Archive for September, 2010
getting past the “boss battle”
sometimes work is really difficult. you spend hours upon hours of time dedicated to solving yours and your client’s challenges. but — every now and then — those issues don’t seem to want to go away, no matter how hard you try.
it might be a complicated spreadsheet, or a really demanding client, or a piece of programming that the person before you built without any documentation. every time you feel like you’ve won, it comes back at you — like a final boss battle in a video game — taunting you, keeping you from getting to what you really want to accomplish.
but the thing about boss battles is that there’s always some kind of a trick.
next time that devil of a task comes back at you: survive when you need to, push back when you can, and look for the weak spots. find the critical piece of your spreadsheet (hint: it’s probably obvious), understand your client’s tendencies and tricks (hint: it takes more listening and less talking), and don’t be afraid to hit the restart button on that piece of programming code (hint: starting from scratch isn’t always a waste of time).
find the weakness, then attack. just remember to hit the ‘a’ button.
finding your way
image by Cyberslayer, flickr artist
at the beginning of the summer, around graduation, time i came across a link, which — if you can spare the 3 or so minutes to give it a read — i think is certainly a valuable message. erica goldson graduated top of her high school class and, rather than laud either or her classmates’ accomplishments or talk about how important or fun the last 4 years of their lives have been for them all, she took a bit of a different approach to her valedictorian speech.
it’s easy to get wrapped up in erica’s speech. Â it has a certain kind of romance to it; an underdog vs. the world mentality that really makes you want to join the cause. Â i think that i especially got caught up in it because i see a lot of myself in her.
case study: the @zoowithroy brand
i have really been enamored with a certain blog — pardon me — bolg this summer for many reasons, namely the brand its creator has been able to forge using microsoft paint and 140 characters.  it really hit me a few weeks ago when fox saturday baseball did a mid-inning exposé on a shirt that an impetuous phillies fan bought from the zoo with roy online store and mailed to colorado rockies manager jim tracy’s office.  this national exposure followed after zwr himself already appeared on espn’s first take.  talk about local celebrity; in philadelphia circles, zwr isn’t just a celebrity — he’s a folk hero.
i wanted to do a quick and dirty case study on the “i want to go to the zoo with roy halladay” brand to see if we can figure out how all of this national exposure came to a simple bolg that someone created on blogger.com (it has since been moved to its own domain).