Producing vs. Consuming

As of late I've been thinking about how much time I spend producing vs. how much I spend consuming.  It's been part of what I've been thinking around happiness as I think there is a relationship between the two.  I'd first say I think there are three actual types of activity we do as humans:

- Passive consuming
- Active consuming
- Producing

The difference between the first two is that passive consuming is when you don't do anything to add to the information exchange, i.e. watching TV.  Where as active consuming could also be interpreted as learning where you have to mentally or physically participate in some way.  Producing is where you're the one outputting all the information.

What I really find fascinating about these thoughts is what is my ratio and what is the ratio of really successful people.  Obviously, you have to believe that really successful people stay in the active consuming and producing mindsets.  I'm thinking their ratio looks like this:


- Passive consuming (10%)
- Active consuming (30%)
- Producing (60%)

I think the key here is that we often spend way too much time as passive consumers.  Just stop for a minute and think about how much time you spend watching TV,  scanning Facebook, reading Twitter or land on some web video that went viral.  I think both to be happy and successful we need to spend the majority of our time producing and actively consuming (i.e. learning).

The last thing I'll leave you with is could there be a work style that could be defined within these types?  So, let's say in your day you cycle through these 3 different modes and often we need to jump in and out of all three to stay productive.  I ultimately would love someone to interview some really successful people and see what their ratios look like and how they alternate between these three mindsets throughout their work day.

The Speed of Innovation

Had a great conversation this weekend with my father in law about the speed of innovation. Much of the discussion circled around the Google Glass project as it's starting to feel like 2050 instead of 2012. The realization is that technology innovation is slowing accelerating not at a linear pace but more of an exponential one.

The most important thing to ask yourself is why this is happening and what it means in terms of the work you do. First, it's mainly has to do advancements in the underlying hardware that allows for a lot of these leaps in how we interact with computers and giving the processing power we need to pull of augmented reality and the like. Moore's Law has done an amazing job at predicting the speed of CPU speed but it's also probably a reflection of the speed applications can be delivered. There are some who are predicting programmers double there speed of programming every 6 years due to the advancement of languages, systems and tools. However, if that curve continues that means both the rate of application development and the value of programmers will continue to accelerate.

Overall, I'm very optimistic if this type of acceleration is truly happening. However, it does mean that your great business might quickly become obsolete faster than ever, competitive advantages that once existed will be gone and you'll end up paying a lot more for programming development.

An Open Message To RIM

This morning I was thinking about the future of RIM and how it will most likely become the bottom of the top three right behind Android and Apple. Their chances of creating a device that truly outperforms either of those platforms is about zero in my opinion. However, the one thing I think keeps many users attached to the BlackBerry platform is the BlackBerry Messanger. It is far better than any mobile messaging clients I have seen and really keeps people connected.

So, what if blackberry changed it's entire strategy from a mobile device company to a mobile messaging company. Creating subscription based messaging applications that run on it's own proprietary network, offering the fastest, most secure, best messaging infrastructure on the planet.

I can almost guarantee that most people would be willing to pay a subscription if BlackBerry came out with and Android or IPhone application that let users BBM with my friends who have BlackBerry's.

I think some may argue that this is just too risky, but my feeling is how can it be more risky than a guaranteed third place in the crowded mobile market. I think it would put them in a very powerful position if they took over the texting market as texting continues to take over voice communications.

New Pocket Projectors

Sometime you see something and most people kind of over look it and I see a huge opportunity. I have been looking at some of these new pocket projectors and they are amazing. When you start to think about how confining screens are these days, mini projectors can really change the entire landscape. Imagine having a laptop with no screen, just an attached mini projector and all you need is a surface, the back of your plane seat, the floor, the walls, a sheet of white paper. More importantly, if you added an infrared sensor, you could have games, etc, any where, anytime. I think it could be very cool at sporting events or concerts because you can just project onto any surface and you can conceal the projector in plain sight. I'm sure there are going to be lots of great ideas coming out with these projectors and more importantly we can say goodbye to lamp based projectors which are expensive, large and fail way too often.

Making Money Online

The more and more time I spend on the web, the more I realize I really just want to build something really simple. It's become apparent that we waste so much time trying to build business plans, negotiate, do strategic thinking or just talk to people and spend very little time actually implementing what we want to do. I keep trying to think of niche products or ideas that will take very little time to implement and we'll start to generate revenue. I found the video below so refreshing and think that David is right on with his presentation.

Ubiquity - You control the data

Notch up another interesting project for Mozilla. As I'm sitting here at my desk I've installed a new app called Ubiquity to my firefox browser. This little app allows you to take any information on a web page, highlight it and do something with it. For instance, I see an address, I highlight it and then hit ctrl spacebar and type map. Instantly, I get a map of that location and as I learn more commands I can do more things, like an amazon search or yelp a resturant I read about or I could even create my own commands. It's a great concept to think about taking information on any page into more useful, relavant information for you. While it's still version 0.5 I think its got great potential and can't wait to see where they go with it.


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

The Luke Arm

It's always cool when you see something you know is going to change peoples lives. When I saw this video on the Luke Arm that Dean Camen and his team have put together, it really blew me away. It always amazes me what a small team of people can do with a little money and a year worth of time. It will be great to see this technology come to market and really make a difference in amputees lives.