I just took a quick swing into and out of NYC, catching up with some great friends whom I haven’t seen in the better part of decade. It was awesome to hang with Rachel, Micha, and Katha and one of the highlights was checking out the High Line in Manhattan.
Last year attended The 99% Conference in NYC and one of the keynote speakers was Robert Hammond who (along with Joshua David) spearheaded the project. Robert gave a great presentation which you can check out by clicking here - on how the project was born and how he helped to start a movement in the community to bring it to fruition. I was immediately fascinated by not only the look and feel of the High Line but also how it came into being.
Here’s a quick video of the park that I shot of us at the High Line as well as some footage of us enjoying the mustache exhibit by Dave Mead at the Chelsea Market.
Have YOU been to the High Line? Would love to hear your thoughts on the park - or David Mead’s photos. Those mustaches are fierce. Fire away in the comments.
One of the main reasons I wanted to hit up The 99% was to see Seth Godin speak in person.Seth is the author of many great books on marketing including Purple Cow and most recently – Tribes.He also has one of the most successful blogs on the web and I’d highly recommend that you subscribe to it or at least give it a visit.He’s a source of constant inspiration.
What Seth wanted to talk about was our Lizard Brain and how that makes us reluctant to ship.He argued that we are all creative – we all have big ideas. That’s not the problem.The problem is that we need to execute.We need to SHIP.
It happens to all of us right?We’re working on a project for weeks or months with a go live date or a deadline that we have to hit.And the closer we get to release (our Ship Date) – somehow magically more people want to have influence in the final product.More people (including ourselves) want to change the product.And the closer we get to the ship date, it seems like the more we want to make last minute revisions and tweaks.We call this ‘Thrashing.’
So why do we thrash, particularly at the last minute?Seth says its our Lizard Brains speaking up.See, in evolutionary terms we all have a lizard brain to a certain extent.It’s the cortexes that evolved around the lizard brain that makes us reason, create, etc.But the lizard brain – that’s the part that is reactionary.It doesn’t have the ability to reason because its preoccupied with threats (animals are pretty much always hungry, scared, horny, or reacting to something).
The threat is that as we get closer to the Ship Date, we start to get scared.Other people want to put in there .02 before the final product goes out.Afterall, we want to please as many people as we can…We want it to be a hit.But that rarely happens with we thrash at the last minute.It s what prevents us from shipping on time, under budget, and with the best quality we can muster.
The answer?Two things.First, Thrash Early.In the planning stages of the ideas, make some ground rules that everyone from the top down has to follow.Everyone.For instance, if you don’t show up to the thrashing meetings to voice your ideas – you don’t count.If you don’t have the confidence to speak up early on, to make your opinions heard – you don’t count.Because its by thrashing early that we’re able to set goals, set priorities, and bring the project to its full potential.
The 2nd lesson is to know when to ship.Often late in the process, more and more ideas and hands get put into the pot and the cause of that is cost overruns, and delays.Don’t.Keep to the plan.When do we ship?We ship when we run out of time, or run out of budget. Period.
In the end, the products and ideas that are rewarded are the ones that are tangible.They are the ones that are executed.They arethe ideas that have shipped.
Ji Lee’s background at Google Labs was very impressive from a design and programming perspective.There’s no doubt that he had the chops to be there.But the crux of Ji’s talk was not about his work at google at all.It was about realizing the power of your passions and personal projects.Its through investing time in these projects whenever you can, that some of your best ideas will be born.And these ideas can turn into something much bigger than you could have imagined.As Gary V. says ‘ You can do a lot of damage between 7pm and 2am”.
Ji’s personal project that probably received the most amount of notoriety was not an online project at all.It was The Bubble Project.You may have seen this covered on the news (particularly if you live in NYC).
Here’s the gig. Ji printed up several hundred stickers of speech bubbles in various sizes and snuck around NYC in disguise at night attaching them to existing advertisements.The catch was that there was nothing written in the speech bubbles.Rather it was an experiment to see what people would do with them.And in most cases, the art which resulted was much more interesting than the ads themselves, and subsequently more interesting than anything Ji could have pulled off on his own.
Soon, the project was being covered by national news and started a huge buzz on the internet.He also allowed anyone to download bubble templates so that people could affix bubbles themselves to places, decentralizing the project (and culpability).
The takeaways?First, don’t be afraid to enable your customers or people in general.When you enable them to participate and have input into a project it can grow well beyond your original expectations.
Platforms are where its at.They allow for instant scaling and reach.Because platforms distribute ownership.It gives users a stake in your idea.Its by building a platform that ideas can take root, morph, and expand exponentially larger and faster than a controlled growth plan.
Finally, money is NOT everything.The reason people engage in personal projects is that they have an innate passion for whatever it is they’re doing.First find what you’re passionate about, execute, and opportunities for business applications will present themselves.
Ji is also working on a video spinoff of the Bubble project encouraging people to make their own forms of guerrilla video art.Its the Abstractor Project. Check it out here.
Ji Lee’s background at Google Labs was very impressive from a design and programming perspective.
