In our point of view, we can see things from a perspective that leans towards Experience, Data, or somewhere in between. Which is better? The culture we live in worships Data. It would seem that standing in Data would lead to a more powerful point of view. However… Data does not get alcoholics to quit drinking. (“Your drinking has ruined 79.3% of the relationships in your life, so now it’s time to do the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life and quit!”) Data does not convince firms to specialize. (“Less than 30% of your market has specialized, so …

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I’d like some stories from y’all about investing in your business. Send ’em my way and I’ll share back with the list. Investing: expending time or money with the hope of payback/ROI, but without the guarantee of payback. Feel free to send 1 or multiple stories. I can attribute or keep your story anonymous, your choice. Please say which you prefer. Thanks! -P

Experience is one place we can stand in our point of view. It’s not the only place. Some of us want data instead. Others of us blend the two. All of us are standing somewhere on this spectrum: In reality, we don’t occupy one tiny fixed point on this spectrum. Our POV tends to come from a range: When I ask participants in the Point of View Workshop to place themselves somewhere on this spectrum, several striking things happen: Most participants have an easy time doing it. We have good self-knowledge about how experience and data define our point of …

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Your point of view is where you stand, what you see from there, and how you advise your clients as a result. Where you stand determines what you’ll see. This toot illustrates that point nicely: (Source: https://twitter.com/visualizevalue/status/1363621040715419649?s=21) For reasons I don’t fully understand, I currently have zero interest in listening to audio that isn’t music. I used to listen to maybe 5 or so hours of podcast programming/week, now it’s 0. Where I (currently) stand is a world were podcasts have almost no value. What I see from there is other people mysteriously finding value in these things I can’t …

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I sat in on a fascinating group discussion led by Simon Wardley earlier today. One of the topics was distributed/remote work. One of the usual concerns about distributed work is that it reduces innovation. It occurs to me, however, that when people discuss innovation, they are talking about a bundle of discrete things. In that conversation, at least 3 elements of innovation surfaced: Connection Knowing the terrain Serendipity As I’m fighting my way towards completing a book, one mistake I know very well: assuming the entirety of a bundled problem is as difficult to solve as the single hardest component …

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I’m still excited about NASA getting another robot explorer to Mars. It’s possible this excitement will improve my delivery, later today at 9am Pacific/noon Eastern/5pm GMT, of a livestreamed talk on business research: https://indieexperts.io/event/tei-talks-what-is-business-research/ Here’s me looking sorta stoned while practicing the talk: A TEI participant is wanting to learn about developer experience from VPEng/Team Leads who have a front-end focus in their current or past management work. If you’re open to sharing your insight into DX with him via a 30m interview, please REPLY and I’ll forward your email along to him. This Twitter thread, from Louis Grenier, is …

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Perseverance stuck her landing on Mars. Watching the livestream was the most fun and excitement I’ve had in a while. I need a cigarette now. 🙂 I’ve linked to it before, but I’ll link to it again as a part of a “double album” of two well-worth-reading writeups on member-supported work: And Matuschak’s writeup on his crowdfunded indie research program: https://andymatuschak.org/2020/ Craig Mod’s writeup on lessons learned from running his membership program: https://craigmod.com/essays/successful_memberships/ I’ve gone on record in the past as being down on consulting + patreon business model, but I should probably refine that to pure consulting + patreon …

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Getting to do a TED Talk isn’t a goal. It’s a second-order consequence of something else. Congressional medals of honor, too. Ever wonder what else works that way? -P

Upcoming talks on: business research; innovative productized service; selling your firm. For literally months I have been looking forward to turning these ideas into a talk: I know that mindmap is illegible. This Friday, using my mouth, some livestreaming software, and more than a few faroff gazes of thoughtfulness, I will make it legible and interesting. I’ve spent somewhere around 9 hours talking about the daily publication challenge of The Expertise Incubator framework (https://indieexperts.io/the-expertise-incubator/tei-curriculum/). This has been an extravagantly deep exploration of a powerful practice. I’ve said everything that I think is broadly useful about this practice, and now the …

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Cheryl and I drove to Los Alamos yesterday. Our cats, who are fascist in their food preferences, were scoffing at the backup food; they wanted their normal food faster than we could get it delivered, and Los Alamos had the closest supply. The drive took us from a house that has fiber Internet to the premise (most of its demographic peer cohort in the United States suffers with DSL-level access), past a place where a schoolteacher was killed by a pack of wild dogs last year, past one of the oldest continuously-inhabited human dwellings in the United States, through gorgeous …

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