March 2012
51 posts
February 2012
16 posts
“OMGPOP is a gaming company that has been plugging away at it for some five...”
– Draw Something Is a Hit for OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter - Peter Kafka - Media - AllThingsD
BREAKING! Magic ingredient for success: keep trying.
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“Genes for altruism could evolve if the benefit (B) of an action exceeded the...”
– Jonah Lehrer on genetic altruism
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state...”
– Kierkegaard (via slavin)
Walk needlessly!
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Why loss aversion isn't a great behavior change...
When I talk about how I’m building some kind of health-improvement app that uses game mechanics and other behavior change theories to help people make the changes they want to make, I almost always get the inevitable feature suggestion:
“You should ask people for an embarrassing photo of themselves that you post if they don’t complete their goal.”
- or -
“You...
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“If we can pause, we create space. Space to breathe, to think, to be without...”
– - Zen Habits: Pause
The key is to just pause… not to try to change your behavior.
Lately I’ve started to believe that behavior change is about 98 parts attention (aka pause), 1 part self-judgment, and 1 part effort. Of course self-judgment should stay low, but effort is the one that...
Foursquare + OpenPaths.cc (not quite there yet)
I’ve been messing around with the data from openpaths.cc for a while, and actually quite liking the simplicity and focus they’ve got for capturing and opening up personal location data.
Basically, it’s a background app on your iPhone or Android that posts location data to a secure server that only you can access (even they can’t unencrypt their own data).
I ran into...
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A shotgun approach to motivation
Some of our motivation comes from our own interest, and drive.
Some of our motivation comes from external factors like approval, status, money, points or whatever.
Either way, we all have a limited amount of motivation to apply to our day. It runs out.
I think the right metaphor for it is as an engine. It runs on energy, and creates force. The energy can be clean energy (intrinsic) or dirty...
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Humans and neurons
As a devout Kevin Kelly fan, specifically regarding his recent book What Technology Wants, which anthropomorphized the human+technology+culture hybrid as the Technium, I think a lot about the direction technology is taking us (largely independent of our own input).
It’s pretty obvious (to me) that we’re in the “connect” phase of the Technium’s development. From...
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Habits Are The New Viral: Why Startups Must Be... →
I definitely agree that knowledge about behavior change and habits are pretty important for startups these days. But the tone and implications of this article are misleading and damaging to the idea.
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Daydream about the global brain
There are 100,000,000,000 (one hundred billion) neurons in the brain of a 3-year old (which is the age that the number of brain cells peaks).
There are 7,000,000,000 (seven billion) people on the planet. So, we’re quite a few short if we were to assume that it would take one hundred billion humans to build a super-organism like the Global Brain.
But what if you count networked computers?...
“Essentially, Matchbook is like Foursquare or Yelp, minus the check-ins, reviews,...”
– Behind New Funding, Matchbook Wants To Turn Bookmarking Into Action With Intent-Based Deals | TechCrunch
Happy to take part in Matchbook and investing in it. This paragraph pretty much nails why I’m interested.
I am obsessed with Foursquare, that’s why I invested in it when Dennis invited me. I...
Top five regrets of the dying, with tangents
In an article that seems to probably be posted every 6 months or so, title Top Five Regrets of the Dying, there is this list of things that people regret about their lives, after they have lived much longer than we have:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to...