Ok work hard, but work on the right thing!

I came upon a link shared by a Facebook buddy, about why working hard is overrated. Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr, argues that working hard is not really the magic thing that leads to great inventions or successful outcomes. She says working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard. She continues:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing. Working hard, even, if that's what you like to do.

But just how do we know we're working on the right thing? In her followup post, Caterina says the only way to gauge that is instinct, gut feel, or the spine-tingling sensation you feel when you encounter a great work of literature, as Nabokov (of Lolita fame) says. Getting the right thing generally requires exploring lots of ideas, fleshing out a few, ruminating on them, and throwing almost all of them out. She quotes Steve Jobs, "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the many things we haven't done as the things we have done."

Sports stars, trophy wives/girlfriends - 2

More sports stars and their trophy wives/girlfriends.

Boxing champion Wladimir Klitschko, 6'6" - Actress Hayden Panettiere, 5'1"
(Omg, 17" height, 150+lbs weight difference, she'll be split in half)

Happy three kings

Today is the twelfth day after Christmas. The twelve days of Christmas ends today, the Feast of the Epiphany - Three Kings Day. Facebook, which is good in reminding me of events, tells me that I have three friends named Melchor who are all celebrating their birthdays today. Happy birthday to them. Happy three kings to all of us.

I also know of a Mang Gaspar. I bet it's also his birthday today. I don't know anyone named Baltazar. It's more common as a surname than first name. Available online text bills the three kings as Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. But in the Philippines, I remember the billing went as Melchor, Gaspar, Baltazar. That's probably why for those born on January 6 more are named Melchor than Gaspar or Baltazar.

The Age of Unreason

"George Bernard Shaw once observed that all progress depends on the unreasonable man. His argument was that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world, while the unreasonable persists in trying to adapt the world to himself; therefore for any change of consequence we must look to the unreasonable man.

While in Shaw's day, perhaps, most men were reasonable, we are now entering an Age of Unreason, when the future, in so many areas, is there to be shaped, by us and for us—a time when the only prediction that will hold true is that no predictions will hold true; a time, therefore, for bold imaginings in private life as well as public, for thinking the unlikely and doing the unreasonable."

- Charles Handy, The Age of Unreason
# ISBN-10: 0875842461
# ISBN-13: 978-0875842462

Unfriended

Early last year they said that the 35-54 age group is the fastest growing age group in Facebook. That has since been replaced by an older group, the 55+, but my age group still remains 2nd fastest. It's no surprise then that I manage to see many of my long lost friends and relatives in social networking sites. And as we continue to use technology to try to reconnect bonds, we conjure up new words to describe the experience.