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Recalling SXSWi - Day 1 (Evening)

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by
John Erik
on March 17, 2008
in General
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At the Coworking meetup. I think I talked to Julie Gomel of Launch Pad Coworking first (new space going in downtown austin!). Talked to her for a long time. She is such a lovable lady. And a bad ass business women. Damn! Then to some of her business partners and to Murry Legg the architect for Launch Pad.

I got myself in a little circle of non Austin people. Alex from Indy Hall was the first person I talked to. Then Patrick. Then Geoff the other owner of Indy Hall.

Then! I met the creator of scriptaculous and Amy Hoy. That was pretty killer. I talked to Amy for a long time about random stuff. I saw her again later on at garyvee’s spontaneous wine party but she like didn’t remember what we talked about. Apparently she was drunker that I perceived. :) I think she was supposed to email me something.. I remember her putting it in her phone.

I also saw Christy Cox there – miss that girl – she was just there at the hotel hangin out, not apart of the coworking crew. Random, but great.

As the party drew to a close everyone began heading to SIX where the official SXSWi opening party was.

I heard on twitter that everyone was on the rooftop, so that’s where we headed. Sure enough everyone was swarming Kevin Rose, well, and the heaters over by him.

That was a great night for meeting people. The first person I met was Kyle from Justin.tv – I was standing by myself kind of in a corner because the crown was as pushy as a rock concert – he was like what’s up man, why u by yourself. We talked about what he did, how he got involved with Justin.tv – evidently he’s an MIT dropout and doesn’t plan to go back. To me, Kyle was the epitome of the young tech crowd. He came and talked to me. Told me tons of stuff about the people around us. Told me his story. Listened to what I had to say. Told me to come to the valley and hang out. Then gave me some drink passes. Hah. I mean. I freekin love internet people!

From there I met Daniel Burka, I had not idea who he was I just gave him a high5 and said what’s up. Again, he was totally nice. Talked to him for a while about Pownce and Digg, I had no idea he was involved in them. Great dude. He introduced me to Jim Louderback (dude, Jim why is your site done in frontpage – is that a joke?) whom I recognized but not as the CEO of Revision3. I actually didn’t remember at the time what Revision3 was even though I had watched Diggnation a couple times on there. Talk to him for prob 15mins about revision3, radar.net, why I didn’t know what revision3 was, video compression, great guy! Only after he left did I get clarification from Burka on why I recognized him – Fresh Grear – a show on TechTV I used to watch in high school with my dad like everyday.

I know I talked to more people over in this group but I didn’t get their card so I really can’t remember.

Over on the other side of the heater was Shawn O’Connor of Timepedia.org – we talked about Radar and about Conjunctured. He offered some great advice on getting things done and not trying to get a good office space to get work done. Just work on that a little at a time. Think about what your ultimate end goal is. It’s to have created something, right?, not to have an office. He was saying how people get to caught up in that. I kinda felt like he was challenging everything I was talking about. Never the less his advice was sound. And he was one of the only people I met at the conference who knew what radar.net was and about the guys at Tiny Pictures. So that was nice.

After Shawn I met a couple girls from Yahoo! We talked about how cool Austin was and how I was not from the valley. Elsa Kawai was one of them.

Next person was Srini Kumar CEO of Metanotes and lots of other stuff – the guy is so full of energy. He was great to talk to. Told me all about metanote and all the cool ajax jazz they have rockin behind it. They later won a SXSW web award.

Around then was Austin’s closing time 2am and we all went home.

Recalling SXSWi - Day 1

Published
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John Erik
on March 17, 2008
in General
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Had a bagel & banana for breakfast at Jo’s at 7am with Todd, Cesar, and Jon….Cesar and I got our badges. Went down stairs, saw iJustine and took a pic with her. She had to pee so we let her go.

ijustine

(dang I’m excited - smiling so big my gums show, I hate when I do that)

In the conference center we stopped to play with legos for a sec and John Poisson (tiny pictures/radar.net founder) popped up. We were both rockin the radar hoodie - I actually wore more the whole week. I really miss talking to the radar peeps. John knows his shit. We went out a few days later and had a great convo. btw if you want a similar radar t-shirt just email em

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Went to lunch at Las Manitas for the tweetup. There I met the Maestro of Utterz, Simeon Margolis (I had no idea he was a co-founder until just now). Tony Katz and his business partner-cant remember his name. Met orchid8 for the first time – twitter friend. Started seeing people with their N95s. Austin funny man/tech geek Omar was there - loved running in to him all week and laughing to his commentary on twitter. Talked with Simeon for quite a while about promoting to the youth market - really was a great conversation, he was very interested, listened well, and was totally humble. Gonna have to talk with that guy again. Met David – twitter friend who is at UT. Started following laughingsquid – turns out there were always at the same places as us but we had no idea what the guy looked like. Connie Reese and palls were there. Also, somewhere in between @Davidhwalker came and gave Cesar and I our new Conjunctured business cards. Damn, they are hot.

conjunctured business cards

Went to a panel on how to Rawk Southby. It kinda sucked. Afterwards we went to the stage and I gave Matt Mullenweg a high-five for creating wordpress. We talked to him about growing up in Houston, etc. Was a very nice guy. Cesar and I took a photo with him.

Matt Mullenweg

Oh man, we met the icanhascheezburger guys – they are so freekin cool! We talked to them about coworking for a while and them opening a space in Hawaii After that we went and waited for a bit for Tim Ferriss. He got done but needed to go get something or someone. So he proceeded to put down his stuff and run off. In the mean time I got kissed on the cheek by a toasty MJ (some girl who is supposedly internet famous. Never heard of her, but she was real drunk all week).

mj girl

Tim came back as we talked outside the auditorium for like 30 mins. He had sent a tweet earlier about how grackles were whooping like meth addicts at 3am. And that he wanted a shotgut. Evidently he was staying down town where there was a large collection of those foul birds.

When Tim left he put on his backpack and orange jacket and did a little jump kick maneuver. Then ran off. He just looks like a highly tuned machine.

Went to Champions by the convention center with Cesar and Kara Soluri – really happy about meeting Kara. Thom Singer, Ash, and Eric showed up for a while too. Champions is lame btw. But we knew that.

Kara left and Cesar and I went to his car and drove to the Coworking meetup at the hotel san jose. There were a ton of people there I wanted to meet, and I did. …to be continued.

Recalling SXSWi - Day 0

Published
by
John Erik
on March 17, 2008
in General
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Went and had dinner with Drew and Todd from http://notanmba.com – they had just gotten in town. We were following their trip here on twitter so it was fun to then join in the story we (@Cesart and I) had been watching.

From there we went to the Continental Club and watch some crazy “psychedelic folk” band with a woman singer. I really enjoyed it. Was laughing a lot. After her came a Blues jam with Charlie Sexton. Evidently he is famous. No idea.

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There was however a famous person in the room. Lance Armstrong and his posse were stage right watching the show. Some tall skinny white girl wearing flats was dancing dirty with him. No idea who he is dating. There were also some older men in his group who were dancing up a storm. And a guy or two who may have been his brother(s). They all seemed to get pretty wasted. Towards the end the girl and lance were all over each other. So yeah, they were more fun to watch than the band.

SXSW Interactive 2008

Published
by
John Erik
on March 7, 2008
in General
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sxsw2008.jpg

And so it begins

Follow me on…

  • radar: johnerik | invite code: cheese
  • twitter: john_erik  | http://twitter.com/john_erik
  • dodgeball: jmetcalf27@gmail.com

Austin Entrepreneur Townhall

Published
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John Erik
on March 5, 2008
in Austin, Texas Related and Texas Ventures
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The night started with some casual networking. Kevin Koym our conversational host for the night told everyone this was not a sit-down event. That we needed to get off our butt and stop talking to the people we came in with. We were all there to meet people. I thought it was a great thing to say - really set the mood. Kevin knows what he’s doing, he’s held these kind of townhalls all over the place (Chile, Mexico… Kevin, correct me?). We also watched a clip from A Beautiful Mind, this one where John Nash (Russell Crowe) declares The “best result comes from everyone in the group doing what’s best for himself. Incomplete. Incomplete. Because the best result will come when everyone in the group doing what’s best for himself and the group.”

After a quick intro to the agenda of the night’s events we broke into groups of 3. Each person answered 3 questions: Why did you come here? What challenges are you facing in your business? Who are you? In my group was Jon Lebkowsky (more on Jon in wikipedia) and a nice guy named David? who was not yet an entrepreneur, is working on finding his passion in life, and doesn’t let his kids on the internet.

Then the discussion started. We were in a half-circle auditorium, the one at IC2 if you are familiar. Kevin seeded the discussion. He wanted to know, what can we do together? Where can we take Austin?

The conversation for some reason stayed on social media for quite some time - we can we all use it to efficiently make more meaningful connections. There was a lot of talk regarding the Digital Convergence Initiative, who’s goal is “To create an economic super cluster through the growth of the Digital Convergence business and research base of the Central Texas corridor from Waco through Austin to San Antonio and the surrounding and included communities.”

To further develop Austin as a hub for innovation I posed a couple things: There must be free flow of information (who’s working on what, etc), we must eliminate good ol’ boy networks, and use the internet to do this efficiently. This is what DCI is doing for businesses and this is what our co-company, Conjunctured is working on for the individual entrepreneur.

Of course the comparison came up between our Silicon Hills and Silicon Valley. Jonathan McCoy, one of Austin’s youngest serial entrepreneurs was called out because he’s leaving for San Francisco soon. Granted he has a good reason - he’s working on semantic web applications and the only place in the world for that is a little district in The Valley some are calling Sema.

hmm… If we believe that innovation comes from collaboration and collaboration can only happen when people know what the other individuals/companies are up to - I think the bay area benefits from such an extensive blog network - thus resulting in everyone knowing everyone else’s business AND everyone benefiting for a peer review, scrutiny. We need to work on a way to facilitate communication in Austin - these townhalls are a great way to do that, same with Rise Austin.

There is so much to say on the conversations that were had, I’m going to cut this off know because I’m way over my 20min time limit. Pretty soon we’ll have a video of the night that I will post here. Until then, here is a purposefully lame video by Saatchi and Saatchi (thanks Dave for this).

Join the Entrepreneur Townhall Google Group if you’d like to attend the next one - sometime after south-by.

Question about digital outreach

Published
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John Erik
on March 3, 2008
in Social Networks and Transparency
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Via social media, people are sharing more and more online. The aggregation of their various profiles (facebook, myspace, friendfeed, etc.) can create a near mirror reflection of their real world actions and feelings.

We have the power to empathize better then ever, to understand people in a new light. How can we use that to preempt mental downswings, specifically in kids?

Thinking here: You can’t just watch over and swoop in every time you see something negative. What is the balance? Should we have social workers trolling profiles for “signs.” Will we just develop the sense to tell if someone is having a hard time. I’m talking about preventing tragic events - every time they happen it seems it was all over the students profile. right. So what can we do?

–

Thanks to Skyler for getting me thinking about this again. And to Danah and Bambi for chatting a while back.  Outreach20.org is a site I made a while back about this.

My answer to Bill Gates

Published
by
John Erik
on February 28, 2008
in Insight
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Today I logged in to a freshly redesigned Linkedin.com and saw this question by one of my favorite people, Bill:

Q:

How can we do more to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology?

A:

As a millennial, I can tell you exactly how.

Bolster our *existing* young/outspoken leaders in science and technology. Help them be leaders, then allow them to talk. The younger the better, our youth have to be able to empathize with the person they are listing to. If they can see an inclining of themselves within that person then you have a chance. “If s/he can do it, so can I.” Open up.

Please don’t even try with a traditional media company or traditional media outlets. It has to be peer2peer — and you’d better hurry up because trust there will be gone soon like the rest.

Romanticize those leaders.

You, Bill, have the ability to do this. And I believe you will. Please keep asking questions and talking. You’re a leader, you have an obligation. Thanks for realizing that.

Thoughts on managers/execs

Published
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John Erik
on February 16, 2008
in Transparency and Work
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Thanks to http://notanmba.com and Todd’s comment for getting me thinking like this.

As an outsider (corporate outsider, that is), it seems unbelievable to me that managers don’t make a point to communicate/get to know their team. I can understand the desire to keep secrets/keep things non-transparent, but I liken that to being a wimp. A pushover. And other terms. That’s just weak. If you are the best, you should have nothing to worry about, challenge that. Be the best. Let your guard down and ask questions.

Here’s something I was talking about with my uncle yesterday: You get into upper management because you are a gal/guy who can get things done. You got there because you are a top performer. Now you’re leading a group and you think you have to continue doing the same thing. So, you crack the whip and push your team hard. You work 90hrs vs 60 because “you know best.” Nothing happens.

Here’s what I think: Rethink the position you are in. A great manager/exec is a coach/a teacher. You’re not there to continue doing what you did. You’re there to teach your whole team how to achieve, like you used to. To do this successfully, be a good teacher you have to stop doing, doing, doing and start talking, communicating, getting to know your team, understanding why each of them do things the way they do. Allow yourself to empathize with them, and they with you.

This is good for two reasons. 1. If they can see themselves within you, and they respect you, it will encourage them, motivate them. 2. If you can empathize with them then you can understand their intentions. Understanding their intentions is like understanding their thought process.

Where did I come up with this response? I thought about what I learned from the ad industry: How to reach and know your target market. …The same principles apply to so many domains. Listen. Communicate. Ask questions. Achieve empathy.

Internal social media strategy

Published
by
John Erik
on February 16, 2008
in Social Networks
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Last night I had dinner with my Uncle. He’s a leadership/exec coach so after dinner we hung out and he gave me a couple hours of coaching. I was surprised how much what he was saying sounded like a social media pitch.

The ideas are the same: get to know your customers/employees, build (empathetic) relationships with them, be able to understand where they are coming from, ask questions, don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know.”

It seems like companies should have an internal social media strategy: a series of outlets created just for employees. A way of keeping a conversation going.

Just asking questions now… Is that the value of having an internal social network? How do you keep people using it? How do you make it fun? Who is an expert in this?

I’ll be thinking.

Where to post jobs in Austin / active communities

Published
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John Erik
on February 15, 2008
in Austin
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Let me know if I’m missing any important ones under these topics, this is the list I sent to the City of Austin guys…

Communities with active job boards

Other Active Groups

Happy Hours/Events

Know any good UI designers in Austin?

Published
by
John Erik
on February 15, 2008
in Austin
. Comments

To follow up on my last post, we had drinks with the AustinGo guys. They’re working hard on the site - I told them a list of places to post for jobs. They need Plone developers.

On that note, I’m always surprised with how little people know about what is going on in the city.

I was watching DEMO the other day and discovered a new Austin startup: Voyant Inc., purveyors of Voyant @Home. It’s a downloadable java app that allows you to create a financial time line for yourself and/or family. meh.

It’s not like mint.com (a service that connects to all your financial accounts and creates pretty graphs to tell you when you’ve spent to much eating out, etc.)- you have to enter everything manually. I love time lines, but they have to be pretty. That makes them fun to use. My friend Michael had me watch a TED video of JJ Abrams, in it he says how he loves Apple computers because they are so beautiful. It’s like they look at you and say “what are you going to write worthy of me.” Needless to say, Voyant @Home is not really fun to use this time around.

Austin. Go!

Published
by
John Erik
on January 31, 2008
in Austin and Texas Related
. Comments

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Myself, Cesar and Dusty went to the first of six Townhall Meetings regarding the redesign of the City of Austin’s website. At one time our site was voted the one of the best in the nation, unfortunately it hasn’t changed since then.

Pete Collins, CIO, did most of the talking and was very receptive to the audience’s thoughts and opinions - and even gave out his personal email address and phone number. We talked with Matt Esquibel who’s heading up the project. He seemed to really know his stuff and was a designer in his past life so I’m looking forward to a beautiful exterior for the site. Something that was interesting to me, they’ve deiced to build the site in Plone . They are looking to hire asap - I believe they have three full time positions open.

I was telling Paul Hopingardner how I believe the city needs a private media network to talk about/publicize what the city is up to. I’m subscribed to all these blog from The Valley, but really what I want to read about is what’s happening here in Austin. …We’re having drinks on this topic soon, I’ll report back.

On another note, it was my first time inside our City Hall, it’s very sleek, but quirky at the same time - fits Austin.

MOLI - who cares about privacy, feels like AOL

Published
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John Erik
on January 30, 2008
in Social Networks and Transparency
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moli.pngI almost erased this blog because I didn’t want this company to get any press, good or bad.

MOLI.com, has anyone heard of this site? I just learned about it from the DEMO website. So, it was started by the founder of E*TRADE, him and some other early investors put up 29.25M. Recently they raised another 29.6M from, among others, the two founders of Home Depot (huh?).

DEMO says they have no primary competitors - listing Facebook, mySpace, and Linkedin as secondary. The reason, MOLI allows you to have multiple profiles under the same login. uhh, that’s not that different. I’m pretty sure this would be an easy move for Facebook to implement - ask users “Hey, have more that one account - enter the email address you used to create that account and we’ll link ‘em up. We’ll never share with anyone that your accounts are linked! (small print: But, we’ll know and so will our advertisers and everyone else we sell data to!)

covibelive.pngI signed up for an account with MOLI and after a few minutes all I could think was “OMG it’s AOL.” It’s a huge nonorganic network for everything.

The layout is hip - kinda feels like a less refined VIRB - and they do have a cool feature called CoVibeLive (patent pending) that shows you statistics of the people who’ve visited your page. It looks like they spent a lot producing the site - dark tones and gradients are everywhere. All this slick and cool doesn’t mean speed though, it takes a while to load - if you’re gonna have all that, have some AJAX goin on to limit the need to refresh.

TechCrunch, GigaOm, and Webware are are all very nice to MOLI in their reviews. Where they paid? heh There is a lot of talk about the site being for adults - doesn’t feel like it. There is a video tutorial where an overly excited twentysomething makes jokes and talks mostly about privacy controls (Which to me just seem like a joke - I don’t care about privacy, I want people and companies to know who I am personally. If I was to work anywhere I would want them to look at my facebook/myspace/flickr/radar/twitter and say “yeah, he’d fit in our culture” - what’s up with this separation, what a pain in the ass — if you’re worried about this take Tim’s advise)

We’ll see what happens. They have ~60M to burn through, lots ads, commercial content and a couple paid services that let you turn your profile into an online store.

What is Texas Ventures?

Published
by
John Erik
on January 15, 2008
in Texas Related and Texas Ventures
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texas-ventures.jpgI’ve been doing a bit of networking lately, and so I have been working on my Texas Ventures pitch – or, at least trying to explain concisely what it is/does and why I care about it. Here’s what I got:

I’m a recent graduate. While I was at UT I co-founded (with Tom Serres & Brandon Chicotsky) a student group called Texas Ventures. It’s a group for student entrepreneurs to get together, learn, network, etc.

  • We keep a database of all student entrepreneurs on campus. Want-a-bes and real ones. The real ones are organized by industry, description of their business, level of their business, etc. and we provide a prospectus to the university and soon the city of Austin on the climate of entrepreneurship at the university. We will soon be allowing organization like Angel groups and VC’s we’ve partnered with to search this list. Using Angelsoft or an old fashion phone call, we’ll pass off or pitch the best ones to these groups. But only the best of the best, and only if they need it.
  • Of course, we have a speakers series and we try to go to lunch with a local entrepreneur every week – the last two people we spent time with were Gay Gaddis and Donald Zale.

Now that I’m graduating (and the others are too), we’re taking it to the next level and forming a nonprofit. Andrews-Kurth has taken us on pro bono and we’re working on our 501(c)3 status.

  • The nonprofit will provide small financing to student run businesses as well as grants (probably average of a few thousand/yr)
  • Through our advisor, John Sibley Butler, we are working with IC2 and the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship to provide a physical location for these companies to work together in a co-working environment (perhaps similar to what some other Austinites are doing, with this atmosphere)
  • In that environment we’ll continue to bring in consultants/professors/etc to continually mentor these students

This is what I always wanted when I was a freshman/sophomore. And that’s what we have created.

Anything else I should include? Want to talk more about this - drop me a line: jmetcalf27 (at) gmail.com or 210.724.3619 - you can join the facebook group if you’re a UT student.

–

Couple call outs because I’ve been reading your blogs for a while and would like to get to know you guys: Texas Startup Blog,  Austin Startup.

As a millennial, where I want relationships to begin

Published
by
John Erik
on January 8, 2008
in Insight and Transparency
. Comments

timeline.jpg

Thom Singer (who btw has a new book on the way) left an excellent comment on my “Cut the chitchat - carry a dossier everywhere!” post. because my response is so long, i figured i’d make it a post. you can read his original comment here.

–

i do see you’re point tom. i would never give up the time i’ve spent getting to know my girlfriend - those getting to know you talks were and still are the very best.

>>>however, not all relationships are built/formed in the real world. you and i may have had only one interaction in the real world, but i feel like i know you quite well from reading your blog, receiving your tweets, and looking at your linkedin profile. (jonray even better – i wish i was as transparent as him.)

this doesn’t mean that when i see you again i’m gonna give you a big hug, but i will know you much better than i did.
i’m not suggesting that we forgo face-to-face relationship development, i’m suggesting we kick start it by getting the simple stuff out of the way - the profile stuff. i wish new people i meet in the real world could just hand me a piece of paper that says everything about them (i’m just gonna google them later). …doing this does not bypass growth, it enhances it and allows us to get even closer, faster.

if the level/closeness of a relationship is on a number line and 0 represents a complete stranger and 30 is knowing their birthday and their wife’s name, it may take 7 real world interactions just to get to 60. what happens when we reach 100? it doesn’t just end, it keeps going, we get to know each other better and better. and that’s where things like trust and confidence can happen. where they can take on a new standard. that’s where you want to be.

this is a little off, but let’s use a father-son relationship as an example. i let my dad in on everything and i have kick started it by allowing him access to my photos, profiles, writings, etc.. stuff he would never have dreamt of telling his parents. because of this, he is able be a dad on a deeper level. to give me guidance in situations where none would have existed had we not gotten lower level things out of the way.

sharing brings people closer and closer, and there’s no ceiling on that. i agree, perhaps some things like color of undergarments need to be left out initially, but maybe not.

we can’t escape it. especially a millennial, growing up connected with things like facebook’s newsfeed, i just want to skip to the level 30 and start from there. to bypass the profile info, the ‘what you did today’ narrative. i just want to know that info. for it to be told to me instantly so we can jump ahead and talk about things that really matter, about emotions, how things made you feel, how we can work together, what goals we share. we (people today) are busy and have less and less time with others, to grow we need to be able to get to the substance as quick as possible.

that’s how we create trust and honesty, i want to jump start it.

when you share things on twitter, on your blog, about your life, allowing people in, you’re opening the door and making it possible for people to have a meaningful interaction with you. isn’t that what you want - to start the relationship at a higher lever. isn’t that what social media is all about. - sharing and connecting with a person or brand through means never before possible, except in person, to creating an emotional connection. a desire. an attraction.

… i wish people would carry a dossier everywhere so we could make this initial jump without having to go home and research them online.

to conclude, when my gf and i first started talking, one night while i was working on a project, i encouraged her to look at all my photos, read essays i’d written, journal entries, my blog -i wanted her to get to know me as soon as possible so i didn’t waste her time or mine with something that wasn’t going to work out. when we started having the pillow talks they started at a much higher level. because of this and continued honesty and openness, i believe we know each other far better than some couples who have been together for 10 years. - the same thing can be applied to business relationship.

Thoughts on criticism / put downs

Published
by
John Erik
on January 7, 2008
in Insight
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thumbdown-786247.jpgA good friend of mine (college undergrad) asked me a great question this morning. I only had a few mins to get back to him, so I wrote quickly. Here’s the break down:

Q: How do you deal with/react to public criticism? Whether it be on the shallowest level of “your an idiot” to a fair level or even higher level.
Basically in general how do you respond to criticism/put downs?

A: positive criticism should only really happen one on one or in a small/tight group. in that situation, ask them questions right there, get them to be completely honest with you about their criticism. even if what they are saying is hurting you, pretend you’re ok so they won’t hold back. you won’t grow nearly as fast from people beating around that bush, not saying directly what they really mean.

later on there are some question you need to ask your self, but let’s keep going.

for negative criticism: when it initially happens, react calmly. often people are looking for a reaction or a rise from you. if you don’t give it to them, the fun is diminished for them. with guys, i’d say, don’t apologize to them, say something like “alright man” and try to end it. if they continue either stay away from them, leave, or hit ‘em in the face if you’re not in a place where you will get arrested (if that sounds shocking to ya, i’m totally serious, make sure you have the balls mentally that you really would hit someone. but only if know for sure they are in the wrong).

after negative criticism or during positive: always try to understand why they said it. what are they talking about. what’s the root of it. what gave them the idea, or spurred them to say it.

always try to find the reason why. even if it’s just someone being mean. there is always a reason. to grow you have to be completely honest with yourself. do you actually suck at doing something, that’s ok. just realize it, realize the other things you are good at, then figure out what you’re going to do about it. knowing more about yourself, discovering what others really think about you/how they see you is very powerful, but like everything, with more power comes more responsibility - potential for greater success and greater failure equally.

Cut the chitchat - carry a dossier everywhere!

Published
by
John Erik
on December 29, 2007
in Social Networks
. Comments

Reading a post at BornEntrepreneur.com titled Deep, Meaningful SMALL Talk, made me remember one of the reasons I started blogging and making information about myself public: If I blog consistency and others do the same then perhaps we’ll reduce then need for general confab, allowing me/us to get talking about something of value asap.

Online profiles help, but not in real time. I wish that when I met a new person they could just pass me some sort of beefed-up “about me” that included their backgroud, job, goals, education, etc. Having to ask questions to get that information can really take a while - and most of the time we don’t have it. What else would that document include?