Paulo Coelho on SOPA and “piracy”

Pirates of the world, unite and pirate everything I’ve ever written!

via Techdirt

Economics Made Simple (and interesting!)

I love Dr. Madsen Pirie, from whom I learned so much while I was in London (and from whom I continue to learn). It’s not an overstatement to call him a national treasure, someone Great Britain is so fortunate to have. I’m honored to know the guy who is doing more than almost anyone to try to give the UK a shot at being a better, more free country.

There is a common myth that, when an exchange takes place, someone gets the better of the deal. [T]hat is simply not the case. There are two parties to an exchange and they do it because they would rather have what the other one has. Each person gains. It’s a win-win. Each person has more value than they had before because each person has something they’d rather have. This is how wealth is created.

One of the things I appreciate most about Madsen is that he has always enthusiastically embraced the potential of the online space, and was open to trying things and learning from what worked and what didn’t. I’m so glad he’s brought his talents to YouTube to explain some very fundamental economic ideas in a fun, engaging way – and in an astonishingly short clip. I cannot wait for the rest! (You can buy his new book, Economics Made Simple, from iTunes or Amazon.)

Depressing thought of the day

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.

Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs. So sick of eyeballs.

Pixar, IDEO and innovation

What does this box of chocolates have to do with the topic? They were a gift from the guy who moderated these fascinating conversations at Pixar last weekend (thanks again, Frans!). My favorite quotes, courtesy of Chris Yeh (whom I owe forever, for introducing me to Frans and for so much else):

The original idea sucks. You can’t show it to marketing or the toy people, because they won’t get it. But you can’t protect it for too long; engaging with the world forces you to make the necessary decisions. There’s a lot of pressure on us to get the process right. ‘Hey, if you guys got it right up front, this would be a lot easier.’ Getting the process right is *not* the goal. (implied: The goal is to make something great)

You want to signal to everyone else that it’s okay to be unusual. ‘That guy is really pushing it, and he didn’t get in trouble, so I guess I can too.’

We have had some films that failed. We didn’t release them. Toy Story 2 was a restart. Ratatouille, we kept one line from the original script. The first version of Up took place in a floating castle in the sky. The only thing left was the bird and the word ‘Up’. The next version, there was a house that floated up and landed on a lost Russian dirigible. The next version, the bird laid eggs that conferred long life. You can say that these were failures along the way. The things that don’t work right are just things that we tried. That’s learning. Why do we associate that with the word failure? We should associate it with the word ‘learning’.

We bet on the person, not the idea. We never start with the idea. We ask them to come up with three ideas so they aren’t stuck on a single idea.

Biting my tongue

I complain far too much about the cold and rain right now, how much I hate it and want it to be over and cannot stand knowing we have many months of this to go. But I quite like the misty mood Manhattan takes on in this weather, which is sort of enjoyable if you’re indoors.

I’ve become so accustomed to looking out my bedroom and bathroom windows and seeing this view that I really wonder how I ever got by without such a reassuring, constant presence of resilient structure.

DO WHAT YOU CAN

Words to live by.

LASIK NYC

I keep suffering corneal abrasions that force me out of contacts for weeks at a time. So I’m throwing in the towel and going for LASIK, finally. Know a good surgeon in NYC? Let me know. I’d love to see properly, somehow, someday.

Are you an accomplice to the enemies of autonomy?

From our earliest days at school we are trained to think that if we don’t have order of a particular sort then we have chaos – and chaos is a bad thing. If we don’t have the grown ups in the centre of our society, maintaining order, then it falls apart. Those in power in companies, institutions or nations all have a vested interest in perpetrating powerful myths that keep the rest of us in check. In fact the degree to which they have power is determined by their success in convincing us that without them looking after us we would get in a mess. As a result we have a consistent and pretty fixed sense of what organised means, what organisations look like, and how unattractive the alternatives are. We cling to this sense of order like a lifeboat in the stormy seas of life.

Being part of this myth generating group has a strange effect on its members [...] They see people in the same situation as themselves and start to gravitate towards them because it feels more comfortable to be with people who understand. Next thing you know they are starting to see the world in terms of us and them, black and white. They need to defend something they are part of from people who are not.

-Euan Semple, whose new book is now available

Grand Central on Sunday night

Dinner