Start Making Something

From Rework, Change the way you work forever

We all have that one friend who says, “I had the idea for eBay. If only I had acted on it, I’d be a billionaire!” That logic is pathetic and delusional. Having the idea for eBay has nothing to do with actually creating eBay. What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.

Think your idea’s that valuable? Then go to sell it and see what you get for it. Not much is probably the answer. Until you actually start making something, your brilliant idea is just that, an idea. And everyone’s got one of those.

Stanley Kubrick gave this advice to aspiring film-makers: “Get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.” Kubrick knew that when you’re new at something, you need to start creating. the most important thing is to begin. So get a camera, hit Record, and start shooting.

Ideas are cheap and plentiful. The original pitch idea is such a small part of a business that it’s almost negligible. The real question is how well you execute.

The Powerlessness of Positive Thinking

Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared, and more acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can’t persuade himself to believe are good.

According to a great deal of research, positive fantasies may lessen your chances of succeeding.

The whole story here.

Massive Open Online Courses

A deep revolution in education is in progress in the form of high quality free online courses. I have tried a couple of them in Coursera, and have been astonished at the quality of the teaching there.

There are a lot of important issues at stake. First, most teachers, at least the kind of teacher that just stands up and talks in front of a blackboard, simply disappear. You just need a bunch of them, the best ones, to create online courses that can be followed by millions.

On the other side, the whole model of high education collapses. You don’t need to go to a expensive and prestigious university for five years of your live, since you can have access to the best information from home and throughout your whole professional live.

It is true that top universities provide students with much more than formation (in fact I doubt that they provide formation at all). They provide networking, human experience of how interact with elites and a label of having been there that opens thousands of doors.

Here is a list of open online course providers. Choose your passion and enjoy it.

Doodling

This is a word I didn’t know until Arcadi Navarro sent me the following link:

            Why doodling is a habit you don’t need to break

Doodling designates this universal habit of people of writing automatically something when attending a boring speech or when talking by phone.

It appears to have beneficial effects on our cognitive capabilities.

The Checklist Manifiesto – Reading Calendar

Let’s begin our first experiment in synchronized reading. The chosen book by popular acclamation has been The Checklist Manifiesto by Atul Gawande

We are going to set a calendar that extremely slow so that no one gets stressed by it and also that we can go into more detail in the comments of it. After this first experience we will see if the model is useful to us are changes have to be made.

We will set a date for each reading unit. At that time, either David or me, we are going to publish a post commenting the reading and we will use the comments of the that post as the discussing board for it.

Proposed calendar:

2014/03/06      Introduction

2014/03/13      1. The problem of extreme complexity

2014/03/20      2. The checklist

2014/03/27      3. The end of the master builder

2014/04/03      4. The idea

2014/04/10      5. The first try

2014/04/17      6. The checklist factory

2014/04/24      7. The test

2014/05/01      8. The hero in the age of checklists

2014/05/08      9. The save

My Tailor is Reach – Our blog is changing language

 

Esa es la primera y famosa frase del método de aprendizaje de inglés Assimil con el que yo aprendí ese idioma. Desde entonces siento adoración por el método y lo he usado siempre que he necesitado aprender una lengua nueva.

Y esto viene a cuento de que David y yo hemos nos hemos reunido en cónclave porque ya hace tiempo que estamos dándole vueltas al tema de la lengua que usamos en el blog.

Por un lado estamos dejando de lado gente que no habla español y que ha expresado su interés en seguirnos.  Por otro lado, la mayor parte de los materiales a los que hacemos referencia, y las lecturas que vamos a emprender, están en inglés de manera que se hace extraño escribir los textos en otra lengua. Si alguien no sabe inglés, de todas maneras, no puede seguir la mayoría de los posts actuales porque no tienen sentido sin los textos que los acompañan.

Así pues, con la autoridad que nos confiere ser los dueños del blog y teniendo en cuenta que “El Pla Subtil” ha sido concebido siempre como una plataforma de experimentación, hemos pensado que vamos a pasar a escribir nuestros blogs en inglés. Al menos lo vamos a probar una temporada.

Naturalmente todo el mundo está invitado a poner sus comentarios en la lengua que le apetezca. Catalán, Español, Francés, Inglés y Polaco lo entenderemos. Para otras lenguas tiraremos de Google Translate.

Die Gedanken sind frei

Leyendo sobre La Rosa Blanca el grupo de resistencia no violenta contra el nazismo, me he encontrado con esta canción tan emocionante: The Gedanken sind frei -los pensamientos son libres. Como no tengo ni idea de alemán, adjunto la versión en inglés de Pete Seeger.