Last night, Tony Hsieh of zappos.com spoke at the Long Now on the topic of Helping Revitalize a City. He described Downtown Project, which is the company he designed to create a thriving community (tech, art, fashion, family) in downtown Las Vegas. As he discussed the project, he brought up a great concept that I […]
Category: journal
Hosting update
I should have known better than to keep pushing my luck with textdrive.com after last year’s catastrophic meltdown, but I didn’t want to deal. Unfortunately, textdrive went down without even an email to its users a couple weeks ago, and their provider deleted all their data on Friday. Oops. At least I had a backup […]
2013 review
I’m a little late to this, but a 2013 review is an easy post to kick off my theoretically renewed commitment to blogging in 2014. For the first time since joining Google in September of 2008, I wasn’t completely swamped by work, and thus had time to invest in the rest of my life as […]
Being a good teammate
As those of you who follow me on Facebook know, I have gotten back into playing volleyball this summer, specifically sand doubles volleyball. I have been playing with a variety of folks on the main Google court. We typically get 4 people together to play, and then rotate through teammates, so everybody plays with everybody […]
Restoration in progress
In case you hadn’t noticed, the server where nehrlich.com is hosted had a catastrophic meltdown a few months ago, and my hosting provider (Textdrive) was not able to recover files or backups. This is sad, because I’d last backed up my blog in 2009, so I’m going to be using the Wayback Machine to try […]
I went to India!
I just got back from a trip to India and thought I’d share my thoughts and some pictures. I had only 17 days in India itself, as getting there and back took a couple days out of the three weeks of vacation that I had available. My itinerary evolved throughout the trip as I made […]
The Anthropology of Innovation panel
Last week, the Computer History Museum hosted a panel on “The Anthropology of Innovation”. I had to attend since I’m a fan of anthropology, I’m fascinated by corporate culture and how it leads to goals like innovation, and the panel featured Genevieve Bell of Intel, who Jofish and Janet interned with in Portland one summer. […]
Incremental steps towards uselessness
Last night, I attended the Mountain View Linchpin Meetup, inspired by Seth Godin’s blog post (speaking of which, I need to review Godin’s book Linchpin at some point). Spending an evening with a group of people following their passion inspired me to take a swing at restarting this blog yet again. Today’s topic – the […]
Coaching and feedback
In my last post, I talked about getting the reps to improve oneself on desired skills. But it’s difficult to make the time for practice, especially for deliberate practice where we are always dancing on the edge of failure. And I think that’s where I think Coyle’s observation that coaching is an integral part of […]
Getting the reps
Seen on Twitter: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle Both Drive and The Talent Code make the same point: Becoming a master isn’t about natural talent or improbable achievements – it’s about getting a little bit better every day, and practicing until what is now […]
