Few new products or services are based on completely new ideas. Many are a variation of something that already exists and the more products and services that are invented, the harder it is to find something someone hasn’t done in one shape or another before. And that’s fine.
We’ve started to think of names. Last year around this time I was doing the same for my Limited Company. It was quite the challenge and I ended up just picking one as the papers needed to be filed.
It’s been another productive week where we’ve refined the ideas further and started talking in more detail about the formalities of this whole thing. Something tangible is starting to take shape and what’s to come next is the most exciting, so far.
We’re not just making pretty interfaces. We’re acutally in the process of making an environment where we’ll spend most of our time, for the rest of our lives. We’re the designers. We’re the builders. What do we want that environment to feel like? What do we want to feel like?
I got the book you see above from D for Christmas a while back. I read parts of it last year when I set up my own Limited Company and right now it’s becoming really handy in terms of a guide of all the things we need to look into.
The critical measure of work isn’t and never should be input but output. What matters isn’t how many hours your team puts in, but the quality and quantity of work they produce. From the Inc. article The Truth About Sleep & Productivity stating that working overtime doesn’t increase your output.
To overcome the distance factor that is the downside of living in different parts of the city, we’ve started meeting up in cafes to work through the ideas. It’s a bit of trial and error to find one with that is quite enough so you can sit down for a while
Today it’s D’s birthday and I thought it fitting to write a few lines around the importance to celebrate and the type of work environment I want to create.
A couple of summers ago a new addition to our group of friends told me to make sure D and I had the legal aspects regarding our flat on paper. It was a slightly weird conversation to be having with someone I was meeting for the first time, but I
Tonight we were going to test the ideas on a third person. Unfortunately they got stuck at work so instead we had another working session trying to refine them further.
The best part of last week was to put my thoughts on the ideas to the test. To be forced to articulate what I actually meant and had in mind, and to answer questions from Yellow.
It’s been a really good week. For two weeks I was sat working on the ideas alone but on Monday I met up with Yellow and talked them through. Overall the main theme for this week has been focus and a reminder of what it is that I really want
An idealistic vision can lift people up and engage them, but it also needs to be approached in a way that acknowledges the reality of the challenge. Great leaders are able to work both agendas simultaneously in a compelling way. From the Harvard Business Review post The Power of Idealistic-Realism:
It’s been a productive day today. The morning was spent doing research at home trying to flesh out some of the ideas and the afternoon was spent in town in a cafe discussing them.
There’s been further conversations this week with the friend that I met up with on Monday. Next week we’re meeting up to discuss the ideas with a further person. Two trips have also been booked so this weekend is about really starting prepping.
One of the beautiful things in life is how a seemingly small event or decision can end up shaping your future. You can often look back at certain points in your life and conclude that those were the ones that led you down the road you’re now on.
The internet, at this time in history, is the greatest client assignment of all time. It’s offering you a blank check and asking you to come up with something fascinating and useful that it can embrace en masse, to the benefit of everyone. – Ben Pieratt, Svpply – referenced in
Other than the regular 5 of vegetables and fruit, I have another set of 5 a day that I’m trying to stick to.
It’s been just over two weeks since I started this journey and my daily blog posts and I thought that every Sunday I’ll try to do a bit of a summary of the week. What I’ve learnt and what’s to come.
Last year some time I read a post about how we should be spending less time browsing other people’s [creative] work and more time doing the type of work that we find brilliant. One week into my competitor research that post has floated to the top of my mind.