Category: Reading Lately

Schedule regular check-ins with your direct reports, so that giving feedback — both negative and positive — becomes a normal part of the weekly routine.

Everything You Need to Know About Giving Negative Feedback by Sarah Green for HBR

Before you begin to write, do you have any pre-game rituals or practices?

Given I write several thousand words each day, there’s no room for “pre-gaming.”

The “game” IS the ritual.

Here’s How Maria Popova of Brain Pickings Writes, interview by Kelton Reid for Copyblogger

Most jobs are mediocre. Most people’s work is mediocre. Most products and experiences are mediocre. Most lives drift to mediocre. When you rise above the mediocrity, people will notice.

Thirty Things I’ve Learned by Nick Crocker

Lois wholly or partially created some of the most exceptional and memorable ads in history. For better or worse, behemoths of consumerism such as Tommy Hilfiger, Jiffy Lube, ESPN, MTV, and many others have ingrained themselves in American culture because of his indelible campaigns. The qualities that set Lois’s work apart from that of today’s advertising industry are a) his stuff was unapologetic and transparent about the fact that it was selling a product, and b) he used ideas to hawk products rather than the other way around.

Geoge Lois, interview by Rocco Castoro for Vice

I will try to post every month or so what I have been reading lately – books, essays, blog posts, code. Recently inspired by Om Malik’s similar column.

Yet if we look back over the last 400 years to ponder what ideas have caused the greatest changes in human society and have ushered in our modern era of democracy, science, technology and health care, it should be a bit of a shock to realize that none of these is in story form!

Powerful Ideas Need Love Too! by Alan Kay

A good programmer in these times doesn’t just write programs. A good programmer builds a working vocabulary. In other words, a good programmer does language design.

Growing a Language by Guy Steele (video on YouTube, transcript)

It turns out that the key to Apple’s creativity, speed, and adaptability is, on its surface, the exact opposite of the kind of free-wheeling creativity one might expect. It’s a checklist. A really long one.

Any company can copy the keystone of Apple’s design process (Quartz)