Author Archives: nwfries

“You must avoid at all costs the idea that you can manage learning several skills at a time. You need to develop your powers of concentration and understand that trying to multitask will be the death of the process.”

– Robert Greene

“I struggle to remember. I close my eyes and think back, but so many precious moments from those nights are gone forever. Numberless conversations, breathless laughing fits. Declarations, revelations, confidences. They’ve all fallen into the sofa cushions of time. I remember only that we always sat up half the night, cataloging the past, mapping out the future. I remember that we took turns describing what our little company was, what it might be, and what it must never be. How I wish, on just one of those nights, I’d had a tape recorder. Or kept a journal, as I did on my trip around the world.”

-Shoe Dog, Pat Knight

I’ve noticed when something seems oddly difficult, it’s usually because I’m conceptualizing & approaching it the entirely wrong way.

Ex) with descriptions on Product Pages in shopify (liquid not being allowed – only html)

Bill Atkinson came to Apple in 1978, after Jobs had convinced him to quit his PHD program in neuroscience at UC San Diego. He had become known for designing computer programs that made 3-D maps of mouse brains. It was cutting-edge work. but Jobs pooh-poohed it: “What you’re doing is always going to be two years behind. Think how fun it is to surf on the front of a wave, and how not fun it is to dog-paddle on the tail edge of that same wave.” Atkinson wanted to surf. Two weeks later, he was at Apple, where he soon became Jobs’s regular dinner partner and sounding board, and a star engineer on Apple’s follow-up to the Apple II, the Lisa.

Jobs’s main way of motivating people wasn’t merely fear, but rather capriciousness, which was both scarier and far more magnetic. “Steve would say you were great one day, and an idiot the next,” recalled Bruce Horn, part of the team that went on to create the drag-and-drop method of moving files around. Atkinson seemed to float above Jobs’s ire, and below it too. buried in his work. Peers would tell him that Jobs was using him, exploiting Atkinson’s obvious talents and energies. But Atkinson mostly didn’t notice. He was working too hard. “A good tube toothpaste wants to be totally squeezed out,” Atkinson told me with a shrug.

– User Friendly, Cliff Kuang

From The Systems Bible, by John Gall:

There is a man in our neighborhood who is building a boat in his back yard. He knows very little of boat-building and still less of sailing or navigation. He works from plans drawn up by himself. Nevertheless”. he is demonstrably building a boat and can be called, in some real sense, a boatbuilder.

Now if you go down to Hampton Roads or any other great shipyard and look around for a ship-builder, you will be disappointed. You will find in abundance welders, carpenters, foremen, engineers, and many other specialists, but no ship-builders. True, the company executives may call themselves ship-builders, but if you observe them at their work, you will see that it really consists of writing contracts, planning budgets, and other administrative activities. Clearly, they are not in any concrete sense wilding ships. In cold fact, a SYSTEM is building ships, and the SYSTEM is the shipbuilder. In brief:

PEOPLE IN SYSTEMS DO NOT DO WHAT THE SYSTEM SAYS THEY ARE DOING.

“Fall in love with problems, not solutions. As a PM, it’s easy to see a problem and snap to a solution. That’s what product management is, after all. But if rather than falling in love with the solution, you learn to love problems, you’ll find a steady stream of opportunities for innovation. Even better, you’ll be open-minded and let the problem guide your solution.”

– Ken Norton’s Bring the Donuts blog

Excerpt from The Birth of Loud, by Ian S. Port:

A while later, Muddy found himself inside a downtown recording studio, where the people in charge, a well-to-do white lady and a foul-mouthed Jewish man, asked him to do a song or two of his own. Muddy agreed. With his amp turned up so loud that his strings cackled through its speaker, Muddy sang that old slow blues from the Mississippi Delta.

He gave himself over to the words, conjuring the distraught tremble that killed in a club: “Well, brooks run into the ocean and the ocean run into the sea / If I don’t find my baby, somebody gon’ sure bury me.”

“What’s he saying? What’s he saying?” said the Jewish man in the control room, a club owner named Leonard Chess. Here was just a signer and an electric guitar, backed by an upright bass. Chess was laughing skeptically, shaking his head. “Who the fuck is going to buy that?”

Chess’s partner, Evelyn Aron, hadn’t heard this music before, either. But she liked it. “You’d be surprised who’d buy that,” she told him.

Aristocrat Records pressed up three thousand copies of release 1305, “I Can’t be Satisfied” backed with “I Feel Like Going Home,” performed by Muddy Waters. The ten-inch, 78 RPM platters went out to corner stores and beauty parlors around Chicago one Friday. By the next day afternoon, every one of them was gone. People snapped them up so quickly that Muddy could find only a single copy.

A critic for Billboard heard the record. “Poor recording distorts vocal and steel guitar backing,” was the assessment. But it wasn’t the recording that had distorted the guitar—it was the overdriven amplifier that gave it that thick, worried tone. Muddy’s electric guitar and amplifier had begun to transform the Mississippi Delta blues, the country blues, into the electric blues. “I Feel Like Going Home” reached no. 11 on the national Billboard charts—a feat that neither Muddy Waters nor Leonard Chess would have dreamed of.

In the dub, performing with another guitar, a harmonica, and drums, Muddy’s music reached its full power. Yet Chess (who soon assumed total control over Aristocrat and renamed it Chess Records) refused to bring Muddy’s full group into the studio, seeing no reason to mess with a successful formula. Muddy, seeing the reactions of crowds in clubs night after night, hankered to capture the potency of his new electric blues, though, and finally went renegade to do it.

In a covert session for the Regal label, Muddy Waters and his band made an astounding document. “Ludella” featured the frontline of his club band – Muddy on lead guitar, Jimmy Rogers on vocals and their harp player, the explosive genius Little Walter, filling in. Drums and bass came in behind the three of them, laying down a heavy, rolling, medium-tempo beat. From the very start, Muddy was all over his guitar, bending notes in ecstatic agony, keeping his overdriven amplifier growling. When Little Walter cried through his harmonica, Rogers moaned about a woman sneaking around, a woman who “just won’t get along.” The intensity, the sheer heaviness of the performance, was devastating. It was 1949. “Rock n’ roll” as such was still years away. But there was no other word for it: the song absolutely rocked.

More hits came, and by the early fifties, Muddy’s electric music had a hold on Chicago. “They even named it the Muddy Waters blues,” a contemporary remembered. Muddy hadn’t been the first to play blues sons on an electrified guitar, of course, but his band was “the first to use amplification to make their ensemble music rawer, more ferocious, more physical, instead of simply making it a little louder,” the critic Robert Palmer would later write. Muddy was taking music to new realms of expression and power through the electric guitar. One of his bigger hits was a song called “Rollin’ Stone.” The revolution was under way.

Someday goal: Work directly with people and help them in some fulfilling way?

Five year goal: become financially independent

One year goal: be self employed