It is funny, being a parent and raising four kids teaches you a lot of life lessons (imagine that) that can be applied to various situations, both personally and professionally. One of the things I have been working on lately with my children is the notion of continuing to try harder and you will eventually succeed.

I am reminded of a time when I was in kindergarten and the year end play was “The Little Engine that Could”. Back then, it just seemed like a fun story about a little engine that was trying to make it over the mountain top, but could not get any help from any of the passerby trains. So, to his (or maybe her, I am not sure what the “actual sexual orientation of the engine was and I am not even sure that it mattered) delight, he / she continued trying and finally made it over the mountain, hurray! What I now know is that fun and innocent little story has great meaning when applying it to life and especially in raising children.

In “The Pursuit of Happiness” there is a point where Will Smith tells his son never to let someone tell him that he cannot do something or accomplish something (my paraphrasing there, sorry if I did not get the quote exactly right). Little tidbits of advice and guidance like this go a long way in shaping the confidence of your children, it also teaches them that in order to achieve / obtain certain things that you have to work really hard at them. I know that it seems trivial and common sense, but it is amazing at how powerful these little lessons can be.

So the next time that you are feeling like you are ready to throw in the towel, remember back to your childhood and the story of The Little Train that Could and keep chugging away, you will eventually cross that mountaintop.

This is a term that we use often in our office, and more generally in product management and marketing conversations. It seems to sometimes baffle people as to it’s meaning; but once explained, you are like no shit, I get it. It seems that most of the time that we use the expression, we are using it in terms of product features or functionality that are simple and easy to implement, would not take a lot of effort or development time and produce a good return on investment.

Seth Godin has a great post recently on the magic of low hanging fruit, and he focuses on the marketing side of it and how attacking and implementing the marketing side of low hanging fruit, you can accomplish quite a deal of good. See, often times in the product feature decision making process, we look at the things that we can accomplish with minimal effort and it may be a feature that has been requested by an influential group of users, or it may be a feature that could drive more traffic or usage. According to Seth, it makes more sense to go after those features that would drive more traffic and usage by the masses rather than those features that may have been requested by that group of influential users. Looking at it from that perspective, it makes sense. By going after the low hanging fruit that could convert the average or passive user into a more active user is more worthwhile that trying to make the already amazing users even more amazing. Seems simple in theory but a little harder in practice.

Just something to keep in mind the next time you sit down for your planning session to determine what the next features should be, take a look at the whole picture when you are picking that fruit .

NOTE: sorry Doug, this post was not inspired by you

So it has been a week or so since I have attributed inspiration for a blog post to the new guy at work Doug. However, it is not to say that he has not provided me with “numerous” inspirational tidbits, I have just been holding off for awhile for this one, but the time has come. So Doug, this one is for you .

Through an IM conversation that I will not recount here (no need to bore you all), Doug had a typo, well at least that is what I thought. In fact, it was not a typo, but a word from a language that I did not know, the language of the Internets. He went on to say that the “typo” that I thought he typed was part of a language called L337 (that is Leet for those of you that do not speak it, and Elite for those of us who have no F’ng clue what it all means). Of course, I was like WTF? about this whole “language” and Doug was so kind as to point me to the Wikipedia page for it. That’s right folks, it is a language alright because Wikipedia says so (after all, everything on Wikipedia is 100% accurate, right?). I was floored, how could there be a language out there that I was not familiar with? Once I understood the meaning behind it all, I quickly realized why I did not know of it. I fashion myself a fairly savvy Internet user, but apparently not savvy enough. I am not down with using various combinations of ASCII characters to replace Latinate letters.

Lesson learned here for me, I am not one of the cool kids, I guess I have some catching up to do. In the meantime, I am going to get schooled on L337 so I can hang with the cool crowd. Once I do, you all will be pwned by me .