I’m ready to sign up and start next week. I don’t know that this model would work for every industry and for every scale company, but man is it compelling. Nice work, Valve.

Great stuff, relevant for so much more than movie making. We all have stories to tell every day, many of these tips are relevant in so many settings —

• “Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle.”
• “Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it.”
• “Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way.”
• “Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of?”
• “What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character.”
• “Simplify. Focus.”

But he was our dog, and we adapted to him, and made a home for him. And in his last year, he got sweeter and more attached to us, and accepted our carrying him and helping him through his day.

We will miss him.

So I’m being way more thoughtful about what I read. It is easy to get drowned by all the tech industry blog/press content, but there is a lot of echo in this content, and given the huge drives to publish publish publish, a lot of less thoughtful content. And has been well noted by others, not a lot of transparency. So less daily tech coverage, more thoughtful analysis on long wave trends.

Also, some great inspirational thoughts that arrived on my screens yesterday to help me:

• Starting at the beginning of February, I made a change. Each day I blocked off a precious hour to build something.. Hear hear. Creating is hard hard work but is infinitely more rewarding than consumption.
• So next time you hear something, or someone, talk about an idea, pitch an idea, or suggest an idea, give it five minutes. Think about it a little bit before pushing back, before saying it’s too hard or it’s too much work. Those things may be true, but there may be another truth in there too: It may be worth it.. It is super important to keep my brain open to new ideas and not just wallow in the stuff I already know, so I do need to keep a little brainspace open for other’s ideas.
• …so I’ve started forcing myself to ask the other person at least three questions about their opinion. Forming those questions helps me think. Often, my gut negative opinion changes. Sometimes, the questions change the other person’s opinion. There is no downside.. Another way to keep the brain open.

Reminds me of the classic 4 quadrant chart of ambition vs competence. Being competent is good, but you need to have a dollop of ambition. And you have to get the ambitious and incompetent people out of your org as quickly as possible.

After the meeting, my mentor and manager pulled me aside and said “You know, you might want to develop a weapon besides the bazooka.” And pointed out how I had humiliated the client staffer, and that I was unlikely to get a lot of cooperation from him in the future. Oops.

I’ve gotten better at this over the years, but I was reminded of this recently when one of my partners and I sat through a pitch. At the end of the pitch, I pointed out a number of flaws in very terse fashion. My partner shared his own experiences, mentioned some challenges, and asked some gently-pointed questions. The team likely left the room thinking that my partner was really wise, and that they’d like to sit down with him. In contrast, they probably thought I was a d*$k.

I have to keep reminding myself — the goal of business communication is to make yourself understood, and to hopefully effect positive change. If you communicate in such a way that people write you off, well, hard to make progress from that point on.

I’m betting the same dynamic holds true in popular music, or in almost every other area of human endeavor. Certainly holds true in software, with obviously even faster aging out. 

Enjoy what you are doing today, work with people you like today, help make people’s lives better today, because in the long run, our efforts are largely immaterial. 

You could view this as depressing but I view it as wonderfully freeing — don’t worry about making mistakes or heading down the wrong path or looking the fool, in the long run it really doesn’t matter, so take some chances today and try to make a difference now in someone’s life.

But as a country we have expended a lot of dollars and diplomatic chips to get these folks free. I hope that we present the folks with a big bill for services rendered — if you go poking around in dangerous places in the world (like these folks, who goes hiking in Iraq/Iran for gosh sakes, was that really the only place you could think of to go hiking??), you should not expect that all the other taxpayers in the country are going to carry the cost of rescuing you. Yes we will rescue you, but there will be a reckoning for services rendered.