Tobias Wright

Are you better than yesterday

This is a great article: The Big Question: Are You Better Than Yesterday? ...Read more

Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy

Planning fallacy

A wonderful on article on planning fallacy:

People tend to generate their predictions by thinking about the particular, unique features of the task at hand, and constructing a scenario for how they intend to complete the task - which is just what we usually think of as planning. When you want to get something done, you have to plan out where, when, how; figure out how much time and how much resource is required; visualize the steps from beginning to successful conclusion. All this is the "inside view", and it doesn't take into account unexpected delays and unforeseen catastrophes. As we saw before, asking people to visualize the "worst case" still isn't enough to counteract their optimism - they don't visualize enough Murphyness.

Oldie but Goodie – The Stop doing list

Fabulous article from 2003 by the author of Good to Great and Made to Last, Jim Collins.

She then gave me what I came to call the 20-10 assignment. It goes like this: Suppose you woke up tomorrow and received two phone calls. The first phone call tells you that you have inherited $20 million, no strings attached. The second tells you that you have an incurable and terminal disease, and you have no more than 10 years to live. What would you do differently, and, in particular, what would you stop doing?

That assignment became a turning point in my life, and the "stop doing" list became an enduring cornerstone of my annual New Year resolutions — a mechanism for disciplined thought about how to allocate the most precious of all resources: time.

This sentiment is also echoed in The Dip by Seth Godin. Starting something is just as important if not more important than knowing when to stop.

What are you going to stop this year?

Solider on Partner: Halls ads

I actually like these ads. While not terribly original, everyone can relate to these ads especially in the light of cold season. However, here's the one thing I don't like. Shouldn't these people if they are that sick be at home in bed? More images after the jump. ...Read more

Foward leaning

The newspaper industry is one of the favorite a whipping boy of a lot people and of course everyone one has the answer, even I've sounded off on it. The answers are not easy for the newspapers and magazines, but not many people are talking about book publishing. From my point of view some of the practices are archaic if not downright counter-intuitive. The one thing that book publishing still own are the lines of distribution, but the music industry thought the same thing and probably spend way more time fighting the future instead on embracing it, and learning new ways to make money. ...Read more

Pushing through.

Oft times in my profession it's hard getting started. This does not change no matter how extensive you project brief, how well your creative brief is done and no matter how many times you sit down with the client. There are times when jumping into a project is next to impossible. This can especially be true in a large project which can seem even more daunting. I had an experience with this recently. Here's what I like to try to do in effort to push through: ...Read more

One problem really

Love this graphic. I think it's clever and relevant but really there is one problem, not everyone knows 99 Problems by Jay-Z. ...Read more

Wall-e

Finally saw Wall-e this week. The best part in my opinion is the closing credits. It basically showed the (re) evolution of man through art. Great piece.

Bad ideas

What do we do with bad ideas?

The bad ideas that I am refering to here are the small ones. The ones not worth fighting against. Those bad ideas that are easier to get them done and over with.

In times like this I go back to what professor said once upon a time. He said that as creative people out job is to make even the smallest job and make it beautiful.

This is a little had to do with a bad idea.

However, I’ve found that even with bad ideas, at the very least I can make the execution beautiful. Shallow, I know, but when execluded from the conception process with these small bad ideas, sometimes you have to just get in there and do the work and make it beauticful.

Some links I find intresting

I've set myself the task of cleaning out my delicious bookmarks. Since I've had the account for a bout 4 years, there are a lot of dead links, sites I really don't need bookmark and some rediscovering some wonderful sources of inspiration. Here are a few: ...Read more

Leonardo da Vinci Quote

One can never draw too many penguins in one day, as one can never take too many breaths of air

Your business card sucks

I don't want to buy business cards.

Not one primarily for contact information anyway. I think it's a waste of paper and a waste of time. The business card concept might be a dead one, but like email, what else is there? It's the currency of business contact information when meeting someone face to face. Electronic exchanges is the future, once there is a way to make the exchange easily or everyone gets hip enough for an iPhone so they can do that bump thing. ...Read more

Two and two

I'm trying something new. It's called the 2 and 2. I believe that no project should last for more than 2 weeks, and a task that takes more than 2 hours is probably a project that can be broken down into smaller steps. ...Read more

Meeting notes: Opportunities

This is a business card meeting. We were going over some mockups of some of our more ambitious ideas. While none of them were chosen, it always good in a company to get away with as much as possible. They may not choose the design this time, but with enough priming they may be ready for it next time. ...Read more