Dance Central (Taken with instagram)
I kind of want to kindle-five the random person sitting next to me…if only that were a thing (Taken with instagram)
In praise of vacation
Every time I go on vacation, particularly when I travel abroad, I come back refreshed and infinitely glad I took the time off. In praise of vacation:
To be sequestered from daily routine…
Work is work - no need to explain why it’s nice to get away from it. When we’re in the rhythm of work though, it’s easy to believe that weekends are a sufficient break. After all, it’s fun to fill upcoming weekends with plans well in advance, and I absolutely love this city, so there’s something I’d hate to miss out on nearly every weekend. Plus, to rest two days out of seven must be enough, no?
When you stop to think about it though, we give ourselves very little “me” time - my attention is almost always focused outward at other people or at whatever I’m doing (and I’m always doing something, even if it’s listening to Pandora as I walk or surfing online mindlessly). We fool ourselves into thinking we’re being productive with idle acts - I’ve literally spent hours at night organizing my eBook collection on Calibre while being on email and gchat while working while watching Hulu.
When I was discussing this with one of the partners at my firm yesterday, he mentioned that human levels of creativity are correlated with the amount of time that we spend doing nothing. I’m hard pressed to think of the last time before vacation I actually did nothing (Note: doing nothing != accomplishing nothing. I accomplish nothing all the time).
Who needs Bread and Circuses when we have our own ADD and the internet to keep us occupied?
… gives us the silence in which to hear our own thoughts
During my travels around SE Asia, I was dismayed and turned off by the addiction that several of my travel companions had to WiFi. The question “Do they have WiFi?” came up at least 5 times per day, often closer to 10. I waited impatiently during meals and rest stops when three of my friends were on their smartphones, while I had either not bothered to bring my phone that day or already gotten bored of checking email. Maybe my inbox isn’t appealing because I’m just a boring person, but for me, one of the best parts of vacation is temporarily severing ties with work, friends, technology, and our entire lives back home. It’s also why I love traveling alone.
When I travel, all I want to do is feel. I want to breathe in the dusty Laotian air (through my air filter a.k.a. Pashmina); to savor the sun of Bangkok as it colors me three shades darker in a single day; to contemplate the still, almost-oppressive beauty of Halong Bay’s karst cliffs in silence; and to muse over the bittersweet juxtaposition of killing fields and schoolchildren’s laughter in Phnom Penh in peace.
For me, 1.5-2.5 weeks is a perfect amount of time for a vacation while working full time. It takes me a full week to stop thinking like I’m still in the States, to stop thinking about work and my life back home all the time. By the second week, travel is my life, and there’s a certain serenity to focusing on refining the itinerary for each day, chronicling each day’s adventures in my journal, and meditating on life goals and resolutions for the future (New Years or not, my mind always drifts to self improvement when I travel). There isn’t anything “more productive” to do, and there isn’t a computer within reach, so we don’t feel so guilty letting our minds wander.
There is a very pensive side of me that lies dormant for much of the time because self-reflection is so low on the daily list of priorities, yet I came home from this trip with so many valuable insights that I now know I need to make it a priority. Especially while I’m young, I need to pull my head out of the water more frequently just to reevaluate. Not only have I decided to take a travel vacation every half year or so, I want to keep up the reflection in between these biannual retreats. Maybe this will take the form of more consistent blogging/journaling, maybe I’ll take up consistent jogging/yoga, but I want to carry my present clarity with me going forward.
Travel is my meditation, my Walden. May I never stop exploring, and may my curiosity never wane.
Dear Google, regarding Google+
Disclaimer: this may not make much sense if you haven’t tried Google+. If you’re curious, this site describes the features very well: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-project-real-life.html
1) This is a shockingly good UI by Google standards. Good call on Andy Hertzfeld.
2) Instant Upload concept is simple but impactful. iOS is totally going to integrate this into the next release (as they have other great Android features), but kudos nonetheless for driving mobile innovation.
3) Circles interface is brilliant, love the recommendations. Unfortunately, even elegant self-curation (a la Circles) isn’t going to convince people to redirect their content generation away from FB/Twitter. Content sharing is all about strong network effects, and you just can’t get past the Twitter/FB moat for the common people. Without the type/amount of content ppl currently share on Twitter/FB, Circles is just a multimedia version of email contact groups (which btw, is still great due to the interface).
People will take a first look at Google+, because you’re Google, but if you want them to come back for seconds, you need to make it engaging from the start. A few suggestions:
- As everyone has been saying (and as I’m sure you’re about to do), make this available for Google Apps. Considering the number of enterprises operating on Google, this could be an important enterprise play (SME, probably?)
- Add Google Groups as Circles
- For the Circles stream, pull in public tweets/updates from people in your Circles who’ve connected their fb/twitter/linkedin/4sq accounts (you do it for Google Realtime Search, do a socially filtered version here).
- Suggest Spark topics a user would be interested in (the way you’ve suggested friends) and celebrities people might want in their “Follow” Circle.
- Convince Tumblr etc to add “Send to Google+” capability (and convince Lady Gaga to publish her posts now that she has an acct…). And obviously integrate it into Blogger.
- Turn Youtube “likes” into “Google+ likes” (but make it obvious so you don’t get privacy complaints)
- To prevent the Wave mishap, show some examples of how it can be used on the initial landing page (take a picture on your phone and share it with your Family Circle through Photos, make dinner plans with your Roommates Circle through Huddle, check out interesting web content shared by your Techie Friends Circle through Stream, etc).
So as a final plea, please figure out how to make a great first impression before broader rollout. This product has had an uncharacteristically long incubation time for Google, which is great because you’re learning to hone your product more before pushing it out. Before broader rollout, make this immediately and obviously useful, or else people won’t give it a second look. For now, I only see unrealized potential for consistent engagement.
Humbling but true…
Just read a great article on business vs. technical perspectives on startups: Stanford CS major seeks sales/marketing monkey
Two fantastic quotes that reflect these tensions:
”Add $1,000,000 in value for every engineer.
Subtract $500,000 in value for every MBA.”
“They are not the code monkey. You are the biz monkey.”
Overall, the article does a great job of bringing to light these differing perspectives and arguing for bizops people sometimes having to prove their own necessity. A slightly sobering article for me, since I am no l33t h4x0r, but nonetheless helpful food for thought.
