The Dip is, like most Godin’s posts, insightful, inspirational and brief (you could read the book in less than an hour). It also contains some great illustrations by Hugh McLeod.
The message of the book is deceptively simple: The Dip is the slog between starting and mastery. The Dip is the reason we are here.
Some quotes:
Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff a the right time.
Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success.
In a competitive world, adversity is your ally. The harder it gets, the better chance you have of insulating yourself from the competition.
And yet the real success goes to those who obsess.
It’s easier to be mediocre than it is to confront reality.
The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable.
If you are in Zurich, you can borrow my copy. Just ask.
In the quest for the definitive blog ranking system, some optimistic guys (and maybe gals, who knows) have launched today the cleverly-named site blogged.
This is how it works: you submit your blog, with a description and some keywords (which they call tags, which is, you know, more 2.0 and stuff), and their team of editors will eventually review and rate your submission.
This innovative approach to organizing and ranking web-content has only two minor problems:
Editors need to be extremely well-versed in the categories they are responsible for. Their opinions and tastes should be in line with those of users.
You need an army of editors. A big one.
So maybe they can hire lots and lots of editors. Maybe they already have, who knows. But is their editor hiring process good enough? Judging from my initial explorations, the answer is “No!”.
According to blogged, About.com: Web Design / HTML (grade: 9.3) is a better programming blog than Joel on Software (grade: 9.1), and the best programming blog of all is Slashdot (grade: 9.9), Coding Horror coming in a distant second (grade: 9.5).
Anybody that has spent any time at all reading programming blogs (e.g. me) can tell you that neither Slashdot nor About.com: Web Design / HTML are blogs, and neither of them is really about programming.
I guess the blogged guys have never heard about Yahoo! and why/how it lost in search. And I guess they haven’t noticed Technorati’s struggles, either. Sigh. If they would have just read the right blogs…
Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast.
Free Exchange blog at The Economist: Sick man no more: the German economy and labour market is recovering:
Germany is indeed waking from its sclerotic slumbers and might post a growth rate of 3% in 2007. That would more than double the 1995 to 2005 average growth rate of 1.4%, and could even exceed expected American and British 2007 growth numbers.
[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]
A site for a book called “Career distinction” has something they call an online identity calculator. The ‘calculator’ is actually a rough guide to assessing how does your personal brand look on the internet.
I had never heard about the book or the site before, but the online identity calculator seems like an interesting tool for those that want to build out a reputation online.
Hi, I am Ana and this is my site. If you are the curious kind, you might want to read a bit more about me. Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely mine and not those of my employer, past, present or future.
