the comments section, Huffington Post reports that “many took to Facebook to express their appreciation for Cheerios’ decision to feature a mixed-race family,” and the commercial is still up on YouTube.

(H/t Lakesia Johnson)

I apologize that it has been a minute since I've written here. I recently moved back to New Orleans to take a break from Los Angeles and restart my career as a freelancer. It's been a lot of fun getting to make internets with the likes of Rian Rochford, Leda Chang, Jason Feinberg, Harold Gutierrez, and many others again. Today I want to share some details on a Queens of the Stone Age campaign I launched last week in support of their soon to be released record, …Like Clockwork.

---

I met Josh Homme about five years ago while working at SAM. He called me “pubes” because my voice cracked during the meeting, and while we've created a lot of mischief together during Era Vulgaris and Them Crooked Vultures, we haven't worked an entire record cycle together. To say I'm excited is an understatement. Not to mention the new album is a fucking masterpiece.

Josh's visual aesthetic mimics his musical style: dark, mysterious, crass… and he always seems to surround himself with the best talent to make his fucked up vision(s) a reality. This record is no different as he employed the help of Liverpool based illustrator Boneface to create the album artwork and a series of Liam Brazier animated videos set to songs from the record.

Concept

Two weeks ago I jumped on a Skype call with Boneface and Liam to discuss my vision for hyping this series of videos based on an idea I had that actually came from a defunct Tom Petty proposal I wrote recently.

The concept involved allowing the user to feel attached to what they were seeing on screen via a phone call initiated by the subject. So what started as Tom Petty standing in a phone booth, turned into an evil clown mask wearing figure… I love ideas, like Call Drops, which feel like magic but are actually simple builds technically. Fucking with someone's phone is a surefire way to grab their attention and force them into the story you're telling.

Boneface and Liam agreed so I wrote them a scripted grocery list of assets I needed to pull it off.

Script

1. INTRO -Pan into room where clown is sitting.
2. IDLE - Clown sits patiently waiting for user interaction. (Loop)
3. PICKUP - Switch to close up of clown, picks up phone from receiver.
4. DIAL - Clown dials each digit 0-9 of users number. (Click sound)
5. TALK - Clown “talks” to user. (Loop)
6. OUTRO - Clown hangs up and camera pans out of room.

Within three days, Boneface and Liam had delivered all the assets I needed while also simultaneously working on our animated series. That's some serious hustle. Then I got nerdy.

Tech

HTML5 Video

I began development by including each video file within an HTML5 <video> element. All were given the setting of preload to load them automatically (on desktop.) The idle and talk videos were set to loop as they would play constantly until that particular phase was finished.

<video id='intro' preload autoplay>
  <source src='/video/intro.mp4' />
</video>

<video id='idle' preload loop>
  <source src='/video/idle.mp4' />
</video>

In order for the HTML5 video to work cross browser and, you'll need to include several formats of each video. Check out Rob Walsh's tutorial for creating these formats using Quicktime and ffmpeg2theora.

Using jQuery, I was able to bind a listener for each videos “ended” event and jump to the next scripted video. For example, when the intro ended, I wanted the idle video to play. So in Coffeescript I wrote:

$("#intro").bind("ended", function() {
  $("#intro").hide();
  $("#idle").show().get(0).play();
});

These were layered and binded in a way to script the entire scene, and also adjust other elements on the page as needed.

I expiremented by creating a sort of video sprite sheet, and setting the play position to each section in a similar manner, but I couldn't get the millisecond precision I needed, causing things to look glitchy. However, I feel like that could technically work if done correctly.

Twilio

User phone numbers were obtained via a simple input form on the page and were asynchronously sent to an action on the server. This function made sure the input was a phone number and then normalized and formatted it accordingly using the excellent Phony gem.

if Phony.plausible?(params["phone_number"])
  phone_number = Phony.normalize(params["phone_number"])
  phone_number = Phony.formatted(phone_number, format: :international, spaces: '')
end

I then used Twilio to initiate a call, and if successful, create a new user in my local database with the newly obtained phone number.

call = twilio.account.calls.create(
  from: ENV['TWILIO_NUMBER'],
  to: phone_number,
  application_sid: ENV['TWILIO_APP_ID'],
  if_machine: 'Hangup'
)

user = User.first_or_create(phone_number: call.to)

Finally, the unique “sid” of the call was sent back to the client application. I'll tell you why in a bit. ;-)

{ sid: call.sid }.to_json

The actual application which is ran for each placed call is part of a seperate action which I specified in my Twilio account. Using Twilio's XML friendly markup, TwiML, I tell the app to Play the clown's dialog and Sms a message once the call is completed. Pretty simple.

response = Twilio::TwiML::Response.new do |r|
  r.Play '/phone.wav'
  r.Sms 'Return. May 6th. http://likeclockwork.tv', to: phone_number, from: ENV['TWILIO_NUMBER']
end

For US numbers, this only cost us $0.02 per call and we were able to pull geographical data (city, state, zip) about each caller. International was more expensive and some countries, like Brazil, cost as much as $0.33 per call. Next time I would probably stick to US, UK, and those countries that were less than $0.05. Sorry Brazil! You can check Twilio's pricing here.

Pusher

Given the varying times it takes for a phone call to be placed and received, I couldn't show the talking animation for a set time and then transition into the outro. Instead I needed a way to know exactly when a call ended. Luckily Twilio provides a status callback URL, which can notify my app of each completed call. Combine this with a real-time API like Pusher and you've got a 1 to 1 representation of the actual call.

It all starts with that unique “sid” the Twilio call response provides. We'll want to receive that one the client and subscribe to a Pusher event of the same name. When that event is triggered, the hang up animation should be shown.

pusher  = new Pusher(PUSHER_ID);
channel = pusher.subscribe(CHANNEL);

channel.bind(sid, function(data) {
  $("#talk").hide();
  $("#outro").show().get(0).play();
});

Then we simply tell our Twilio status function to trigger the event of the same “sid” after each completed call.

Pusher[CHANNEL].trigger(params['CallSid'], { sid: params['CallSid'] })

This works so well that if you hang up on the clown prematurely, he'll react accordingly on screen almost instantly. It would be bad ass if he reacted differently to dropped calls and bad numbers also, but we didn't get that far this time.

Howler.js

Since the app had two audio files, background ambience and dial clicks, I needed a way to play two sounds simultaneously which also worked on mobile. Typically I would use Scott Schiller's excellent SoundManager2 but I didn't think it would handle web audio the way I needed so I found a new library called Howler.js that did exactly what I needed.

Setting up each sound was easy enough:

background = new Howl({
  urls: ['loop.mp3'],
  autoplay: true,
  loop: true,
  volume: 0.5
});

click = new Howl({
  urls: ['click.wav'],
  volume: 1.0
});

And playing the click after each dial is a simple:

click.play();

Looking back, perhaps I could have just added the click audio to each of the dial videos… in fact, maybe I'm an idiot for not doing that… Whatever. It worked.

Outro

If you're in the United States, you can still try the clown dialer here. And be sure to check out “I Appear Missing” the first of our animated videos below:

As always, thanks for reading and checking out the work. You can expect much more open-sourced knowledge here over the summer. Follow me on Twitter for the latest and please let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Over the past couple years, I’ve become a huge Louis C.K. fan. I’m almost done with Season 2 of his show Louie, which is amazing. 20 minute episodes packed with comedy and real insight.

In his recent Rolling Stone interview (paywall), he says this:

I don’t mind feeling sad. Sadness is a lucky thing to feel. I have the same amount of happy and sad as anybody else. I just don’t mind the sad part as much; it’s amazing to have those feelings. I’ve always felt that way. I think that looking at how random and punishing life can be, it’s a privilege. There’s so much to look at, there’s so much to observe, and there’s a lot of humor in it. I’ve had sad times, I’ve had some hard times, and I have a lot of things to be sad about, but I’m pretty happy right now.

Agreed. Observing how you feel, not judging it or immediately trying to change it, is a powerful habit to develop. It’s the lynchpin of the Vipassana meditation I practice.

“Negative” emotions like sadness can deepen you. Suffering deepens you. These feelings can be instructive. They can inspire empathy. They can be darkly hilarious. And ultimately, they’re impermanent. As Goenka says, all sensations arise, pass away. Arise, pass away.

Wise people seem to know this: when bad shit happens to you, experience it. Don’t run from it. Don’t run from grief or pain or suffering. Accept it. Observe it. And then observe it leave your body, over time.

My 2007 post Do Only Negative Emotions Count for Depth? covers this theme, and the comments there are excellent. In the five years since, I’m still not sure whether joy really stretches and deepens you. But I am as convinced as ever that sadness does.

“When have you felt really sad?” is an interesting question to ask someone.

“You can do anything you put your mind to!”

“The sky’s the limit!”

“You’re the best!”

“Follow your dreams!”

Did you hear these kinds of things growing up? Your parents sure meant well. They really felt like you were the most special creature to arrive on planet earth – a beautiful boy full of limitless possibilities. You could do anything in the world!

But now that that boy is grown up and in his twenties, you might find that such encouragement has become more paralyzing than motivating. If your possibilities really are endless, how will you ever decide which path to take and what to do with your life?

Meg Jay is a clinical psychologist who specializes in counseling young patients who are struggling with navigating their twenties. One of the case studies she talks about in her fantastic book, The Defining Decade (we have and will be referencing it a lot here on the blog – it’s really a must-read), focuses on “Ian,” who can’t decide what to do with his life. Should he pursue something in graphic design, go to law school (which would please his parents), learn Arabic and do some kind of foreign service work, or maybe postpone the decision altogether with a trip through Asia? He feels like he’s drowning in a vast ocean of choices and doesn’t have any idea which direction to head. Jay writes:

“He couldn’t see land in any direction, so he didn’t know which way to go. He felt overwhelmed by the prospect that he could swim anywhere or do anything. He was equally paralyzed by the fact that he didn’t know which of the anythings would work out. Tired and hopeless at age twenty-five, he said he was treading water to stay alive.”

The Alluring Myth of a Limitless Future

As we all intrinsically know (and for reasons we’ll discuss more below), nobody’s future is in fact “limitless.” But holding onto the feeling of endless possibilities, instead of going after a few of them, is very alluring — even if doing so makes us anxious or restless. Here’s why:

It feels freeing. People love having as many choices as possible (even if an overload of them can make us unhappy). Believing that every avenue is still open to you is both comforting and liberating. We love the sense of the unknown and the intoxication of vast possibilities.

For this reason, we may hesitate to choose one door, as it can feel like doing so closes a bunch of other ones. Getting an MBA and going into business likely means you won’t be an orthopedic surgeon; we want to hold to the belief we could do either one, yet we choose neither. As Ian put it, “claiming something felt like losing everything else.” Plus, in contrast to the noncommittal task of peering in each direction from the middle of an intersection, picking a single road to start traveling down can feel boring and constraining – as well as a lot more work. Once you choose a path to take, that decision comes with necessary next steps and responsibilities. It’s much easier to sit on the curb and watch the world go by than to hustle and make something of yourself.

You have incredibly high expectations. Because many in Generation Y (I’m right on the tail end of it myself) were raised to feel as though we were (and are) very special, we often say we don’t want to settle for an “ordinary” life. We want our lives to be different than our parents’ were in some way — to be extraordinary. People feel very convicted about this, but if you ask them what having an extraordinary life means, they’re usually not sure. They’re likely to say something about not wanting a regular 9-5 office job and wanting to do something they love, but even here they’re vague on what this might actually look like. They know what they don’t want, but aren’t sure of what they do. They figure they will simply know it when they see it, and so keep their options open in the hope that the path to an “extraordinary” life will somehow reveal itself.

You don’t know how to get started. Sometimes those who say they don’t know what to do with their life in fact really do know. What they don’t know is how to go after that dream, so it feels better to tell themselves, and others, that they’re still trying to figure things out. As Jay puts it, not knowing what to do with your life brings great uncertainty, but “the more terrifying uncertainty is wanting something but not knowing how to get it.”

If you don’t start, you can’t fail. Even if you do have an idea of how to get started on building the life you want, you might be scared of trying and then failing. If you keep all your choices in the realm of mere possibilities, you don’t have to risk finding out you don’t have what it takes.

You’re afraid of making the wrong choice. This is a huge reason people hold onto the myth of a limitless future. What if you choose one of the possibilities you’ve been endlessly examining and then you don’t like it? What if you get stuck doing something “ordinary” – something that doesn’t fit your idea of what your life was supposed to be like or what you were really meant to do?

It’s easy. When Jay asks Ian how he thinks he can find his way out of this paralyzing ocean of choices, he answers: “I don’t know. I would say you pick a direction and start swimming. But you can’t tell one way from the other, so you can’t pick. You can’t even tell if you’re swimming toward something, so why would you use up all your energy going the wrong way?” Then he adds with relief, “I guess all you can do is hope someone comes along in a boat or something.”

That’s the mindset of a lot of twentysomethings – they’re waiting for their ship to come in. They want their life to be great and exciting and adventurous, but they think that it will just sort of fall into place for them somehow. Jay explains how this mindset is actually just a defense mechanism, a hedge against fear:

“There is a certain terror that goes along with saying ‘My life is up to me.’ It is scary to realize there’s no magic, you can’t just wait around for something. Not knowing what you want to do with your life—or not at least having some ideas about what to do next—is a defense against that terror. It is a resistance to admitting that the possibilities are not endless. It is a way of pretending that now doesn’t matter. Being confused about choices is nothing more than hoping that maybe there is a way to get through life without taking charge.”

Basically, what all the points above have in common is that they allow you to feel safe. But as we’ll discuss below, this feeling of safety is merely an illusion.

So how do you stop intentionally keeping yourself confused and let go of the myth of limitless possibilities in order to take charge of your life? The first order of business is dismantling that myth.

Everybody Starts with the Same Common Parts

The feeling of limitless possibilities, coupled with the barrage of “lifestyle design” rhetoric that is so popular these days, can blind you to the fact that life is still built out of the same, relatively few components that it always has been. Your future may seem vast and featureless at times, but it will be constructed – no matter how extraordinary you want it to be — with the same common “parts” that everyone uses.

Jay used the metaphor of a custom bicycle to finally get through to Ian. Ian worked at a bike shop and rode a custom model for transportation. He had put the bike together from various custom parts he had handpicked. But those parts were simply specialized versions of ones all bicycles include – frame, wheels, seat, gears, and so on.

Our lives are like that custom bike. We can all choose the parts that suit us best – and you may go out of your way to select unique, non-mass-produced versions — but they will come from the same main categories everyone else selects from. In building your life you basically have the following categories to work with: relationships, children, vocation, and travel/hobbies. So we can already narrow down our “limitless” possibilities into four divisions. How you arrange and how much you invest in each “part” is up to you. You might want a tandem bike (you prize marriage), but with mountain bike tires (you want to spend a lot of time outdoors), and a baby trailer on the back (definitely want kids). Someone else might want a one-seat bike with road tires meant for speed (doesn’t want to settle down) and a fixed gear (dedicated to a free, hip, artistic lifestyle). The combinations are endless, but we’re all just arranging the same common parts.

Getting Down to the Brass Tacks

”So everyone builds their life out of four main parts, but how do I know which kind of part to select from each category – we’ve organized the choices but there are still so many!”

Let’s think about this for a minute. The marriage and children question, if sticky in real life, is very straightforward – you either want to get hitched or you don’t, and want to have kids or you don’t. And when it comes to hobbies and what to do in our spare time, people feel pretty free in picking things up and putting them down without much pressure.

So when people say they don’t know what to do with their life, they’re really talking about one thing, even if in their cloud of uncertainty they don’t realize it: they’re not sure what to do for their vocation. Here the choices seem endless and the stakes terribly high. The fact that most of us still want those “ordinary” things like marriage and kids only creates an even greater sense of pressure about choosing a really special vocation; we fear if we don’t balance our traditional choices with something really unique, our lives will never rise to our vague vision of the extraordinary. We’ll have the same kind of lives our parents had! It is here, we feel, that we must hold the line on diverging from the ordinary, or risk never becoming the “special” people we always felt we were.

Thus there’s really only one category at the root of people’s gnawing uncertainty about their future. And despite the pressure we may feel in choosing the “right” career, the possibilities are not limitless here either. Our choices are greatly narrowed by several things. First, you’re not a blank slate; you’ve had more than two decades of experiences that have shaped you into the man you are today. All these years have strengthened some talents and abilities and weakened others, developed your values and beliefs, and honed some very distinct interests. Put these things together, and what you find is that as opposed to there being endless possibilities, most people are really drawn to, and have the aptitude for, no more than half a dozen vocational paths. Six is far more manageable than infinity. And of the handful of possibilities that really suit your talents, abilities, values, and interests, there’s probably one that calls to you the most, that nags at you the most often – even if questions and doubts about how you’re going to get there make you sometimes push it aside. This frontrunner choice, Jay suggests, may be for you what psychiatrist Christopher Bollas called the “unthought known” – “those things we know about ourselves but forget somehow.” You may shy away from thinking about it, and saying it out loud, but it’s there nonetheless. 

But What If I Make the Wrong Choice?!

Whether there’s one vocational opportunity that sticks out to you the most, or several that you feel equally drawn to, you may hesitate to move forward and claim one out of fear of making the wrong choice. As we discussed above, this fear can keep you in “my options are limitless” mode as you wait for the right choice to magically manifest itself. Here’s why you shouldn’t worry so much about making the “wrong” choice and should start on something, anything concrete, instead of living in limbo:

Not making a choice is a choice. The first thing to realize is that not making a decision isn’t any safer than making one. It feels safer in the short-term, but as Jay warns, “The consequences are just further away in time, like in your thirties or forties.”

Failure to make a choice is in fact a default choice. While making a concrete decision will shut some doors, at least for a time, not making a choice also closes numerous doors as well. Jay worked to get Ian to realize this:

“Ian would say, ‘I don’t want to settle for some ordinary thing.’ And I would say, ‘I’m not talking about settling. I’m talking about starting. Twentysomethings who don’t get started wind up with blank resumes and out-of-touch lives only to settle far more down the road. What’s so original about that?”

While deciding to pursue one path does close down other routes, at least for a time, it also opens up new ones that would never have been available if you remained at your initial starting point. For example, I went to three years of law school and yet never took the bar and became a lawyer. Was going to law school the “wrong” choice then? Not really. It prompted me to start a blog, which became my full-time profession. I never could have seen or even imagined that option from my starting point — never could have conceived the way one thing would lead to another — no matter how hard I squinted down that road.

Choosing one path doesn’t mean you’re stuck with it forever. Another thing to keep in mind is that just like the parts on a custom bike, if you try a part out, and it doesn’t work for you, you can always switch it out for another. Yes, every choice brings consequences, some that make it much harder to change course, but you don’t have to think of starting on a vocational path as a death sentence. As we previously wrote, learning new things throughout your life is easier now than ever before in history.

Employment experts say that this generation probably shouldn’t think they’ll have the same kind of job their whole life anyway. And many don’t even want to do the same exact thing their whole life, even if it’s something they enjoy.

What this generation needs most to succeed is both expertise and a broad range of skills (creativity, judgment, decision-making ability, social skills, etc.) – “identity capital” — they can take with them anywhere they go and will serve them well in any position. And here’s the good news, any experience, even if it doesn’t end up being your lifelong career, will build this important skill-set…

Every experience builds your identity capital. Seeing vocational pursuits as right or wrong is really the wrong way to look at it. Some experiences are better for us than others, but all experiences, if we have the right attitude and navigate them well, can be for our gain. Experiences are never a complete waste, as they can all add to our store of identity capital and connections with others. A course is only wrong if you see life as a linear pursuit, where each thing must lead directly to the next. If you instead see the point of life as gaining as many rich experiences as possible, learning and growing as much as you can, making a difference and contributing wherever you are, each avenue you pursue can be the right one, at least for a time.

You’ll never know if you like it, unless you try! You can, and should, do as much research about things you’re interested in pursuing as possible. But for many avenues, there isn’t any way of knowing if you’re going to like it before you actually try it. With that said, when you’re on a path, really be on it. Throw yourself into experiencing it; don’t sit on the fence and take a superficial temperature reading that won’t tell you what it’s really like. Before you decide you do want to change course, make sure you’ve run the one you’re on for all it’s worth.

Live with confidence and certainty. Believing that your options are limitless is intoxicating, but also anxiety-producing. Once you choose a path, you can feel the confidence and security that comes with having your feet firmly planted on the ground. That doesn’t mean uncertainty is a bad thing, or that you’ll never feel it again – it will return when it’s time to make another big decision. But it’s better to go from uncertainty to confidence and progress, then back to uncertainty and onwards again, than to completely stagnate in a cloud of bewilderment.

After Ian made a decision and went after and landed a graphic design job, he wrote to Jay:

“When I made the decision to come to D.C., I worried that by making one choice, I was closing all the other doors open to me at that moment. But it was sort of liberating to make a choice about something. Finally. And, if anything, this job has just opened more doors for me. Now I feel confident that I will have several iterations of my career—or at least time for several iterations—and that I will be able to do other things in life…

Above all else in my life, I feared being ordinary. Now I guess you could say I had a revelation of the day-to-day. I finally got it there’s a reason everybody in the world lives this way—or at least starts this way—because this is how it’s done.”

 

_____________________

Source:

The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter and How to Make the Most of Them Now by Meg Jay, PhD

Have you heard? It’s time to run for cover: the Nerd Apocalypse is nigh! Or so say the writers who are up in arms about how San Francisco used to be an artistic haven but has morphed into a sterile, robotic, money-grubbing tech hub.

As a writer who wanted to move to San Francisco after college to become the next Allen Ginsberg, I understand the desire to preserve the city’s artistic legacy. But when I arrived here eight years later, it was because I’d gotten a job as a content marketing manager for an app developer that put videos in e-books. Our CEO sold me on the idea that technology is merging artistic media to tell stories in completely new ways. That company turned out to be my gateway drug. Three years later, my job is writing and editing content for deep tech companies, and I have no regrets.

Not only is the tech industry creatively solving problems that change our lives for the better, but also it’s participating in events like Art Hack, a hackathon for developers, designers, and artists to share ideas. Whatever your vocation or however many times a day you check your email, technology is changing our experiences in amazing ways.

At a time when it’s easy to take cheap shots at tech types, there’s more to be gained from understanding nerd culture than condemning it from the outside. Step one is learning about the stuff we love. Mention that you read The Lean Startup years ago or that you’re swapping your iPhone for a Droid because you believe in open source, and we’ll be all ears. Still feeling like an outsider in a tech city? Memorize this handy cheat sheet and maximize your chances of surviving the Nerd Apocalypse.

You’ve been on Facebook for years, but unfortunately, so have your mom and my grandmother. It’s time to take your social networking to the next level.

Path is a social sharing app that’s perfect for introverts because it’s exclusive: you have to cap your friends at 150. Show how cool you are with this lack of attention by saying, “I don’t really care who sees my stuff on Path. It’s just a beautiful UX, and I use it more as a journal for myself.”

Once you’re practiced at saying, “I hardly ever check Facebook anymore,” you’re ready for Reddit, which is part social network, part forum, part aggregator, and all nerd heaven. It’s a place to obsess about Internet memes, politics, technology, and whatever niche hobbies you may have. You can use Reddit to keep your finger on the pulse of what nerds are up to and find your own weird hobby.

When it comes to sharing real knowledge instead of hilarious memes, nerds go to GitHub or Hacker News. GitHub is a site where engineers can publish their code and collaborate. Hacker News is where engineers go to talk shop and rip each other mercilessly to shreds. Participation in these sites isn’t recommended for novices, but occasionally dropping, “Oh, I think I saw that on Hacker News” into a conversation will never hurt.

You played The Legend of Zelda when you were a kid, right? Good news: this is something you have in common with your nerd counterparts. The only difference is, while Zelda may have been the last video game you played, for some techies, it was probably the reason they decided to spend their lives tinkering with computers.

Fast-forward two decades or so, and games are a whole different world. If you’re feeling ambitious, mention Hotline Miami, or read this article on BioShock Infinite that includes some spoilers and a thematic discussion that would put my old English papers to shame. You might be able to convince someone you’ve not only played it but also overanalyzed the heck out of it.

If you’re feeling really ambitious, talk about your passion for the indie games that even the game-store employees don’t know about: Réplublique, Project Eternity, Starbound and, most importantly, Divekick. You can also earn some cred by confessing an affection for good old-fashioned board games. You’ve probably played Settlers of Catan, but did you know there are multiple editions and offshoots of the game? If you can learn to respect Atlantis: Scenarios & Variants, the nerds will definitely respect you.

Brushing up on the Zombie Apocalypse is a good way to get ready for the Nerd Apocalypse. Dig into the Walking Dead (no, not the AMC TV show, but the graphic novel), and you’ll be assimilated in no time. Bonus points for saying, “It’s totally different and so much better than the show.” If you’re not into zombies, a) don’t advertise that fact too widely and b) choose something else off this list of the top 50 graphic novels.

On the flip side of graphic novels and fantasy is another favorite nerd indulgence: nonfiction. Grab any history book that chronicles a very narrow subject in great, great detail, and you’ll have no trouble passing. For example, James Gleick’s The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood will give you the foundation you need to understand information theory, but if you talk about it, make sure to mention that it’s “pop science” and “not nearly technical enough but entertaining nonetheless.” (Yes, nerds find information theory entertaining, and soon you will too!)

What could be more entertaining than pop science? O’Reilly books about tech, of course. Not only will you fit right in while carrying one of these books, but also you might even learn something useful, such as the answer to the question, what is a Linux operating system? (Hint: it’s not made by Apple.)

If all this is making your head spin, just shrug your shoulders and type “tl;dr.” That’s nerd speak for “too long, didn’t read.” Then, check out something shorter: xkcd, a webcomic “of romance, sarcasm, language, and math” that is brilliantly constructed so you can laugh at it even if you don’t know much about math. Consume as much as you can by clicking the “random” tab. If you’re ever caught in an awkward moment, salvage it by saying, “This totally reminds me of that one xkcd...”

Surely, you’ve seen or heard of the Big Bang Theory? Conjure up a memory of the show, hold the picture in your brain, and now push it out of your head forever. Referencing this show is a telltale sign that you are a non-nerd fascinated by the idea of making fun of nerds. For a better picture of both nerds and the jokes they might find funny, try The IT Crowd, a British sitcom about – yup, you guessed it – some folks in an IT department. Watch this show, and you’ll be able to lament, “It’s sooo annoying when my dad asks for computer help and I have to ask him if he’s tried turning it off and back on again.” No one will ever guess you majored in American Studies.

That is, unless you mention that you watch Futurama. Turns out so does that former sorority girl who still has a BlackBerry. For a real adventure in futuristic outer space, check out the famous Joss Whedon series, Firefly. Part Western, part sci-fi, this show has all the right components to garner nerd adoration. Plus, it’s produced by Joss Whedon, who has accrued a true cult following in the nerd community.

On the movie front, well, you’ve seen every movie there is because you download them all for free. But you can’t tell anyone how. You never know who’s listening.

You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you! Time to stop reading this article, cover up your obscure T-shirt with a comfy plaid, and tackle your to-do list. The good news is that you made it to the end of this guide, and if even a few of the things included seemed interesting, you may find that San Francisco’s changing scenery isn’t actually the sign of a Nerd Apocalypse, but a Nerdvana.

How could I not link to this? By Rohin Dhar:

If the traditional band business model is to generate hype through the media and radio airplay, and then monetize that hype through album sales and tours, Phish doesn’t fit the model at all. For a band of their stature, their album sales are miniscule and radio airplay non-existent. And so when the “music business” cratered in the 1990s because of file-sharing and radio’s importance declined because of the internet, Phish remained unaffected and profitable as ever.

What fascinates, puzzles, or annoys most non-fans about Phish is that their appeal doesn’t seem to make sense, and the fans who try to convince them to like the band often can’t make a very persuasive case. I’ve even tried to explain the appeal myself, but it rarely sticks.

Explaining Phish’s appeal in the context of mainstream music doesn’t make sense, because Phish doesn’t make mainstream music. When they’ve tried to condense their music into the mainstream formats of short, flawless, studio-recorded songs grouped into dozens and crammed into 50-minute albums every 18 months, most of their appeal and personality have been lost. The mainstream only sees these mediocre adaptations and, understandably, can’t figure out why so many people like the band.

If you’ll permit a pretty rough analogy, imagine a world in which the vast majority of published fiction was in the form of 3,000-word short stories, and most people had never read anything longer. Phish is the one outlier publishing novels, and they’re pretty weird, complex novels. No effort to condense such novels into bite-sized short stories will truly capture the appeal.

But if you’re one of just a handful of novel publishers in this rough metaphor, you’re going to slowly accumulate a hell of a fanbase from the people who actually like novels, even if yours get a bit too weird sometimes, because almost nobody else is creating what these fans want and love.

∞ Permalink

Quaker Mode

I don’t really know shit about Quakers. I mean, I grew up in Philadelphia, where Pennsylvania Founder and Quaker William Penn’s statue sits atop City Hall. And I know that from the right angle it looks like he’s got his dick in his hand. And I know that William Penn gave Philadelphia its nickname, The City of Brotherly Love, which is a Quaker thing. I know a ton of people who went to Quaker schools in Philadelphia, and by and large they all turned out pretty good people. I also know a few Quaker adults. And out of respect for them, I want to make sure I’m not trying to pass myself off as an expert on all things Quaker. I am not.

I am also not a big fan of religion. I don’t do God. But I’ve got a thing for Quakers. They do God, but it’s more about how you treat those around you. And they don’t do the church thing, they have Quaker Meetings. And the incredibly great thing about Quaker meetings is that everyone just sits there. Silently. And they talk only if the spirit moves them to talk. They only open their mouths if it improves on the silence.

I’m gonna repeat that phrase because I love it so fucking much: “if it improves on the silence.”

This is a phrase that I’ve been holding near and dear to my heart recently. As the world seems to be falling apart, and social media introduces a new level of cacophony of misinformation, speculation, and downright venomous bile — we should ask ourselves, is what I am about to say better than silence? Am I adding anything to what’s already being said? And possibly most importantly, is my desire to say it keeping me from listening to what is already being said. Because waiting for your turn to talk is not the same as listening.

Have I actually improved the silence?

And the best part is that everyone gets to make this decision for themselves. Do you think your dick joke improves the silence? Awesome, post it. Do you think picking a fight with some racist cracker on Twitter improves the silence? Do you really? Think twice about it. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. It’s your call. But I can tell you that in the last week I’ve probably deleted more tweets, after asking myself that question, than I’ve spiked in the entire preceding year.

So, yes, there will be dick jokes. But only when I decide they’re better than the absence of a dick joke.

I abhor buying stuff, so if I buy something, I like it to be the best. The best isn't the most expensive, nor the cheapest, nor is it the most famous. But I genuinely feel these are all the best of their categories:

Belt: Best Made Kevlar Smokejumper

Wallet: Noah Lambert

Rucksack: master-piece OVER ver.5 No.03456-v5

Spectacles: Oliver Peoples Ziegfeld

Sunglasses: Randolph Engineering Intruder

Bicycle: Kona Smoke

Pen: Pilot G2 0.38mm

Stylesheet Language: scss

Notebook: Düller Ring Notebooks

Mouse: Logitech MX518

Sneakers: Tretorn Nylites

Pants: Outlier Slim Dungarees

Denim: Rogue Territory Stantons

Sports Jackets: GANT by Michael Bastian

Water Bottle: Sigg Heritage

Loafers: Bass by Mark McNairy

Pale Ale: Hitachino Nest

Polo Shirts: Kent Wang

Dog Leash: The Fair Lead, Calypso

Underpants: Mack Weldon Trunks

Tshirts: Icebreaker Bodyfit 150

MongoDB browser: humongous

Twitter Client: Tweetbot

Rugby Shirts: Michael Bastian

Boat Shoes: Sebago

Daily News: NYTimes

Sports News: BBC Sports

Weekly News: The Economist

Magazine: PORT

Emergency Lighter: Maratac Titanium Pea Lighter

Outerwear: Barbour Beaufort

Shorts: Outlier Three Way Shorts

Glasses: Libbey Gibraltar 16-Ounce

I have never found in ear earphones that are great, robust, do not tangle, and affordable.

I have never found a note taking application that was fast, structured and designed nicely.

Oliver Burkeman, who writes a great column / blog titled This Column Will Change Your Life, has a new book out: The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.

In his book, he argues against an optimism-focused, goal-fixated, positive-thinking approach to achieving happiness. Instead, he praises stoicism, meditation, keeping vague goals, tough love, and pursuing a ‘negative’ path to happiness.

It’s a delight to read. Oliver doesn’t cite the same studies of everyone else — he commits real acts of journalism, traveling out to meet people, doing a 10 day meditation retreat himself, drawing upon new and old books alike. And rather than obsess only about the idea of happiness, Oliver riffs on a broad set of “deep” life questions.

He leads a thoughtful discussion about our fear of death and the various “immortality projects” we take on as a result.

He says our attachment to goal-setting can be explained by our inability to deal with the anxiety produced by uncertainty. (I’ve written before about the fact that I’m not an especially goal-oriented person, despite high ambition.)

He suggests that thinking through the worst case scenario in your mind — grappling in your head with possible negative outcomes from a given endeavor — may be more productive than soaking up self-help positivity maxims.

He cites Paul Pearsall’s effort to get the concept of “awe” accepted as one of the primary human emotions, alongside love, joy, anger, fear, and sadness. “Unlike all the other emotions, awe is all of our feelings rolled into one intense one. You can’t peg it as just happy, sad, afraid, angry, or hopeful. Instead, it’s a matter of experiencing all these feelings and yet, paradoxically, experiencing no clearly identifiable, or at least any easily describable, emotion.” (Awe, to me, is the core emotion of a secular spiritual practice that emphasizes nature/the outdoors.)

He also quotes others throughout. For example, on trusting uncertainty:

“To be a good human is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertainty, and on a willingness to be exposed. It’s based on being more like a plant than a jewel: something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.”

– Martha Nussbaum, Univ of Chicago Law School

 On love and vulnerability:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung, and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no-one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with your hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

– C.S. Lewis

The most important characteristic of the book is its tone: it’s not bubbling with sunny, practical solutions for building a meaningful life. It’s a darker view of the human experience. But he does not employ said darkness as a cheap way to seem sophisticated — he’s subtle, and thus worth listening to.

Bottom Line: Oliver Burkeman writes about everyday philosophy and the wisdom of the good life. I believe he is underrated. I recommend his book.

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Aura, a visual novel writer and independent game developer. I’m best known for my work on the visual novel Katawa Shoujo with the Four Leaf Studios. I also have an uncohesive tumblr I update less than I’d like to, and a literature podcast called The Epiloguists.

What hardware do you use?

A writer has little need for specialized hardware, and barely any of the gear I have was acquired with writing specifically in mind. Nevertheless, being at my own setup has become a comfort zone for me, but I’ve found that I can, and will, carve words with a toothpick on a piece of orange peel if it comes down to that.

I have a soon four year old custom-built desktop PC, and as long as it won’t catch fire or start throwing unreasonable tantrums like things at that age are wont to do, I’ll keep it. On my desk are dual BenQ monitors, a 24” and a 19” one that have ruined me for single monitor setups forever, and a tea-stained generic Logitech keyboard that looks like it’s been manhandled by the Spanish inquisition. From my computer runs a line either to Sennheiser HD 429 headphones, or through a Denon DRA-F101 amplifier to a pair of B&W DM601 S3 speakers, to provide the necessary aural ambience for the magic to happen. Fuel for writing is always available and required, in either a Villeroy & Boch NewWave tea cup, or an Iittala Essence wine glass.

For mobile writing I have a bunch of pocket notebooks such as Moleskines that I strategically place in things I carry or wear so the only place where I’m without one is the shower, and my Samsung Galaxy Gio smartphone that I once took with me to the shower.

And what software?

My PC still runs Windows Vista because the thought of upgrading my OS gives me anxiety, and Vista works sort of ok. My tastes in writing software are simple. OpenOffice 3.3 is the trusty workhorse of my stable. It doesn’t get in the way of writing, which is the most desirable quality in a text editor. Notepad is mostly used to digitally scribble down all my incoherent ideas, throwaway concepts and unused fragments, spread across hundreds of text files that probably form fractal patterns I hope to one day decipher into stories. When I start working on something that’s too big to fit in my head all at once, I fire up yWriter 5 and meticulously note down everything I can, lest I forget and lose them forever.

Writing is not just writing however, and managing projects takes quite a few more pieces of software to manage. I work with people who are spread across the globe and timezones, so we need mechanisms to hold our virtual game studio together. To keep track of our project assets we use Subversion version control system and the TortoiseSVN client for it. Trac project management tool would be a great asset for our work if we weren’t so lazy about documentation and FileZilla connects me to our digital storage cabinet. As my “office” is as much virtual as it is physical, communication across the time and space that separates me from my coworkers is done through Gmail, phpBB, Skype and Chatzilla IRC extension for Firefox.

For swimming in the stream of social media, I use Tweetdeck and the Twitter app for Android. All of this stuff was mostly chosen, or maybe settled for for the convenience factor, because I don’t want to fight my tools in addition to struggling with the stuff I actually want to do. If a thing doesn’t make me want to punch it, it’s good enough for me.

What would be your dream setup?

I’m either in a good place already with my equipment, or too numb to feel a need for significant upgrades, so maybe my environment would be the thing to dream about. Some writers work the best in seclusion, and even I can’t help feeling sometimes that the best thing for me too would be a hardened concrete bunker dug 30 feet under desert sand in the Gobi. However, the real dream setup, if I think about keeping doing what I do, would be a physical office for the studio (and since it’s a dream, it should probably be on the Moon).

As convenient as communication over the Internet is these days, it’s never the same thing as working in the same space.

I’ve been thinking about buying a MacBook Air and a pony, for writing on the move.

At 3:55pm yesterday I cried.

I was getting ready for a Google Hangout back to my office with my partners and I noticed something about an explosion at the Boston Marathon on twitter. I did a quick scan of Twitter, clicked through to a few links, and realized a bomb had gone off near the finish line.

I went blank – just stared at my computer screen – and then started crying. I called Amy – she hadn’t heard about it yet and told her what had happened. I collected myself and called in to my Hangout. My partners were all shaken also – Seth lived in Boston for many years, Ryan has done several marathons, and Jason just did his first marathon last year in Detroit.

During our Hangout I sent some emails out to friends in Boston. Four close friends were on the third floor of the building above the first explosion. They were ok – but shocked and very shaken up. Emails continued to flow with me checking in on people and people checking in on me since they knew I was a marathoner and on the east coast.

My emotion shifted from sadness, to a wave of being horrified, to temporary anger, back to a very deep sadness. At the NJ Tech Meetup, before I started talking I asked for a moment of silence to recognize the people who were at the Boston Marathon, especially those who were injured. I can’t remember exactly what I said – I just know that I teared up again before my talk.

On my way back to Manhattan, Amy and I talked. We were both incredibly sad. And lonely – she’s home and I’m in NY. She was supposed to go to Boston yesterday for a Wellesley board meeting – she decided not to go because of some stuff going on. She would have stayed at the Mandarin Oriental, just down the block from the explosion. It’s all too close for comfort.

Lying in bed, I couldn’t fall asleep. I tossed and turned until 1am. I kept thinking about being in NY on 9/11, about running the Boston Marathon, about the bike accident I had in September where a turn of the wheel a different direction would have meant lights out for me. It was some combination of PTSD, sadness, obsessions, and contemplation of mortality. I finally fell asleep.

This morning on my run with Reece Pacheco we talked about it a little more. I haven’t even begun to really process this. Brent Hill sent out a tweet to me and a bunch of friends to commit to running Boston in 2014. I’m in.

I just contributed to the Boston Tech Communities fundraiser for the Boston Marathon victims. All proceeds will be donated completely to programs working with victims of the attacks including Red Cross, Children’s Hospital, and others.

The post The 2013 Boston Marathon appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

This is a guest post by Scott Kupor, managing partner, Andreessen Horowitz.

We are holding back the middle class in America. But it’s not for the reasons you think, and the culprits are not those most people think of. Rather, the US government has systematically cut the middle class out of the most important wealth creation opportunity for the next 50 years. Through a series of byzantine regulations, the government has made it virtually impossible for working Americans to enjoy the fruits of America’s greatest strength: innovation.

Over the past decade or so, regulatory changes have reduced the frequency with which the stocks of high-growth companies get offered to the public during their most dramatic phases of growth. That prevents ordinary investors from getting in on the wealth creation, and hampers the creation of middle class jobs. Fortunately, there’s a simple solution.

We’ll get to that shortly. But first let’s look at the cases of two companies founded by Harvard drop-outs.

Microsoft went public in 1986 at roughly a $500 million market cap. Today, Microsoft has a market cap of $234 billion. Thus, the public investors in Microsoft have had the opportunity to realize $233.5 billion in market cap appreciation; the private investors had only a $500 million head-start. From IPO, a single share of Microsoft stock has appreciated close to 500x.

Facebook, by contrast, went public in 2012 at roughly a $100 billion market cap. That means that, whatever public stock price appreciation Facebook has over the coming years, private investors have had a $100 billion head-start against the public investors. Even if you were prescient enough to buy Facebook at its public low of approximately a $50 billion market cap, the private investors remain way ahead. If you bought Facebook stock at its IPO, to realize a similar multiple that Microsoft’s public shareholders have earned, Facebook’s market cap would need to reach nearly $50 trillion, roughly the size of the total market capitalization of all publicly-traded companies in the world.

What accounts for the differences between these two cases?

Up until the last decade, about 300 start-up companies went public each year, with more than half of those companies raising less than $50 million in proceeds (small IPOs.) The average age of the companies at the time of IPO was just under five years old.

Fast forward to the most recent decade and fewer than 100 companies each year have gone public, with less than one-third of those being small IPOs. The average age of the companies going public has also roughly doubled to 9.4 years.

Why should we care if the world has fewer billionaire public company founders and CEOs?

Because IPOs democratize wealth creation and create jobs for the 99.9% of Americans who are unlikely to be the next Zuckerberg, fueling long-term economic growth for the country and guaranteeing access for all to the American Dream.

Indeed, we are quickly creating a two-tiered investment market—one for wealthy, accredited individuals and financial institutions and a second for the remaining 96% of Americans.

If you are an accredited investor (which the rules define as someone with annual income of at least $200,000 or a net worth of $1,000,000), you can buy or sell privately-held stock of high growth, startup companies via exchanges such as Second Market and SharesPost. If you are an accredited investor, you can become a limited partner in one of over 400 venture capital firms that invest in such companies. If you are an accredited investor, you can buy privately held stock of such companies directly from the issuing companies themselves.

However, If you are among the 96% of Americans that are not accredited investors, you can wait the 9.4 years that it takes for the average startup to go public and miss out on all of the price appreciation in the private markets that inures to the benefit of accredited investors.

Despite the many very positive changes introduced by Congress via the 2012 Jumpstart our Business Start-up Act (or the JOBS Act), the middle class remains sidelined. On the one hand, the JOBS Act potentially exacerbates the already “long time to IPO problem” by increasing to 2,000 the number of shareholders a private company may have before it is required to report as a public company.

Yet, in the same JOBS Act, we welcome “the 96%” least-wealthy Americans to invest (via crowdfunding) in the absolute riskiest stage of new company formation—early, seed-stage financings. Somehow, we have concluded that unaccredited investors should be able to likely lose their hard-earned money by investing in the most risky of asset classes. Yet precisely as the risk diminishes dramatically in the subsequent stages of a company’s development, the spoils go only to the wealthy. As veteran investor Steve Rattner pointed out recently, most Americans would have better odds of winning the lottery than of successfully investing in seed-stage companies.

There’s another important implication of the changes that have lengthened startups’ path to IPOs. On average, the Kaufman Foundation estimates that companies that go public increase their post-IPO employment levels by approximately 45%. More significantly, for small IPOs, that number more than triples to 156%. This makes sense—an IPO is a capital raising event for a company. That new capital, in turn, is invested by the company to increase growth, which requires more employees to achieve.

Had we not seen IPO volumes fall off of a cliff in the last decade, the Kaufman Foundation estimates that we would have created an estimated 1.9 million new jobs. Even more significantly, Professor Enrico Moretti of UC Berkeley has identified a multiplier effect with technology-related jobs. For every one  new technology job, Professor Enrico estimates that five  new service sector jobs are created.

To put the job numbers in context, the number of total US employees in 2001 was just shy of 138 million people; 10 years later, that number was only 139 million. Thus, the potential to add a minimum of two million jobs—and potentially more with the multiplier effect—to an otherwise stagnant employment environment is immense.

What’s the solution?

A number of policy and market changes—all with well-intentioned goals—have created a hostile environment for new IPOs and, in particular, for small IPOs. Arguably the most significant among the changes was the 2001 move to decimalization. Much has been written about the “death star” of decimalization, a phrase first coined by David Weild, former vice chairman of Nasdaq. But simply stated, decimalization eliminated all of the profits from trading small-capitalization stocks. How did this happen? Because decimalization reduced the “tick size,” the minimum increment in which stock prices can trade, to a penny (from its previous level of 25 cents). Thus, a trader who previously might have purchased a block of small-cap shares knowing that a $0.25 tick size likely represented his minimum profit potential on a trade now found his minimum profit potential reduced to a penny. Facing this uneconomic situation, small-cap traders simply abandoned the market, killing liquidity for these stocks.

The 2003 Global Research Settlement (which prohibited investment banking revenue from subsidizing investment research) proved the final death knell. Pre-decimalization and pre-Global Research Settlement, traders of small IPOs could actually make money, and profits from this trading activity subsidized the publication of investment research for small IPOs. Thus, the double whammy of these two policy changes not only sucked all of the profits out of trading the stocks of small IPOs—making it very difficult for these companies to build liquidity by attracting retail investors—but also choked off the use of trading profits to fund research on these companies. Lacking the ample liquidity that active trading desks and investment research create, newly public small IPOs simply can’t attract new, long-term shareholders, raise new capital and ultimately grow their businesses.

All hope is not lost, however.

The simple act of jettisoning decimalization would resuscitate the small-cap IPO market. And the US Securities and Exchange Commission already has the authority under the JOBS Act to make this happen. The SEC could test this change in the form of a broad, intermediate-term pilot and could even provide boards of directors of small IPO issuers the discretion to determine whether doing so would be in the best interests of the company and its shareholders.

Here’s what higher “tick sizes” will mean:

—Trading desks will commit capital to trading small-cap stocks.

—Research analysts will cover small-cap stocks.

—Institutional sales desks will market small-cap stocks to their clients.

—Retail investors will return to this market.

As a result, we will increase liquidity and reduce volatility for small-cap stocks, shocking the small-cap IPO market back to life and breaking the shackles that are holding back the middle class.

I just finished watching Day 3 of this year’s Masters tournament. One of today’s greatest golfers, Jason Day, finished today with a chance to be in the lead, but unfortunately recorded bogey-bogey on the last two holes. He had a bad finish. The word finish is kind of an interesting word. I can mean so many things. It can be the final touches a painter does on a job, or the final touches on a product. It can be a noun, and it can be a verb, something you may want to stop or want to end. I’ve been thinking about the act of “finishing” lately when it comes to any kind entrepreneurship. This is not confined to technology and websites and mobile apps. I assume that nearly everyone who makes it this far has the skills and determination to start, to get over that initial hump. It is hard to start a product, or a business, or a services firm, or a restaurant, or coffee shop. Many people get over this hump, and it’s to be celebrated. But, how many “finish” in a manner they’re proud of? How many have the ability to concentrate in the face of being tired, exhausted, uncertain, and pulled in many professional and personal directions. Of the few things I’ve started, yeah, I got over the hump, but I didn’t finish with greatness. Jason Day today, one of the best golfers in the world, started this tournament on fire, but today, just today, he didn’t finish with strength. This is something that I look for when evaluating new products, services, and companies. While the work is never really done, there is always some level of “finishing” that it takes to make a success. Around here, I assume everyone can start, and the trick is to try to identify those who can also close it out.

If you want to get better at something, should remain in your comfort zone? Or should you, rather, be exposed to ideas or techniques slightly beyond your reach? It should be self-evident that the latter is the correct answer: it is called cognitive stretching. It is an essential part of learning.

Game designers instinctively know about cognitive stretching: most video games are designed to taunt the player with the possibility that they might be so much more. Yes, cognitive stretch is stressful, but it is also stimulating… and fun!

How do you know whether you are getting enough cognitive stretching? There is a simple test: do you know everything about a given problem? What thousands of years of scholarship have shown is that there is almost no end to what we can learn about any given issue. If you have the feeling that you know it all, then it is maybe time to meet new people, to read some new books, to change school or to change job.

What defines our current era, more than anything else, is that it is obviously apparent to anyone that we live in an open world. We are sentenced to permanent cognitive stretching. To think that you know everything about programming, you have to work hard to avoid reading Stack Overflow where thousands of new perplexing questions are asked every day.

I think that there are a few sane ways to deal with cognitive stretching:

• Perfectionism is the first casualty of cognitive stretching: let go of the idea that you could perfectly master anything.
• Cognitive stretching is fun, if you let it be: you should never have to feel bored anymore.
• If you are a coach, a leader, a teacher or a manager: stop trying to give the illusion that you know it all.
• If you are a student, assume that you know little and will always know little. Take pleasure in what you learn and stop worrying about everything you haven’t learned.

Cognitive stretching is not without controverse however. For example, many dedicated teachers have a somewhat difficult relationship with it. Introducing students to ideas that are likely to remain beyond them for years is often considered a bug. It is as if we were happy to let you make erotic movies, as long these movies ended up showing full frontal nudity. As the volume of porn on the web indicates, keeping nothing mysterious can be profitable. In this sense, these teachers have a point: it does please the crowds to reveal everything. People think they like straight-forward answers. People want to learn everything there is about software programming in 10 days. They want to learn the 7 secrets of the great managers.

But the tension between full knowledge, and partial knowledge, is what keeps us going. I cannot remember a more dangerous intellectual experience than finishing my first course on classical mechanics and concluding that classical mechanics was simple. A few years later, I took another classical mechanics course where I failed the first test. I did end up with a good grade, but only after radically changing my appreciation of Newton’s work. In a very real sense, my first course failed me. It gave me no appreciation for everything I did not know.

A huge network of over 90,000 IP addresses has been targeting WordPress blog installations with a brute force attack, attempting to gain access by using the default "admin" username by trying multiple passwords. Two prominent hosting providers, CloudFlare and HostGator, report that the scale of the current attack is much larger than usual. CloudFlare tells The Next Web that is has blocked 60 million requests in the past hour. HostGator's Sean Valant describes it as a "global attack on WordPress installations across virtually every web host in existence."

The purpose of the attack isn't entirely clear, but as security researcher Brian Krebs reports, currently most of the attacks seem to be sourced from PCs, not servers. The attack seems...

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Notorious B.I.G.’s childhood home is being Sold for $725,000 #BedStuy #ClintonHill

I shot a photo roughly every two miles between take-off in San Francisco and landing in Paris CDG to make this airplane time lapse in April, 2012.

If at any time in the past ten years, you might have asked someone at Intuit about the size of the QuickBooks user base, they would have told you the same number: about 4M.

This figure hasn't grown because Intuit's customer base, the small-and-medium business market, is a leaky bucket. On the small end of the spectrum, about 750,000 businesses are created each year and about the same number fail. On the upper end of the spectrum, successful medium sized businesses (and the larger, more valuable Quickbooks customers) outgrow Intuit's products and upgrade to enterprise accounting packages provided by Oracle and others of their ilk. It's no surprise then that QuickBooks suffers from high churn rates, characteristic of the SMB market.

This leaky bucket market dynamic can be quite unattractive if customers must be acquired through paid customer acquisition. SMBs are notoriously expensive to acquire. Combined with high churn rates, we have a recipe for burning through mounds of cash.

Despite those concerns, it's difficult to argue with Intuit's success. It's nearly a $20B market cap company generating $4.2B annually in revenue of which 17% or $700M+ is derived from this leaky bucket SMB segment.

So how did Intuit build a business of such scale atop a customer segment that looks like quicksand? They don't pay to acquire customers. Intuit used word of mouth, brand strength and an existing product (Quicken) to bootstrap QuickBooks to success.

Today, it's easier than ever for startups to target the SMB market successfully. Freemium businesses of scale are feasible because mobile application distribution, web distribution (SEO, social media) and app stores like Intuit or Salesforce or Google amass millions of SMB owners who can be reached at zero marginal cost.

But very few startups and investors pursue the market even today despite these fundamental changes in the market. Part of the challenge is maintaining the discipline to minimize customer acquisition spend, instead focusing on brand building, word of mouth marketing, product excellence and so on. In other words, patience.

In the next five years, I think we will see a segment of SMB SaaS companies achieving very large exits. And though their customers bases will suffer the same leaky bucket economics as Intuit, the customer acquisition strategies afforded to and created by these startups will trump those challenges.

On Saturday morning, I was attending (i.e. my 16-month old son can't drive; so I was the chaperone) a first birthday party for friends' twins and I got speaking to someone that I met there. The conversation quickly turned to entrepreneurship and how it can't be taught; instead you're either born with critical characteristics that makes you an entrepreneur.

I then read this, this morning:

“Startups, like professional football, are best done by the most desperate people on the planet. Products don’t just walk out the door on their own. Sooner or later, to ship something amazing, you have to dig deep and bring out your beast. A horse running wild is a rare sight, but it takes your breath away every time.”

This struck a chord with me.

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Over the last 11-odd years that I've been building businesses (the initial attempts - when I was still at school - can't really be called businesses and should probably be labeled as projects), I've often considered my drive to be a curse and my passion to be a beast that needs to be fed. I regularly compromised on all the aspects of my life (going out for drinks for friends, working on weekends, spending time with my family etc.) in the short-term in the pursuit of something greater in the long-term. And for most of that pursuit, I didn't even know what that something greater even was. (I've only recently distilled this to my passion for helping other entrepreneurs.)

To the average person, this probably constitutes irrational and abnormal behaviour.

I can also remember a conversation I had with a friend back in the day when we were at varsity. My friend kept talking about business and how he was gonna be this hot shot entrepreneur one day. At one stage, I asked him when he'll work on his first business and he replied: “One day when I'm older.”. Today he is doing really well in a corporate job, where he is climbing the ladder with some great pace. To this day, he also hasn't shown any inclination to be an entrepreneur. This has never made sense to me.

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My brain has been wired in such a way that I can easily compute the risk & reward of any decision. My personality is such that I chase after the impossible and (when it comes to business at least) I'm fearless in that pursuit. I live for the adrenaline of being challenged, being out-of-my-depth and not really knowing what tomorrow holds (and how I will overcome that). I'm fueled by my ambition to change the world and my drive to learn something new every day.

I was born this way. This is who I am. This is the only version of me that I know.

Heck, don't get me wrong. Some days I wish I can switch off all of this and I can just be “normal” (whatever that means). But I can't; I don't know where that switch is and whether it even exists.

Instead, I wake up every morning and I get back onto the rollercoaster. This is just what I do.

I’ve been writing pretty much everything from notes and blog posts to  todo lists and essays in Markdown for quite some time now, and I’ve found some applications and tools for Mac that make it especially convenient.

iA Writer — Writing

iA Writer is often regarded as the very best minimalistic text editor available for Mac. The focus mode is brilliant and the typeface is perfect for writing. I also like the way the HTML exports from iA Writer look. However, as part of its minimalistic approach, it really lacks features and customization. Even the font size cannot be changed.

TextMate — Writing

Because iA Writer doesn’t allow for the changing of font size (and it the font size is rather large), I use TextMate with the Solarized style to write long documents (ex. documentation, long blog posts, etc.) rather than iA Writer. The plethora of text wrangling features in TextMate also make it a breeze to perform actions like indenting large blocks of code. TextMate can also export and preview Markdown with HTML, but I prefer using Marked for those functions. TextMate can also open entire folders of files at once. This makes writing Markdown easier in cases involving multiple files (ex. writing Markdoc).

Sublime Text 2 is a very popular alternative to TextMate (especially since TextMate 2 was not very well received).

TextSoap — Text Wrangling

I use TextSoap in conjunction with all of my Markdown text editors. I have created a variety of “cleaners” that help me quickly add Markdown line breaks, add bullets, and perform other handy Markdown edits.

Marked — Previewing and Exporting

Marked is currently my favorite Markdown preview and export application. I used to use Mou, but Marked has since taken its place. Marked supports exporting into a wide variety of formats, including RTF and HTML. It also allows for custom CSS stylesheets to be added. Perhaps the best feature is the automatically updating preview. When I edit text in iA Writer, the preview is updated in Marked with an indicator showing the latest change, without me even having to save the file in iA Writer.

I really like the Solarized color palette. I found some CSS stylesheets that may be added to Marked to export Solarized-looking HTML. It isn’t a perfect adaptation though, and some of the font and color choices bother me a little bit, but nonetheless, it has more or less the same colors as Solarized.

Day One — Organizing and Writing

I use Day One, developed by Bloom Built, to keep notes, links, journal entries, etc. Entires are written in Markdown. It’s ability to organize entries chronologically and its automatic timestamping is nice. The new photo feature is useful as well.

TextExpander — Text Wrangling

I have a variety of TextExpander macros or “snippets” that assist in inserting certain Markdown elements (like tables), especially those with parameters that need to be changed each time (ex. the column headings for tables). It really saves a lot of typing.