One unexpected result of becoming CEO of my own company is that I found myself without a traditional budget line I could pull from.
As we grew our company, we created a budget aligned with core functions. I stepped into a role in which I was overseeing them all, but I didn’t set aside budget for me in last year’s budget for myself. That sparked me to wonder how other CEOs approached giving themselves budgetary space to experiment, explore and trial.
I had read other books by popular marketer Seth Godin (I was a regular reader back in 2009). But not one of his best known, one most aligned with work I do, his 2008 Tribes.
A friend (thanks Kristin!) handed me a copy last year and told me to get it done already. Godin is so ubiquitous in web circles that I stopped pursuing his work. I do respect his perspective and approach; I just expect to come across it from his passionate follower base. I supposed a friend handing me the book was just that.
I read it in a weekend last fall, and I just came across the notes I wrote down for myself. Below find them.
In December 2012, My good friend and musician Mike Herzenberg hosted in his beautiful home the very talented John Elliott for a very special, intimate 10-person concert.
I hosted a handful of concerts for John in Philadelphia over the next several years. I recorded a podcast episode with him. He became a friend, and he helped me understand how to better support independent artists.
Buy local campaigns can come across as needless protectionism. At their best though, when we talk about buying local or supporting independent artists or otherwise diverting our dollars to small, we are voting with our wallets about what we want in the world. That is something I support.
I’ve picked up a few habits to support independent artists that I wanted to share in the hopes they might suit you.
Continue reading Buy local; support independent artistsThe words we have for drinking vessels are old ones. Glass, mug and cup are all very old ideas.
Hence, there’s quite a bit of culture tied to them. So, though, I’m not an overly particular person in many household respects, I have a lot of opinions about them.
I remember being a teenager and finding a common bond among friends because we all agreed (and struggled to explain why), we thought it was strangely discomforting to have milk served in a plastic cup. Understand, we weren’t richly cultured.
We were middle -class teenagers who for the first time were confronting together an opinion developed independently based on culture and lived experience. This was new.
This is going to be a strange little post about feelings and memories about tiny, meaningless things. If you’re paying attention, you might draw conclusions to feelings about language and fashion and so many other cultural elements.
Continue reading Apparently I have a lot of opinions about what cup you should use for your drink
A version of this essay was published as part of my monthly newsletter a couple weeks back. In its own way, it commemorates African American History Month. Find other archives and join here to get updates like this first.
Dr. King is likely the American thinker who comes to my mind more than any other. Not the populist who was culturally moderated over time into a convenient character for classroom posters. But the difficult and complicated and tortured man, the leader who was flawed and inspiring and masterful in so many ways.
When a MLK quote rattles in my head, it isn’t his iconic, if tired, classic: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Pulled from its context, that’s always seemed to me to be too universal to stir. Instead, it comforts, and I’ve found always found MLK misunderstood when he’s seen as a comforting.
Modern linguistics is based largely on a descriptivist view of language, describing common usage. Many grammarians follow a more prescriptivist view: if we don’t prescribe, language will falter.
I read a host of pop linguistics books this year, challenging my prescriptivist publishing origins with a small library of descriptivist perspective. I also consumed podcasts, articles and other interviews with experts on the matter. (Most recently this conversation.)
Along this exploration, I was familiar with several of the most-cited grammar classics (King’s English and Elements of Style among them). But I hadn’t read Eats, Shoots and Leaves, published by Lynne Truss in 2006. So I changed that late last year.
I wanted to share a few notes below.
Continue reading Punctuation today: notes from the 2006 bestseller “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”
Prominent investor Ben Horowitz’s 2014 book ‘The Hard Thing about Hard Things’ is among the seminal business philosophy books from this era of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.
Horowitz is half of the founding team of Andresson-Horowitz, an iconic Sand Hill Road software-focused venture capital firm. His work and perspective has influenced today’s funding and startup climate, and so I finally dug into the book.
I enjoyed it and took away several insights. As per my habit, find some of my notes below.
Continue reading Notes from ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things’ by Ben HorowitzA decade ago this month a couple friends and I started down a pathway that became Technical.ly so in the next couple weeks I am going to do some sharing.
A couple weeks ago, we hosted our inaugural Alumni Ball — gathering both current and former staff at the Pen and Pencil Club — and on February 26th in Philadelphia, we’re hosting a public celebration, conjoined with our largest jobs fair. We’ll also run plenty of editorial mentions honoring this anniversary.
First things first publicly, I wrote a Twitter thread unashamedly showing off about how lucky I feel about the team I am a part of right now. I’m sharing that here, with slight editing.
Continue reading A thank you to my coworkers ahead of Technical.ly’s 10th anniversary
Americans are rotten at saving for retirement.
It’s at least in part because of the seismic market change from 20th century-era defined benefit offerings (the pension you might have gotten working at a company in 1972) to today’s climate of defined contribution plans (the 401k you have at work or the IRA you might have with a company like Vanguard). More recently the Great Recession complicated the story more.
Whatever the case, we know one in three Americans has less than $5,000 in retirement savings. Two-thirds of Americans say they’ll outlive what they have saved, including the half of households that have no retirement-specific savings at all. Rules of thumb to the contrary abound: you ought to have the equivalent of a year’s salary by the time you turn 30, and you might want at least 10 times your top earning salary saved by the time you do retire.
When things are stressful, I tend to try to find some way to make them more approachable.
It’s in part why for the last several years, two childhood friends and I have gotten together once a year to discuss what we’ve tried, learned and accomplished on the subject the previous year. With a bit of nerdy glee, we call it Personal Finance Day, and we just held the fourth annual earlier this month.
Continue reading Your retirement savings goal to strive for should mean you never dip into principal
