Drink Beer for Big Ideas, Coffee to Get Them Done
I didn’t know what I was going to write about today. When this happens, normally I grab a coffee to help get the ideas flowing, but for the last few days in Montreal, no one’s been allowed to drink the water due to a bacteria leakage. This also means: no coffee. So instead, I grabbed the next best thing to help me get going: a beer.
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"Never Just Remember How to Do Something, Understand How It Works"
When you know how to do something, you have a skill. When you understand how something works, you can alter that knowledge and adapt it for your best uses. This gives you confidence and the ability to grow.
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Confront Your Biases to See the World from Another Point of View
David Foster Wallace's commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon college has gone down as one of the better pieces of life advice out there. His suggestion is pretty simple: when you're annoyed with another person, think about why you would do what they're doing.
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Oak Outliner Is Simple and Powerful Online Outliner
Outlining is a great way to organize ideas, but they can get cluttered up fast. Oak Outliner is a webapp that supports local storage and makes organizing outlines dead simple.
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"Comparison Is the Thief of Joy"
This quotation, from Theodore Roosevelt, argues that comparing your work, your life, or whatever else will only serve to make you unhappy. Why? Because when you compare yourself to others, you know all the dirty details of your situation or the problems with what you've created but only the seemingly positive surface information about them or their work. So don't hold yourself up to some outside vague standard of greatness. Judge your work by your principles and leave comparison out of the equation.
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Subtask Is a Feature-Packed Mind Mapping Tool (and We’ve Got Invites)
Subtask is a new mind mapping tool that makes mind mapping easy, sports an elegant interface, and is packed with collaboration tools if you need to work with others. It's in private beta right now, but we have invites for you to try it out.
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Suggest a Bad Idea to Prompt Better Ideas from Others
Half of the problem with collective indecisiveness is blank slate syndrome. Blogger Jon Bell recommends providing a poor suggestion to a group in order to get better ideas from everyone involved.
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