Life

“Lose your product oriented lens and start seeing the world through the jobs-to-be-done lens. When you focus on your products and solutions, you begin to lose touch with the real problems and challenges people face in achieving their ultimate desired outcomes.”

What’s the thing they’re trying to get to? What’s the job they’re trying to get done?

Recognize and acknowledge that first. Then look at how you’ll get them there. 

What a sad situation for Wright’s family and the company. It’s tempting to want to draw conclusions between the finances, the campaign, and Wright’s death, but we don’t actually know much about the situation. But I do think this highlights the potential disconnects between mental health & business, publicity & success, and success & happiness. The internet can seem so intimate but ultimately it’s a thin view of an individual’s or company’s reality.

via A sad update about a scissors maker that went viral

In a December 2015 article for BuzzFeed, Joseph Bernstein argued that “the dark forces of the internet became a counterculture.” He called it “Chanterculture” after the trolls who gathered at the meme-creating, often-racist 4chan message board. Others ended up calling it the “alt-right.” This culture combined a bunch of people who loved to perpetuate hoaxes with angry Gamergaters with “free-speech” advocates like Milo Yiannopoulos with honest-to-God neo-Nazis and white supremacists. And these people loved Donald Trump.

They did it for the lulz.

Are you thinking of making the leap as a remote worker? But you wonder what it’s be like to work remotely?

Source: A day in the life of a remote worker – Remotive

My first attempt at working remotely didn’t end well.

I had a brief stint in the role of a Happiness Engineer with Automattic back in 2013. Maybe it was the work itself, maybe it was the timing… I don’t know. But, in any case, there was a mutual agreement that it wasn’t a fit. I didn’t last beyond the probationary period.

Fast forward to 2015. I joined GoDaddy as a remote employee working from home in Toronto. The rest of my team was distributed between our Sunnyvale, CA and Tempe, AZ offices.

It’s been just shy of three years since I joined GoDaddy, and I absolutely love the setup.

It’s 12pm at home while it’s 9am on the west coast. That gives me a morning of uninterrupted time. Sometimes I use it to go heads-down on productive tasks, like writing or research. Other times I use it to run errands while the traffic is light and the stores are empty.

I still go down to our offices every few months, usually to get “face time” with colleagues and sync up on plans for the upcoming quarter. (I’m writing this from our Sunnyvale office, by the way.) But even when I’m there, I’m still doing what I’d do at home: headphones on, plugged in, working away at whatever needs doing. I just happen to be surrounded by people doing the same thing.

So, if there’s one piece of advice I have for anyone considering going remote, it’s this: your ability to perform may be determined entirely by the work you’re doing. If it’s motivating work, work that you enjoy or care about, you’ll get it done, location be damned.

Knowledge is only good if you apply it, right? But here’s one thing a lot of people don’t consider: Sharing knowledge is a great application. You might not be a teacher, but if you act like one, you’re already applying knowledge. All it takes is a mindset shift.

via How to retain more from the books you read (Darius Foroux)

Take what you’ve learned and pass it along.

It’s what I do every month at our WordPress meetups, and what I try to do every day on my blog.

At the office, we’ve started curating the best of what we read and learn into a collaborative “playbook” that the entire team contributes to. The playbook turns ideas into instructions, and those instructions help everyone take action.

Sharing is caring. 🙂