The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious. Your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps. That's schlep blindness.

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Great essay, should get you thinking... | How to Drop Out -

So instead of "do what you love," we should say, "Do what you love, if what you love is a) original, b) plausibly something the world will come to value (even if it doesn't value it now), c) something you won't regret doing even if you never become successful."

Launch fast, don't lose momentum.

By far the most common problem afflicting the writers in Michels’s practice is procrastination, which he understands in terms of Jung’s Father archetype. “They procrastinate because they have no external authority figure demanding that they write,” he says. “Often I explain to the patient that there is an authority figure he’s answerable to, but it’s not human. It’s Time itself that’s passing inexorably. That’s why they call it Father Time. Every time you procrastinate or waste time, you’re defying this authority figure.” Procrastination, he says, is a “spurious form of immortality,” the ego’s way of claiming that it has all the time in the world; writing, by extension, is a kind of death. He gives procrastinators a tool he calls the Arbitrary Use of Time Moment, which asks them to sit in front of their computers for a fixed amount of time each day. “You say, ‘I’m surrendering myself to the archetypal Father, Chronos,’ ” he says. ‘I’m surrendering to him because he has hegemony over me.’ That submission activates something inside someone. In the simplest terms, it gets people to get their ass in the chair.” For the truly unproductive, he sets the initial period at ten minutes—“an amount of time it would sort of embarrass them not to be able to do.”

The Working Backwards product definition process is all about is fleshing out the concept and achieving clarity of thought about what we will ultimately go off and build. It typically has four steps:

Start by writing the Press Release. Nail it. The press release describes in a simple way what the product does and why it exists - what are the features and benefits. It needs to be very clear and to the point. Writing a press release up front clarifies how the world will see the product - not just how we think about it internally.
Write a Frequently Asked Questions document. Here's where we add meat to the skeleton provided by the press release. It includes questions that came up when we wrote the press release. You would include questions that other folks asked when you shared the press release and you include questions that define what the product is good for. You put yourself in the shoes of someone using the product and consider all the questions you would have.
Define the customer experience. Describe in precise detail the customer experience for the different things a customer might do with the product. For products with a user interface, we would build mock ups of each screen that the customer uses. For web services, we write use cases, including code snippets, which describe ways you can imagine people using the product. The goal here is to tell stories of how a customer is solving their problems using the product.
Write the User Manual. The user manual is what a customer will use to really find out about what the product is and how they will use it. The user manual typically has three sections, concepts, how-to, and reference, which between them tell the customer everything they need to know to use the product. For products with more than one kind of user, we write more than one user manual.

How to use Heroku/Jekyll/Git

Great tips on writing.

Start learning Ruby!

@johnbeynon Hi John, I'm having some trouble getting my blog (on jekyll) up on heroku. I have trouble with step 5:

About heroku.

Give a presentation that you would like to hear. Don’t worry about following a formula.
Make your points by telling stories. Don’t just say “X is true”. Tell a story that will make your listeners think that X is true.
Stay within the allotted time (e.g., 5 minutes). In real life — presentations at scientific conferences, for example — most presentations are too long. Listeners rarely like this. They think the speaker is selfish. If one person speaks too long, this usually means that other speakers will have less time to speak.
Don’t read your talk.
Use simple, spoken English. Don’t speak fast
Smile and use body language to connect with the audience.
Pause before the most important points.
Ask questions to attract attention.
Show the big structure of your talk.
When telling a story, don’t go far from the point of the story (e.g., with unnecessary details)

It takes very little cognitive energy to begin this process. Next time you see someone who strikes a very good impression, stop and analyze a little bit. Note what they’re wearing. If you want to strike that same first impression, go get something comprable. Your fashion will be working for you at that point, and your interpersonal dealings will become easier.