It’s been a while, many things have changed and many have not. One thing that has changed, Mobile Monastery! After 5 amazing years of running Code Monastery with Mick, we added Andy as a new partner and took the opportunity to rebrand a little. Here’s to the next 5 years!

Pulse is a great way to absorb the news on any mobile device, with the release of a browser based version it’s a great way to absorb the news on any device. Or waste huge amounts of time reading news that is completely irrelevant but very interesting none the less.

While the service itself is great, I’ve been using it for a long time without the need to create an account for myself. OAuth through Facebook is gradually becoming a standard, especially as everything from a news aggregator to an alarm clock wants to share your intimates with the world. Look Ma’ I woke up a 7:47 this morning!

The problem with this is the power conferred upon the service when using Facebook to sign up. I’ve stopped plenty of times when a simple service proudly requests permission to post to my timeline, edit my cat and redistribute my photos. Pulse is a great example of how to respect your users and start building a little trust for Facebook as a single sign on solution.

When creating a new account with Facebook, Pulse request a simple permission for “your basic details” and email address. This I find reasonable as the Pulse service is specifically designed to deliver a custom news feed based on your interests. Facebook has a pretty good idea of what interests me. Most importantly, I was pleasantly surprised that there was no request request for feline manipulation of any kind.

After happily clicking to indicate my acceptance of these terms, another screen was present, this time with the request I expected earlier. Only this time is was presented as additional and optional permissions. There was also a very clear explanation of exactly why Pulse may want to share to my time line:

These permissions enable you to share stories with your friends and read your newsfeed via pulse

No trouble, I’d actually like to do that, so once again, accept I clicked.

A news reader that allows me to share stories with friends has a good reason to request these permissions. Games, magazines, cooking shows and music services do not need these things except as a free replacement for traditional advertising. Treat users with respect, request permission after gaining trust and then for goodness sake do not abuse that trust. We’ve all felt dirty after Farmville spammed our entire network of friends and family incessantly for months on end.

I’ve recently been pondering personal traits I’d like to nurture and grow along with those being otherwise undesirable I’d rather pare away as I carry forward with my life. As my thoughts meandered along with my footsteps this afternoon, I remember a friend once made comment on my childlike sense of wonder. A childlike sense of wonder I seem to have misplaced in the last couple of years.

This got me thinking of the stigma attached by society at large to behaving as a child after a certain point in ones life. Usually far too early and often right after we discover that the opposite sex is just a little different to us. And attractive in a way we can’t describe; which our parents are oddly hesitant to discuss.

The sentiment against usually runs thusly:

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” - 1 Corinthians 13:11

Unfortunately we grown-ups are a little to quick to expunge the baby with the bath water so to speak; as a whole we may be too quick to jettison the childlike with the childish, a distinction that is fine but vitally important if one is to remain youthful even to the nadir of life.

Childlike is full of wonder, creativity, frugality, exploration and the unfettered joy of simply being. Wonder, creativity, exploration, joy; these are all intertwined and so easily misplaced on entry to adulthood and all the dubious glory of the daily grind. If you’d ever like to recapture a sense of wonder, just find the closest patch of raw nature and look at it.

Now look closer.

I mean really close. Get a magnifying glass, or a telescope if you need one. I guarantee you’ll find details in the simplest leaf or insect that you’ve never seen before. Simply gazing at a clear night sky with the intent to absorb the majesty of the universe is a humbling experience we seldom allow ourselves. A quick trip to the Astronomy Picture of the Day archive will suffice in a surfeit of clear sky.

Through childlike wonder we unlock creativity. When we explore with fresh eyes, we see and make links between the seemingly unrelated, this is the heart of creativity. We need no excuse to be creative and can express it in every facet of life, from a splash of colour or texture in a PowerPoint presentation to the use of a new ingredient for the evening meal. You’ve got nothing to lose, at the very least you’ll be more interesting than the next guy.

Frugality is an interesting thing, but I think a child can be the ultimate exponent of the art. I was privileged to find myself discussing the concept of frugality with Bruce Piasecki, whose book “Doing More With Less” has subsequently left a might impression. Bruce talks of using creative frugality to find an edge in business and create a sustainable future.

If you’ve ever seen a child with a single toy, you’ve seen the ultimate in creative frugality. With a single ball, infinite games and amusements can be had. Children care not for rules; they are constantly inventing new games to play, free of convention. Once we gain the adult ability to acquire new objects without limit, our need for frugality all but disappears, I believe this is the one of the first steps to old age. I challenge you, dear reader to try this one out in your daily life. Next time you think a task at hand requires an additional resource, be it personnel, money, or equipment; Stop. Stop and think about all the ways you could achieve the required outcome - or greater! - with just what you have at hand. The creative process involved leads inevitably to better results and more satisfaction all round.

Of course, as every parent will be happy to say, raising a child can be a nightmare endeavour at times. Pure self-interest, fear, ignorance of consequence and irrationality. These are the times where childish behaviour is in prevalent display. Our natural but irrational fear of the unfamiliar, of thunder storms, or the monster in the closet, is a powerful force. A force motivating tantrums, violent outbursts or a sullen refusal to act.

Unfortunately, at least for me, these fears have not disappeared, but simply changed face and nature. Unemployment, mortgage payments, peer acceptance, the gorgeous brunette at the bar, all are situation capable of instilling a subconscious fear strong enough to prevent us from taking a positive action to change our situation in life for the better.

This is the very essence of status quo, maintaining the current state of affairs, even once they are no longer optimal.

The height of childishness is the ignorance of consequence. Hand in hand with a lack of personal responsibility, this is easily the trait of childishness able to cause the most massive damage in ones life. The unintended, unforeseen and unanticipated consequences of action are rife in our developmental years. This is why my mother was always careful to keep me on leash near high ledges, stoves and the very interesting, but rather dangerous, internals of heavy machinery.

The essence of maturity is the ability to consider all the potential consequence of a course of action, directly positive or negative, the tangental and the potential, before embarking on the realisation of a decision. By accepting that sometimes we have to choose immediate negative outcomes over short term positives, we can make decisions that have a lasting overall impact on our longterm happiness. The GFC was a great example of banks getting this very, very wrong. Leaving a relationship that is sometimes great, but usually abusive is one of the hardest things to imagine unless you’ve been there. By all accounts the pain on making such a decision can be so intense as to be physically felt; however recovery begins soon after, and then, new happiness can be found, pursued and ultimately enjoyed.

I believe the greatest challenge in life is to recapture all the beautiful essence of being childlike, while keeping an awareness of childish tendencies, and in doing so I hope to bring joy, and wonder, and excitement, and creativity to as many people as possible. This is my invitation to everyone to do the same!

As you all no doubt saw a few days ago, Facebook changed the default email address for all profiles to the company branded accountname@facebook.com, this caused a relatively minor stir. I now think the timing is absolutely no coincidence when seen in conjunction with iOS 6 being just around the corner.

I’ve just installed the iOS 6 Beta on my dev phone, synced contacts with iCloud then Facebook and viola, @facebook.com address are now the default for 60% of my contacts.

It’s certainly one way to get traction for a new email platform.

I recently had an email exchange with my partner regarding marketing. Now the content was not strictly to do with marketing, but it highlights the power of personal connections.

Detailed within was a story of two companies dealing in manufacture and sale of modems (of the old fashioned 56k kind). One company produced modems that were fantastically reliable, the customer had a huge bank of them that never failed. They were so reliable the customer couldn’t remember having to call tech support even once but he’d heard they were best in the business on that front.

Company number two produced a product that was distinctly inferior, with constant failures and nagging issues. These were so frequent that a support rep was usually onsite about once a week.

Now, when that customer needed to expand with a whole new bank of modems, which company do you think won the business? It wasn’t the one you’d expect. Because the same support guy from company B came around every week, got to know the customer on a wife and kids basis, was eventually invited to social outings and generally felt part of the team, a relationship was built that transcended product quality.

The sales guy played almost no role in the decision. The decision was made on the basis of a low paid company employee doing a great job, becoming a real person to the customer and gaining an understanding of the customer company A simply couldn’t match.

As a sales manager, account director or BDM, your people on the ground mean more to your business than you do. Be actively involved in with your support team. Hire the right people to put in front of your customers, empower them to make decisions in the best interest of the customer and get to know them personally. Above all, inspire them to do great things.

Now the other side of the story is that poor sales guy at company A. He had the best product, an amazing support team at the ready and perfect solution in place yet still lost out in the end. When questioned, his response was simple.

“I didn’t have to call the customer unless he wanted something. I didn’t have a personal relationship and that ultimately lost me the business”.

The lesson here is to build relationships surpassing the superficial demands of product and service. You do this by calling when your customer doesn’t need a thing, just to see how their weekend was, find out what keeps them awake at night and what the kids soccer score was. Combine this with a great product or service and amazing front line people, the success of your company will take care of itself.

TL;DR:

The people around us place far less importance on perfection than we expect of ourselves. Bonds are built over sharing complaints and celebration in equal measure, and the secret to strong relationships is to share them frequently. This is the same for business, friends and family.

In my line of work I hear a lot of ideas. Occasionally I have them myself. Of these ideas, some are genuinely good (those ones are not normally mine), most are pedestrian and some are breathtakingly bad.

Almost every single person that discusses a business idea with me, insists I swear to absolute secrecy lest some one else hear about it and steal their chance for fame, fortune and a yacht in the Caribbean. This is occasionally followed with some kind of threat or plea against stealing it myself.

People are very proud of their ideas, they are the product of the most intensely personal process we possess as humans. Creativity is what separates homo sapiens from most every other branch of the animal kingdom.

The less a person shares their ideas, the more precious they tend to be about the ones they do, good bad or otherwise. Let me get one thing out of the way right now, everyone has bad ideas. In a memorial speech for Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive shows a side of Steve not usually public.

Steve used to say to me – and he used to say this a lot – “Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea.”

And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet simple ones, which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound.

And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.

Steve Jobs had dreadful ideas. In order to find and nurture the fragile, easily missed or squished brilliant ideas, he shared them all, dreadful or otherwise. Creativity is akin to a muscle, the more you flex it, the stronger it becomes. And just like exercise, if you do it right, some times it hurts the next day.

Like love, petunias and humans, ideas can not survive in a vacuum. There are many reason people don’t share ideas, but at the heart of all of them is fear. Fear of feeling stupid, fear of looking stupid, fear of the idea being stolen, fear that some one else could do it / think it / build it better.

If Steve Jobs wasn’t afraid to look dopey when he had a truly dreadful idea, I’m certainly not going to worry that my idea is a little half baked. Contrary to popular belief, it’s also very hard to get people to steal your idea. Eric Ries puts it best:

“If you have one idea, you probably have more than one idea. Take your second best idea, one you probably will never execute, and find the perfect company to implement the idea, find the right product manager at that company to implement it, and try your hardest to get him to steal your idea!”

When I (stupidly) asked Dave King how to become a great artist, his simple advice become a mantra.

To become amazing, you need to get the first 10,000 shit drawings out of your system.

I’ve since discovered this applies to blog posts (please pardon the next 9,999 odd posts), photography, guitar, dancing, martial arts and basically everything else harder than walking. Great ideas are absolutely no exception to this rule. Somewhere along the journey to 10,000 you’ll forget that you were aiming for a number in the first place and just concentrate on getting better every single time, this is the point people really start to notice you might be something special.

Now I don’t care what type of ideas you have, business ideas, musical ideas, craft ideas, tasty chocolate cake ideas, every single kind of idea is better shared. Do us a little common sense though, for instance the one about the camel and the tire tube, please keep that one to yourself.

The only way to start having good ideas is to get the shit ones out in the open. Choose people you trust enough to give you an honest opinion then share away. Share, share, share. Not only will you have some of the best conversations of your life, the ideas that make it past first contact with another human will be the ones worth pursuing, mental survival of the fittest if you will.

This is liberating. No longer will you feel the hefty burden of keeping so many amazing ideas to yourself, you’ll never need to think about the really dopey ones again, you can now concentrate on coming up with the next idea that may just change the world.

I never viewed my role as to replace him. I’ve never felt the wieght or need to try and be Steve. I am who I am and I’m focused on being a great CEO of Apple.

and

It is my oxygen.

This is a man at his peak, humble enough to know his limits, pushing the most valuable company in the world to maitain a culture of excellence.

Apple is in fantastic hands.

I wish I’d written this first. Perhaps I would have if I weren’t guilty as charged.

In conversation with a good friend some time ago, he mentioned that John Gruber of Daring Fireball was a great example of journalistic integrity. As above, John is a man unafraid to straight up say “guilty as charged”. If there was more of this in the world, we could stop worrying so much about always being right and get on with doing something else far more interesting.

I think Zuckerberg saw that for mobile, the HTML/CSS/JavaScript web is not enough. Native apps are essential, thus the talent acquisitions of superstar outfits like Sofa and Push Pop Press. I bet Facebook has more native mobile apps on the way.

Via the ever insightful John Gruber

Steve Jobs had a way of distilling the complex into the simplest of terms. He also chose to focus his efforts in the places he knew there was a difference to be made.

stevetold.us is a collection of quotes from the zen master himself. A new quote everytime you hit refresh, like a pinata only with wisdom instead of candy. It’s better for your teeth this way.