Saint-Somewhere

Losing Loose

Substituting "loose" for "lose" has to be the most common mistake I see in email, and it drives me nuts. It is so pervasive it can't be a typo. Lose means (among other things) to fail to win, and to fail to retain. Loose, on the other hand is what I'm trying to achieve (at least with regards to the pants I've kept since grad school in the insane hope they'll fit again some day) by dieting. Please, please.... lose the extra "o" (that way you won't look like a looser...)

The Choice of A Pronoun

Over the past few months I've talked to a wide variety of people about different business ideas - from internal product people, to entrepreneurs pitching their company, to friends and family trying to figure out "what's next" in their lives (which often seems to involve a new business idea as we approach our individual and collective midlife crises). In all of these conversations, almost all the ideas were bad (which is, by the way, true of most of my ideas as well - that's just the nature of having ideas... most should be immediately exiled to the trash heap they snuck out of). But something was bothering me about it...

It finally clicked when my wife handed me a Wall Street Journal article on someone trying to market (I kid you not) "eco fur". This isn't just a bad idea, it is a stunningly bad idea. And that's when it hit me...

The thread that tied the bad ideas together was that they all seemed to start with a statement like "I wanted to..." or "We wanted to leverage our assets in...". They never started with "Customers want..." or "There is a clear market need for....". The title of the article is "The Problem With 'Eco-Fur'? It's Still Fur".

I don't know if I'll ever start another company, but I just pray that if I do, it isn't based on an idea like "I'd really like to sell coats made of dead animal fur, so it would be great if buying them made people feel good about themselves, because hey... they're not very nice animals, anyway".

And if it is, I give my wife permission to club me...

Aspire to Inspire

This is another one that really bugs me, and it has been cropping up more and more lately. The first time I saw this substitution, I got an all division email from a very senior manager when I was working at a really big software company out in Redmond, WA. He was talking about our new branding campaign, and it said something like "our competitors may have more time spent on line, but our new campaign gives us an aspirational brand". He was right - they were aspiring to have a recognized brand, and many of us got inspired to leave...

'Scuse Me While I White This Out...

My grandmother was an English teacher, and for generations all the men in my family were lawyers. In my family, making up words for the humor value was fine, but misuse out of ignorance got you something between a severe frown and being last in line to pick your piece of chocolate cake. I once had a summer long argument with my step-mother when she tried to convince me that "bring" and "take" could not be used to describe the same event (yes, I won).

Sadly, email has shown us just how far our use of the English language has fallen...

FIGHT BACK! If you don't we'll end up with "misunderestimated" actually in the dictionary. We already have inflammable having "flammable" as one of the definitions!

Olson's Law of Beachfront Property

The amount you use something you bought your house to be near decreases as the square of the distance from your house. Trust me - the difference between the beach at your door and the beach just down the hill is much farther than it looks in pictures...

The Hierarchy of Suburban Living

There are four basic groupings of relative distance in suburban living:

Wanderable means you not only can walk there, but it really is no big deal - 5 to 10 minutes, tops.

Walkable means sure, you can walk, but you really have to think carefully about whether you want to or if it isn't worth the hassle (I mean, what if it rains halfway there?)

Drivable means that you can hop in the car and be there in a few minutes - it's like the motorized version of wanderable

Go-able means that you can be there in 15-30 minutes, as in "Sure, we can go to the mall this afternoon"

Tripable Anything that takes longer that half an hour in a car is a trip, and likely involves checking to see if you have enough gas, diapers (if applicable, if you don't have kids you don't care, if you do, you only make that mistake once...). If you actually drive more than 30 minutes at a stretch (one way) on a regular basis, either your job involves a lot of talking on the phone, or you were sick the day they taught what makes real estate valuable....

The Hierarchy Of Travel

There are three main types of travel: vacations, trips, and visits.

Vacations are the sort of thing where you lie on the beach, relax, and when you get back you have a hard time getting motivated to work the hours that made you feel like you needed a vacation in the first place.

Trips are things like flying to Rome, spending three days seeing the sights, then flying to Athens for two more days of tours and running around. When you get home and people ask you how your trip was, you usually answer something like "Fantastic, but I feel like I need a vacation to recover from it".

Visits are when you leave home to go see your parents or in-laws. No matter where they live, never confuse a visit with a vacation.

Blogging

I'll admit it - despite spending time putting a blog together, I've been pretty vocal as saying that blogging is probably stupid, at least on a mass level. I'm still fairly convinced that I was right, and that in the end no one will (or should) pay any attention to most people's blogs. Having actually been paid to write at various times in my life, I have an admittedly self-important perception that there's value in getting through the editorial gauntlet, but I've also decided it's an interesting enough experiment that I'll give it a shot. Besides, I have kids now - I need to build up a list of dumb things I've done so I can embarrass them with stories when they start dating...

Twitter

Yah... I'm sorry, but this has to be said. Twitter is dumb. Don't get me wrong, I'm fully aware that just saying that officially makes me Old (with a capital O), and I'm sure the Twits (sorry, couldn't resist) have legions of loyal fans who will find my cell phone number and inundate me with flame-texts and I won't be able to get what I'm sure would have been a riveting email about work, and that they will probably sell their company to Microsoft or Google and make a ton of money... and I hope they do... really.

But seriously... I just don't think it's good for a non-stop stream of consciousness to rise to the same level of importance in our capitalist culture as badly written emails about poor product ideas, and how to market them through scare and pressure sales tactics to pensioners and retirees down in Florida before their houses sink into the marshland on top of which they built their gated golf communities.

In 1998 I was sitting in the back row in business school reading The Onion (ignoring what I'm sure was a fascinating talk about queueing theory, despite the fact they had to give away free pizza to get a crowd). There was a great article about Starbucks opening a branch in the bathroom of an existing Starbucks, because god forbid you'd have to lose your place in line because you wanted to get another cup of what made you need to stand in line in the first place. If only we'd had twitter back then, there would have been no need - a thoughtful friend would have rushed over to bring you a latte when he saw your post: waiting in line with legs crossed at the men's room at starbucks... AND my cup is empty. And that, my friends, is just the kind of impediment to entrepreneurial growth we just don't need at this fragile stage of our economy.

Why am I doing this?

good question.... the truth is I'm not entirely sure, other than to have a place to drop random thoughts, and as an experiment to see whether anyone has so much time on their hands that they'll read them. A few years back I heard a statistic (I don't claim to know if it's true) that at the time there were roughly 4M people writing blogs on a regular basis, and 1M reading anyone else's blog on a regular basis... so, to the 0.25 humans statistically likely to be reading this, thanks for dropping by.