Wes is an expert in Online Lead Generation. Born and raised in the beautiful country of Zimbabwe, like anyone with any sense he left in 2001 and now lives in London. This is his tumblelog.
View the archive.
Quieting the Lizard Brain
“What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do is [get projects finished],” says bestselling author Seth Godin, arguing that we must quiet our fearful “lizard brains” to avoid sabotaging projects just before we finally finish them. (via a comment somewhere on Perry Marshall’s blog about slowing down in order to be more productive)
A lot of companies are set up with departments. So it’s sort of like, OK, you have the design department here and you have the programmers here and you got the IAs and you got the project managers. And while they all work on the same thing, they also have their own sort of turf, you know. So people are really protective about “Oh you can’t do that because that’s my job. I have to do the HTML. You just do the Photoshop, and tell me where this should go and I’ll do it.”
But at 37signals, it’s sort of like the lines are blurred.
Lots more good stuff in this 37signals Podcast
Giving handouts to Africans is harming not helping
In this provocative TED talk, Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda asks us to take a completely new look at the “African question” — to look beyond the media’s stories of poverty, civil war and helplessness and see the opportunities for creating wealth and happiness throughout the continent.
Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression.
While rewards are effective at producing temporary compliance, they are strikingly ineffective at producing lasting changes in attitudes or behavior. The news gets worse. About two dozen studies from the field of social psychology conclusively show that people who expect to receive a reward do not perform as well as those who expect nothing. This result, which holds for all sorts of rewards, people and tasks, is most dramatic when creativity is involved.