Reputation Systems
eBay was founded on a very simple principle: people are good. Of course, after only a few months of operation, it was determined that this wasn't entirely true. Most people were honest, but a few took advantage of the new online auctioning system to rip buyers off. This was typical of the early years of the Internet; people gathered at the fringes of cyberspace and didn't treat one another with respect. Are people, by their...
Toy Story and Charity
For several decades now, Hollywood hasn't been in the business of making movies. It seems that way, because every year the cast and crew of that year's best films attend the Academy Awards ceremony and Oscars are handed out to the winners, seemingly based on the merits of the art that has been created. This holds true for independent filmmakers who want to make art through storytelling, a craft which is, thankfully, very much alive...
Tough Questions
A few months ago, I got to see Malcolm Gladwell speak at a local theater. The subject matter was about what you would expect: a few narratives weaved together in such a way that their endings were all tied together into one tidy takeaway for the audience to reflect on, as is so typical of his effective writing style. What really interested me happened during the audience Q&A after his speech. The third question came...
Breeding What Works
Paul Orfalea started Kinko's in Southern California back in 1970, and quickly expanded his simple copy-shop operation into several stores. His management style was rather unique. By his own admission, he felt under-qualified to tell the people running each of his stores what to do, so he left the stores to their own devices, without issuing a lot of top-down directives. Instead, he traveled around between the stores and learned from each store manager. He...
Knowledge Is...
We tell teenagers it's "power". Celebrities go on television and tell kids on small spots that studying is a quick road to empowerment. The problem with power is that it's an abstract concept. It's not as concrete as it could be, and it's very difficult for a teenager to discern from that message exactly what they stand to gain by trying harder in school. Here's what I've learned: more knowledge means less of a chance...
Accommodations
If you watch for deals, it's possible to get a hotel room in a decent casino, right on the strip, for about $30 a night. You have to dig a little to find these kinds of deals, but they're out there. The casinos don't mind charging the low rates, because most of the guests end up dumping enough money into the slot machines during their stay to make up for what they might lose on...
Nostradamus and the Stock Market
Back when I was in college, a friend and I were having a discussion over a case of beers about how you could defraud lots of people. We weren't really planning to try and do it, but we were just tossing around the ideas of Ponzi schemes, multi-level marketing schemes like Amway, and basically any other white-collar equivalent of the pigeon drop. My friend old me about an age-old con: you acquire a very large...
Fleeting Genius
There's a great book I read recently called Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys To Creativity by Hugh MacLeod. It's a quick read; most of its insights are in the small illustrations (which are the author's craft), which take up roughly half the pages in the book. I picked it up in the bookstore and had finished reading it within 45 minutes. Despite that, I still bought the book, with the intention of re-reading it...
Make Yourself
I had a friend in middle school who loved the Beach Boys. Here's a quote from what was his favorite song of the same name: "I guess I just wasn't made for these times." It's pretty easy to attribute a failure in finding your place in the world to some flaw in the world itself. Defeat means not having to try anymore. Here's my retort to Brian Wilson's lamentation: "It's easier to wear slippers than...
Against the Current
Take a second to reflect on your own personal view of human nature. How do you think we're wired? What motivates people?
Once you reach your conclusion, try this: for one month, try doing something each day that's counter to your worldview about human nature.