Nobody Tells This To People Who Are Beginners

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“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.

“But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.

“Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one piece. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.

I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

– Ira Glass, On Storytelling

Thoughts On Speaking At CocoaSlopes

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I was in Ogden, Utah, last weekend to present at the second CocoaSlopes conference. (Access my slides here.) I had a lot of fun doing it. I haven’t given a speech in a long time and thought I’d share a few random thoughts:

  1. Wow, did putting the presentation together take a ton of work! I had some starter notes and then wrote a full outline then started putting the slides together. It took me four days, which pretty much killed last week. While my ticket and travel was taken care of, the cost of putting the deck together is expensive. I didn’t anticipate that.
  2. I was nervous before I started to speak. I hadn’t given a presentation in a long while. This took me by surprise. I never am nervous before a presentation. I think because I presented in the middle of the day plus not sleeping much the night before all kind of did me in. Plus I didn’t feel like I got enough practice in  because I spent all week just creating the presentation.
  3. Given that, the minute I started to speak the nervousness disappeared and I felt like I was back in familiar territory. I do love public speaking!
  4. With the amount of work it takes to put this together it really makes sense if you can use the presentation more than once. Justin Williams, also speaking there, told me he puts together one presentation a year and then gives it five or six times. That makes a ton of sense.
  5. The people at CocoaSlopes were just awesome. Dave Klein, who runs CocoaConf, Joel Grasmeyer and the others were fantastic and made me feel right at home. Thanks, Joel, for the invite! Dave, if this is what CocoaConf is like except on steroids, I’m going to have to attend.
  6. The participants were really into it. They cared deeply about what was being presented and participated as much as possible.
  7. The CocoaSlopes folks did a great job creating opportunities to talk and get to know people there.
  8. I was so burned out that by 3pm I needed a break. A few of us went out to grab a beer and eat some snacks and decompress.

Probably the best part for me personally, though, was getting to meet some of my fellow speakers. The guys accepted me right away and made me feel at home. It was nice to hang out with and get to know Justin Williams, Collin Donnell, Charles Perry and Jonathan Penn, in particular. I hope we get the chance again soon.

Build Businesses Not Apps

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I gave a presentation at CocoaSlopes 2013 in Ogden Utah this weekend. It was extremely well received by a wonderful crowd. I thought I’d share the slides with everyone:

Build Businesses Not Apps

The few complaints I received was that it was depressing. My guess is that this came from people who haven’t experienced the App Store yet, those who haven’t had their bubble burst by the hard realities of the Store.

Personally I thought the presentation was hopeful albeit realistic. There is opportunity there for all of us if we just choose to think differently about the problem at hand.

In the early days of the Internet you could build almost anything and make it. Then reality hit with the stock market crash and things had to change. We are at that inflection point now for mobile as well.

I hope I get the chance to give this presentation again. It was a ton of fun to give, albeit somewhat grueling to create.

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All links in the lower right corner give credit to the material source if there was any. In addition I added a slide at the end with credit links to all the images, which I found with Google image search.

The Blackberrys Are In The Back

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I was in an AT&T Store a week ago activating an iPhone 5 for my wife. We had some time as the staff was busy with other customers. So I wandered around the store. There were all three iPhones on display with the new ones strategically aligned closest to the door, plenty of Android phones, and a couple of Windows Phones.

I noticed something conspicuous. No Blackberry devices. An intern came around to check on me and I mentioned this fact. One of the sales guys at the counter, overhearing our conversation, called out that they had some “in the back.” I commented back that it is hard to sell phones that are “in the back.”

I don’t hold out much hope for BlackBerry. A few weeks ago Fairfax Financial (an insurance company?) agreed to buy it. BlackBerry’s market cap is down to $4 billion, 8% of its high less than five years before. Already rumors are swirling that the price will drop from $9 per share to $7 before the deal closes.

It strikes me that that conversation with the AT&T salesman perfectly reflects the demise of the company. It used to be that BlackBerry phones had the iPhone shelf position, right up front closest to the door so you can see them the moment you walk in. Now the products are in the back. Soon they will be sent back, marked obsolete and eventually destroyed.

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If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend the Globe & Mail article entitled How BlackBerry Blew It: The Inside Story.