“To those who would tear the world down: We will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: We support you. And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright: Tonight, we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.”
— Barack Obama
Nov. 4, 2008
I’ve seen so many of Jason Fried’s talks at this point, that I think I could do a pretty good job of filling in for him if he ever gets sick before an event. But I keep watching as the talk evolves and new nuggets of thought are revealed.
Jason’s ideas about business are fresh and almost too obvious (as I believe the best ideas are). His thoughts about how to run a business, productivity, and creativity are often at the front of my mind as I work and refine my own work/life balance.
Google Mail’s web interface has tons of great features missing from even older and more established desktop mail applications. One of my favorites is the way it handles email attachments. Clicking “View all attachments” will do just that opening them in a new browser tab all together rather than downloading them to your computer and relying on the user to both find and open the images. This option is only visible when the attachments are images. Smart!
Similarly, with non-viewable attachments (such as the ZIP archives in my example) GMail offers a “Download all attachments” link. This packages all of the files into a single ZIP archive and downloads them all at once. What is more, GMail manages to intelligently name the new ZIP file based on its contents. Really smart!
All I know right now is that I want to do all of it better. Everything better. Better, better.
I don’t know how else to say it: Merlin Mann inspires the living shit out of me. His recent post, Better, incapsulates so much of my feelings about the web, my passions, and why I do what I do. He is right in so many ways; it is all about getting better.
Getting better is what drives me. I pray to be better daily. I am in a constant state of analysis — always trying to figure out what it is I’m doing, seeing, experiencing, making, building watching, drawing, listening to, whatever… and how it can be better.
Getting better is fucking hard. I can do a good job. I can make my client/boss/wife/kids happy, but it can always be better. And not everyone wants to be better. You wife doesn’t want to hear that dinner could be better. Your kids don’t care to hear that obviously their grades could be better. Your boss doesn’t want to know that his decisions could be better. But I won’t stop trying.
Merlin’s post is all about the bullshit that we can all easily fall into when we let others tell us what is important and feel the need to do everything. If you ever read anything I share, read this.
And when you’re done, read the brilliant getting started page on 43folders. And when you’re done reading that, go make something. Something fucking awesome.